Losing Our Religion: An Alter Call for Evangelical America, Part 2 ► Russell Moore

Brian Stiller

Hello and welcome to evangelical 360. My name is Brian Stiller, Global Ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance and host of this new podcast series. On evangelical 360, I interview leaders, writers and influencers about contemporary issues which are impacting Christian life around the world. My hope is that it will not only be a global meeting place where faith is explored from different perspectives, but that each person listening will come away informed, encouraged, challenged and even inspired.

Russell Moore has become one of the foremost minds and voices in the evangelical community in the United States and now Editor in Chief of the major evangelical magazine Christianity Today. Russell has navigated the rough rapids of religious controversy in the past few years and has survived to tell the story, unafraid to enter into any social or political issue. His latest book, Losing Our Religion: An Alter Call for Evangelical America, is critical to understanding what is happening in the American church today. Thank you so much, Russell, for joining us on evangelical 360.

Russell Moore, it’s so great to have you join me today for part two of our discussion.

Russell Moore

Well, glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brian Stiller

I have to say once again, your book Losing Our Religion: An Alter Call for Evangelical America couldn’t be more astute and timely given this moment in the US, as you and I are conversing today, you are facing a fall election as a theologian and as a church leader and now editor of Christianity Today, which is the flagship magazine of evangelicals for the last decades. How do you guide people to think? How do you guide people to think, given the deep division, the deep polarity that is not only cultural but political and manifests itself in the church at various levels? For those of us that are observing it from outside, it would be very helpful for you to to give us your class 101 on understanding the dynamics and the implications of this for the church in america. And, of course, it has its implications worldwide in its travels and its witness. Could you help us on that?

Russell Moore: 

Yeah, well, I mean, I think the primary problem is it’s just the communication to the rest of the world that Christianity is actually about something else. It’s a useful tool to get to what we really care about, which is our political identity or our political action or political power, and what ends up happening then is a stripping away of the identity of the church. And you see that over and over again, it’s not unique to the United States that religion is used as a political tool. That’s happening all over Europe. As a matter of fact, there’s a really important study, body research done by Tobias Kramer in England, looking at these nationalistic movements across Europe that emphasize Christianity and are led by atheists or neo-pagans. And you talk to those people and say you know what’s Christian here? And what the leaders will say is well, what we mean by Christian when we use the symbols and images of the cross or, in France, of Joan of Arc or these Christian sorts of figures, is to say we’re French, we’re German, we’re Dutch, we’re not Jewish, we’re not Muslim. So it’s a cultural identity and a carnal identity that’s using Christianity.

Well, what we have seen over the past 2,000 years is that that ultimately leads to Paganism, and it does in two ways. It does because, once the Christianity is itself not useful, it’s hollowed out and tossed aside, and because the people who confuse Christianity with whatever the nationalistic message is on the outside. By rejecting the nationalistic message, they assume that they’re rejecting Christianity. That’s a very, very dangerous place to be, and so what has to happen in an American context is a Christianity that actually is connected to the core truths of Christianity.

And here’s where I think the primary driver of all of this is is a loss of, for instance, an overreaction to personal evangelism, and so you would have people who would say, well, evangelism is manipulative or it’s canned and so forth. But those churches that actually emphasized you have a responsibility to your neighbors to share the gospel. The people who are actually doing that and actually interacting with their neighbors could not fall into this children of light versus children of darkness sort of mentality that we have in American life all over the place right now. What they were reminded of constantly is every human being is made in the image of God, every human being is offered life in Christ 2 Corinthians 5, the message of reconciliation and every human being is sinful, in need of grace, including me. So that sort of when that’s de-emphasized and the church becomes something else, we lose a great deal.

Brian Stiller

But how has the church, the evangelical church that you and I are a part of, has become so trapped or taken on by a certain political view that has become almost end-time theology for a lot of people, that this is existential, that this is the rise or fall of the kingdom of God as it relates to their chosen political party? How did we come to that?

