Losing Our Religion and Russell Moore’s Hope

foreign [Applause] [Music] [Music] I am not Russell Moore but I'm borrowing the host chair today in order to talk to Russell Moore about his new book losing our religion an altar call for Evangelical America Russ it is great to be here with you and great to talk to you about this new book well thanks for taking the chair I'm looking forward to it happy to do it so to kick things off you use a metaphor early on in the book that I think is a good starting place and will probably resonate for a number of listeners you say there was a point a few years back where as the church began to become more and more polarized particularly around the election of Donald Trump but also the issues that were happening inside of the Southern Baptist convention he said that you began to wonder if what you thought was the Shire was mortar all along describe for me assuming that a number of listeners maybe don't know your story don't know some of the details of how a realization like that came about what happened to bring you to that place a number of things I think the aftermath of the 2016 election what whatever someone thinks that the 2016 election it completely resorted a lot of the old alliances and coalitions in ways that I think a lot of us thought were temporary but turned out to be permanent and then questions of race that also really revealed a lot and the sexual abuse crisis I think it was those three things that caused me to start to wonder wait a minute because I had been arguing against people for 25 years who would say well conservative evangelicalism is misogynist it's racist and I would say no it's theological and here's what it is and this is why it actually does not do those things and then I looked around and said oh it does in all of these cases and so that's what I think caused me to step back in to say wait a minute there are some people that I assumed or kind of lightweights and not really theologically robust who turned out to be very theologically robust and there were a lot of people that I saw the opposite truth about so it was disconcerting yeah I think what's so helpful about the way you frame the book in this way is that it's about use the language of apocalypse actually at one point where this isn't a story of collapse so much as it's one of unveiling it is a story of collapse in one sense but it's kind of a collapsed because of the unveiling there are a lot of things that are collapsing but it's kind of like Wiley Coyote looks down there was never a floor under him but he realizes it I think he's part of that so let me ask you a question that may sound cynical and I I'm sorry if it does but I think it's relevant who's the book for who do you want to read it who do you think this is going to be serving I mean obviously so much of it's about polarization is there a danger in in preaching to the choir and some of this message or who do you hope reads this no I think I think the choir needs to be preached to because I think the choir right now to continue with your metaphor is split apart and each singer thinks that he or she is crazy and one of the key themes of this book is to say you're not crazy and you also shouldn't be hopeless because I think there are a lot of people who kind of are doing one of two things that I think are both they both kind of end up in the same place there are some people who are just completely giving up hope and given over to a kind of Despair about the state of the church about the state of gospel Christianity or or whatever and then there are some people who are just oh don't pay attention to any of those things let's just talk about the good things and talk about the positive and and I think that also leads to the same kind of denial I think instead we ought to go through the crisis and so this is for people who actually are realizing that we're in a crisis but don't know what the end point is because I think a lot of Christians found themselves feeling sort of homeless and disoriented and you know when you're looking around when you find that yourself in that place oftentimes the only voices that were making sense to you were people who were deconstructed who or who had left the faith or who were saying you know kind of what you said earlier this is an unveiling of stuff that was already there so it must be that the whole system or the whole theology logical framework that the whole thing is corrupted how do you hope to speak to those questions well I think that when it comes to stepping back and questioning things and and asking what were the things that were wrong all along and what were the things that were harmful all along and how did we end up in that place I actually think that's a good thing and not a bad thing and I think a lot of the people that we think are deconstructing really aren't they're just going through that process of asking wait a minute is this all we have such so many biblical examples of that from the Apostle Peter wanting to walk away and saying Lord I don't know where I'm going to go I mean that's that's not a bad thing and so I think that with a lot of people there's an assumption that they're losing their faith and they're actually just losing their religion in one sense but they're not losing their faith and they're not actually losing the church but it's okay to think you are for a while one issue you talk about in particular as one of these places where your perspective shifted was around gender and it wasn't your perspective on gender changed in terms of your actual beliefs about the church or the scriptures or or how those things are necessarily applied but you had a different perspective on the slippery slope arguments can you talk about that a little bit I think all the