Russell Moore

I think, in several ways, and one of those ways is through the secularization of the church. And what I mean by that is not the secularization of the communities around the church, I don’t mean the secularization of people who have left the church, I mean the secularization of the church itself, and what I mean by that is the replacing of biblical categories with something that is alien to it. So if you look, you mentioned, for instance, in times, sort of component to it. That’s exactly right in a time machine to 40 years ago. 30 years ago, one of the easiest ways to draw a crowd would be to have a prophecy conference. We’re going to tell you tonight from the book of Ezekiel where the Soviet Union fits in God’s prophetic plan, those sorts of things. People would come to that and what it would give to people is this sense of you are part of the terminal generation. You are here for this last final stand. There’s something very special about you and we have a secret sort of code that we can give to you that will help you to make sense of the world.

The exact same thing is happening right now, but it’s not happening out of the book of Ezekiel, it’s happening through these very secular categories. But it’s the same sort of thing, it’s the same sort of apocalyptic kind of rhetoric. And you look at it in terms of, for instance, the language of spiritual warfare, which has been thoroughly secularized to mean something completely opposite from what the New Testament means by spiritual warfare categories, which is we don’t wrestle against flesh and blood, we wrestle against principalities and powers in the heavenly places. My neighbors who don’t agree with me are not my enemies. My enemy is the accuser of the world, the deceiver of the world, and the way that that spiritual warfare is fought is through the gospel. Now you have spiritual warfare language being used in the exact reverse way, which is to say, we’re fighting spiritual warfare by dividing the world up into the people who are the good people and the people who are the bad people, and the bad people have to be totally defeated and overcome. That’s not the message of the scriptures.

Brian Stiller

I smiled as I read your reaction to the Jesus Saves sign at the Washington debacle. I was raised in a little church in Saskatchewan in the western prairies of Canada. I was raised in a little church in Saskatchewan in the western prairies of Canada and we had on our little Pentecostal church Jesus saves sign Jesus on the horizontal and saves on the vertical, and our church was known as the Jesus saves corner. So when I saw Jesus saved sign at that Washington event I realized the great misunderstanding there is in the notion of being saved and Jesus saving and the appropriation of that within a political context.

Russell Moore

And that’s what concerns me the most is that you have it’s not just that you have the great upheaval that we have in American life right now, it’s that we are giving a picture of Jesus that is often the complete opposite of who Jesus is, which means that you have people who are.

If people reject Jesus, they hear and they understand the gospel and they want to reject that. Well, that has happened for the last 2,000 years. Jesus said that it would, but when people reject a false conception of Jesus, thinking that this is what it means to be Christian, that’s a heavy responsibility for us. To be Christian, that’s a heavy responsibility for us and that’s why, for instance, paul will say the great danger is, you are causing the Gentiles to blaspheme, which means putting a stumbling block to people by presenting a picture of Jesus that is not who he is. That is not who he is.

Brian Stiller

Key to faith is truth. We believe that Jesus did rise from the dead. We believe that to be true historical truth. But within the current cultural wars there is argument over whether you have alternate truth. You have some very interesting responses to truth. You have some very interesting responses to how we think in a post-truth culture. How does the gospel emerge? What do we as pastors, as church leaders, as individuals who claim the name of Jesus as our Savior, how do we operate in that post-truth culture? You had some helpful suggestions on guidelines to help us on our journey.

Russell Moore

Well, I think the most important thing is to recognize what Jesus means in John 9 when he says about the Pharisees. It’s not that you’re blind, it’s the fact that you say that you can see. That’s the problem. So I’m not worried about the person who says I don’t know what’s true and I’m looking for what’s true or false. I’m worried about the people who just assume that whatever fits into my preconceived category is truth and therefore are not seeking wisdom and are not trying to differentiate between truth is worth looking for, not just on the on the big, huge issues, but in those little truths of life, that what the scripture tells us that you cannot bring about good with lying is true and applies to us. So what that ought to look like is, for one thing, making sure that your heart and your mouth are aligned. If you think of what both Jesus and James tell us, let your yes be yes and your no be no. Right now, what we have is a very key distinction between what it is that I believe, what it is I really know to be true, and what it is that I say because it keeps me within my tribe. And then, of course, the heart comes along. Later you convince yourself of what it is that you’re saying. Be very, very wary of that and don’t self-censor from what it is that you actually believe to be true, just because it doesn’t fit with the expectations of your tribe. That’s what I think is critically important.

And then you add to that for those who are Christians this sounds like a Sunday school answer, but it’s because Sunday school was right in this respect, and that is, spend time in the actual text of Scripture, and what I mean by that is not simply know how to go to Scripture to answer whatever questions you’re posing or whatever needs you’re facing.

Let the Scripture form the questions themselves and so be in those places of. Sometimes you’ll have people who will say I’m in Leviticus or I’m in Esther and I just I have no idea how any of this applies to me at all and I don’t understand it. Keep going, and the word of God is powerful and is shaping and forming you, often in ways you don’t know, and so sometimes the most important things are when it comes to truth and falsehood. I think we often think what I need, what I most importantly need, is to have a list of here are all the true things and here are all the false things going on around me. What’s actually more important is that you have a heart and a conscience and a mind that is so shaped by the Word of God that you’re able to recognize certain things as wait, wait, wait this doesn’t ring true to me or wait seems like I’ve seen this somewhere before. I think that’s significant and important for the future.

Brian Stiller

Many of us have children, grandchildren, and our heart is for them to know of Christ and to follow in his ways. As they live in a society highly secularized and then, with the political winds blowing that brings all kinds of collateral damage with it, in that kind of world what is your advice in nurturing their children in the faith of Christ?

Russell Moore

Well, I would say that the first thing is to model authentic faith and repentance and a sense of an ongoing you think of what Martin Luther said the entirety of the Christian life is one of repentance. I would say to model that, I think one of the things that we want to do is to give this fake picture of what we think is strength and what we think is confidence, which is to say I’m right on everything and everyone else is wrong. But that’s not the message of Scripture. The message of Scripture is we’re sinners who are being renewed by the power of the Holy Spirit, and the way that happens is through actual repentance of faith. And the other thing I would say is to make sure that what we actually want to deliver to the next generation is in fact, christianity and not whatever cultural container of Christianity we have grown to expect, and to instead see our children, who may be following Christ in ways that are very different from the ways that we are accustomed to following Christ, or who may have different political views on some things than we have, or may have some different worship expressions than we have, and to rejoice in that and give up. You know, the Spirit moves where he wills and you have the Spirit working in unbelievable ways all around the world right now, including with those who are going to be leading the church into the next generation, and we should not diminish our expectations of that.

And the last thing I would say and this is more of a practical matter is one of the things that I can look back and say my church that I grew up in did very, very well was to give to us, as teenagers, the sense that you are now part of the church and you are responsible as a member of the church, and so we weren’t just consumers of a ministry, we actually had to shoulder the load of the congregation.

That kind of responsibility and that kind of being needed is the way that the New Testament says that we are discipled, and so finding those ways to do that and having Jonathan Haidt in his work on the anxious generation, talking about why we’re in the mental health crisis that we’re in right now Well, one of those reasons is a lack of rites of passage, and well, that’s something that the church actually we have that as part of our inheritance and we ought to emphasize it. So it’s right down to something as seemingly irrelevant as how do we do baptisms, and by that I don’t mean mode and so forth. I mean, is baptism something that is kind of peripheral to the life of the church, or is this a meaningfully central aspect of the witness of the church that has to be reclaimed? And I think that those things are important.