time about David from used this analogy of within his political party he said you had people who all along thought that they had the same goals and that the things that were Central to one was Central to everybody else and that the things that were on the periphery were on the periphery for everybody and then there came a point where he realized wait a minute some of the things that were peripheral to me were actually Central to some of the people that I was Allied with and vice versa I think that's really true when it comes to some of these issues of gender because I think what happened was there was a there was a two-part system that emerged over gender that really wanted to mimic the two-party system of the fundamentalist modernist controversy but it really wasn't the same thing and I think that there were there were some of us I could include myself in that who were saying here's where the slippery slope leads once somebody comes to a different position on First Timothy 2 or some other passage Ephesians by then they're going to end up in gender deconstruction altogether and even more importantly they're going to come to a place where they don't accept the authority of scripture and I think that we have many cases of that there are places where even using the biblical language of father son is considered to be patriarchal and ought to be demolished that slippery slope is there but what I didn't recognize is that there was a slippery slope on my side too and that there was a lot of genuine misogyny it was less about where somebody ended up on the question of gender as how they were getting there so I realized I have much more in common with somebody who would say I don't interpret first Timothy 2 to exclude women's ordination here are the biblical reasons why I think that women should be ordained here are the biblical reasons why I think Ephesians 5 is mutual submission I have much more in common with that person than I do with somebody who has a a really misogynistic view that we have seen in a lot of these sexual abuse cases that could only happen with a view of women that behind the veil is horrifying and could only happen because there were no women at the table and would you say that what primarily kind of drives the tribalism as it stands is the culture War issues themselves sort of power politics and a certain vision of Christendom in America yes and that's another thing where I would have said the opposite a few years ago as a matter of fact I did I could antiqued a book by Barry Hankins the historian uneasy in Babylon when it came out a long long time ago I just re-read it the other day and said he saw this completely rightly which is to say that some people for whom the real issue is culture war and fighting back against the left or whatever the enemy is and the theology is the the means to that when at the time I would have said no no it's the reverse you know you have some people who are engaging in some culture War things but it's because they really care about the Theology and I mean one of the things I think we've seen is there were some really key figures who were saying 20 years ago 25 years ago that the problem with Evangelical Christianity was a market-driven church model and I think they were right but many of those were also pursuing a market-driven Christianity it was just with a different Market walk me through the narrative a little bit I'd be really interested in hearing you just describe how did this unfold for you you and I've known each other a long time we talked a lot through these things but I think it's easy for people to forget how much the world seemed to shift between like 2014 and 2017. can you describe and I know your story extends a bit beyond that as well but can you describe in urine narrative how did you watch this unfold what were some of the pivotal moments for you that made you say hmm this is strange there were things that I would see all along but would convince myself I must not be seeing and and that's that's one of the things that looking back I can say my mind was wrong a lot and my heart was wrong a lot but my gut rarely was so there would be times when I would say this seems crazy to me but it must just be me I was talking to somebody who had served in the National Security apparatus of the Trump White House who said that she would be in meetings where she would say this sounds insane and dangerous but everybody else is just nodding so I must be the crazy one and I would have those experiences a lot there there came a point where I started to realize not just in terms of the tensions going on in Evangelical Christianity there was a lot of that that was always there but the means that would be used to try to destroy people who in many cases in my case I know weren't changing we were staying where we were that was the message you have to know how to play the game and my thought was I didn't know we were playing a game I really didn't think that that was sobering I think a lot of people kind of can see this in their own sort of friend relationships or Ministry relationships or whatever there was a lot of where I started to realize wait some of the people that I really love and thought loved me just found my gifts useful and once I became toxic quote unquote they were going to Russell who and then once that passed would be right back and that was jarring and it shouldn't have been jarring to somebody who's been in this arena for as long as I have but it was during those that time what were you hearing from other pastors were you hearing from a lot of other people who were supportive of you as confused as you were disoriented by the whole experience as you at the Grassroots Pastor level and certainly at the Grassroots church member level I had nothing essentially but good will and support even from people who totally discreet with me there were a lot of trump supporting pastors and other Evangelical Christians who would say look I I don't agree with you but I get where you're coming from it was at the sort of higher level than that where those things showed up I really think we all might have been able to navigate through that if it were just the people the people in the pews and the pastors the pastors were not the problem in evangelicalism the way that a lot of people looking in from the outside think they really weren't in a huge number of cases you do talk though about use this metaphor of the lizard brain right that there's there's something that happens inside of the Evangelical Church you're fed this message that we're under siege everything's a war everything's a culture war and so part of what you describe as one of the impacts of that is that pastors become so used to a reactive Community a community that's reactive in terms of being afraid of culture War being afraid of what's Happening that they actually become afraid of their own communities can you describe how that kind of played out and continues to play out well I mean one of the most difficult things to do in Evangelical America right now is to say okay here are some very real problems and challenges but this isn't an existential threat to you you can't do that what you have to do is either this is of the Lord and we're on board with this completely or this is going to take us to the camps and and get rid of us I mean those are sort of the only two options that can work in a market-driven populist sort of way and so you end up after after years and years and years of that with pastors who who maybe were doing what that person said to me is throw some red meat out keep people satisfied but then go back to what you really are called to do which is preach the gospel and what I think a lot of them found is that there's not enough red meat to throw and that the sense of fear and Siege becomes more and more and more and so you had a lot of people in kind of what's been happening in American culture over the last decade or so you have a lot of pastors I think who had previously been able to avoid all of those things and would say to themselves I'm going to do a second Timothy 2 model a good soldier doesn't get distracted by civilian concerns so I'm going to preach the gospel I'm not going to get diverted into any of these other things who thought that that would work in this era and it didn't because it wasn't just even if you threw the red meat if you didn't have the requisite anger and sarcasm about it then that was a sign that you're not really one of us because so much of this is just tribal signaling whose side are you on and that means who's the common enemy in almost every Arena when somebody would say well wait a minute let's hold on to and maintain our Democratic norms for instance in the political Arena or let's have some Unity across some differences in the church or whatever it is the response would often be get real and so it was this sense of if you're not Machiavellian and you're not willing to knife your way through then you're not living in the real world that's a point of view but it's completely opposite to the point of view of Jesus it's a social darwinian view it's not that we ended up with this sort of Joel Osteen Prosperity Gospel but we ended up with a depravity gospel that really says you shouldn't expect anything more than this and that I think leads to a cynicism that's dangerous it brings up a topic in the book that I think is one of the most helpful things in terms of the way you frame all of this which is just the idea of sort of Christendom versus Exile because so much of this battle is about when you think about what people want when you hear some of the extreme language or around nationalism and all the rest of it there's this sort of imagined vision of of a Christian America that we're trying to achieve or we're trying to go back to or whatever and you point out that that's just not the norm and not the reality can you talk a bit about Exile what is exile in a Biblical framework and and how should we be thinking about that within our country today well I know there are some people who get really nervous around Exile language and would say well you you shouldn't use that language but of course the New Testament Apostle Peter uses that for all Christians you are strangers and Exiles and Hebrews 11 talks about that as a central point of the faith going out where one does not know where one is going and so forth if what Exile means to somebody is they're coming to take us away they're taking everything that we love and so I'm not I'm a stranger in my own country and I have to take it back that's not a Biblical view of Exile instead with Exile who did that who put our forefathers and four mothers into Exile it was God I mean that's the entire point of Jeremiah of Ezekiel is to say you're not here because of what your enemies did to you ultimately you're here because God is doing something and that means that you ought to be able to live and move and have your being here in a way that's never completely at home but also isn't in a Siege Warfare a stance because if Babylon is the only hope you have and it's the final resting place that you expect then you're going to spend all of your time warring for a better Babylon that's really not the biblical picture though and I think many of us have lost that no Tim Keller used to always talk about Jeremiah 29 as the vision right that you want to seek the prosperity of the city where God has put you and those were Pagan cities those were cities of of Empire and yeah I'm in the phrase that always comes to