Brian Stiller

At the heart of your thesis, Losing Our Religion, you talk about revival. Now, revival, the word triggers particular meaning for me and I’m sure, as a Southern Baptist, it does for you. But as you look at the church in America, america itself, but also the church, the evangelical witness, if the Spirit of God brought revival to your land, to your church, what might that look like?

Russell Moore

Well, I think one of the things that we’ve seen historically is that revival is not just a return to whatever came before, and I think that’s what we often assume that revival is it’s. We have these forms and we have these institutions and we have these expectations and they’re flagging, and revival comes in and just brings them back to where they were. That’s not what revival does biblically or historically. Instead, revival does very unexpected things.

I was saying to a Wesleyan friend not long ago I am more and more convinced that the Wesley brothers are more of a model for the future of Christianity, of whatever theological tribe, than I ever would have imagined before.

Because if you look at what the Wesleys were doing, it seems to be a failure because it didn’t change the Church of england uh, in structurally and institutionally. What it did was something different went around that and and created a different uh form of revival. That’s that’s the way it always works. So I think that we’re we’re, if we see genuine revival, we’re going to be surprised and shocked in many ways by what that looks like and in some ways, I think, even unnerved. I think that if you think of the reaction that the Scripture says that Jonah had to the repentance of the Ninevites. I think many of us actually face that struggle, which is to say, if our neighbors actually did come to see the beauty of Christ, there would be some people who would be upset about that, that the wrong people are coming to Christ. It’s going to look very different than what we expect.

Brian Stiller

We’re speaking to a global community, Russell, and the world is very much aware of the US, its history, its enormous contribution to the world, its commitment to missions over these years and the value that has been. But as you watch and lead the church in America through this difficult social political time, what might you say to church leaders in other parts of the world and understanding the dynamics that play in your world and what the Spirit is guiding you in the middle of those cultural wars, as some have described them?

Russell Moore

I think the main thing that I would say is in the United States, we have often fallen into the error of assuming that we are normative evangelical Christianity and that we’re holding up the rest of the world. Now, that’s never been true, but it’s certainly not true now, and so the church in the United States needs the rest of the world, both in terms of carrying out the Great Commission but also as a model of what actual life in Christ can look like. We need each other. I think about.

I was in England a few years ago and the person who was introducing me said everyone in the room who came to faith in Christ at a Billy Graham crusade or were led to Christ by someone who came to Christ at a Billy Graham crusade, would you stand?

It was half the room and I said you know, I think about that. And then I think about the English Christians who completely changed my life, cs Lewis and John Stott, and we just can go on and on and on. Now we’re in a moment where, with all of the challenges that come with technology, we actually are able to be connected to one another in ways that would have been impossible in any other generation of the church, and I think we should lean into that and cultivate a truly global connectedness where we really do see ourselves as we. There’s a huge difference between they and we, them and us us. Well, that is certainly true when we’re talking about what it means to be the body of Christ and the fact that we belong to one another. So, whether you’re talking about Pentecostals in Korea, or Anglicans in Nigeria or Baptists in Brazil, we belong to each other and we’re we, and I think we have to keep reminding ourselves of that.

Brian Stiller

Russell Moore, thank you so much for your time, your generosity, your ideas, for the leadership that you offer to so many of us. We’re grateful for the time you’ve given us and the wisdom you’ve shared with us, and we look forward to further conversations. Thank you so much.

Russell Moore

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Brian Stiller

Thank you for listening to part two of my interview with Russell Moore. If you missed part one, just search and subscribe to evangelical 360 on YouTube. If you found this valuable, please take a moment to give us a review or a thumbs up. We would appreciate it if you would share it with your friends and colleagues as well. You’ll find links in the show notes of this episode for anything we’ve discussed today. If you haven’t signed up yet to receive my free Dispatches from the Global Village, it’s an opportunity to join me and meet leaders in many different countries around the world. It’s also a wonderful way to stay in touch with upcoming episodes and guests. Just go to brianstiller.com. Thank you for listening. Until next time.

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