mind for me and some of this conversation is that we're so accustomed to that Siege mentality and I think that feels ennobling to be like we are under attack and we are resisting and yet the phrase I always think about is like everybody wants to be a martyr nobody wants to actually die and to be a martyr you lose we lose culture wars Christians have lost culture wars all the time Willie Morris a novelist from my home state used to always say everybody wants Baptist heaven but nobody wants to do the Baptist time true about that but yeah I mean and part of it is I think about again where I was mistaken about just sort of generational transfer is I remember growing up in an Evangelical context where one of the easiest ways to draw a crowd is to have prophecy teaching and to have prophecy conferences where the preacher would say here's what Gog and Magog is and it's what's happening right now because there's this sense of you're in this final step of History you are the heroes of the Book of Revelation and I'm going to show you how that can be and I thought because that really had for the most part gone away in mainstream Evangelical life that it was gone but what happened was that came back it was just secularized nobody cared about Gog and Ezekiel and Revelation but it was instead the same sort of final apocalyptic battle and you're the hero of it I mentioned I think in the book about Steve Bannon making this comment about you know you've got Dave from accounting who wants to be Ajax the warrior and he can do that online and his idea was everybody can be Ajax The Warrior and that's really what has happened across the board in American culture right now the other thing that I think plays into it too is is this idealized vision of what America was or of what any society or any culture could be I mean on the one hand and you hear this more recently there's this uh Patrick Dineen has a book that kind of leans in this direction and there's a lot of the Christian nationalists that sort of there's this sort of idealized let's go back to the Middle Ages and we'll all be Knights and kings and you know Jonah Goldberg says yeah but the reality is you'd probably be a surf digging potatoes 18 hours a day until you died at the age of 30 which I think is very true but in in the make America great again language it's like we'll make America great again for who because let's remember what 1950s America was and who it affected and and to me that's one of the most indicting things about a lot of this return to Greatness language is the racial element and the agree to which it's like that's naked that's right in front of our faces the use of language affects this and so I think about the language of and I've used this language before but in this ever darkening culture or this increasingly hostile uh culture and what that language does really though is betray the biblical vision of the world and the Christian gospel because what the biblical vision is is that every era and every culture is captive to Darkness the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one the Apostle John says in the early church many people are want to get back to that was what he said then the whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one so there's darkness in every era that darkness is just going to manifest itself sometimes in different ways in different eras but it's always there and there's always light the the true light is shining and the Darkness is passing away that's true in every era as well and so you can end up with a kind of utopian thinking that says there there was a time when what we had really was stable and godly or we can get to a time when everything is like that in a way the scripture just never tells us to expect that instead says you have to be constantly asking where is sin and darkness here how is it manifesting itself and where is the grace of God here no matter what the era is you can't Zone somebody into the kingdom of God by doing that you're not making anybody Christian at best you're making them pretend Christian and that's even worse because if somebody's pretend Christian it's even more difficult for that person to see the need for grace and Redemption than it is in in outright unbelief speaking of New Birth book's called an altar call and you talk at the end of the book about some resistance to using the word Revival and I love you open that chapter you you talk about the rise of Outlaw country music how Nashville had become I think you call it rhinestones and hairspray and people like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings and others were sort of cast offs that created their own subculture and eventually that became country music and you know it happens in the Arts all the time you know whether it's writers like Jack Kerouac and these subcultures kind of happen and then something larger Rises out of it talk to me about two things yeah I think that are related one is why are you resistant to the word Revival how do those kinds of stories inform what you hope to see happen for the church well I'm not resistant to the word Revival ultimately I was initially resistant to it and the reason I was is because for a long time Revival had been used as this sort of cliche that will make everything better and so well we're just waiting for a Great Awakening and what we need is Revival which for a lot of people what that meant was something's going to happen that's just going to undo all of this so don't worry about it and that's not what I see Happening Here but I think Revival is exactly the right language if we understand what Revival really is which is often a tearing down before it's a building up and I quoted A.W Tozer in the book because my friend Ray ortland actually was the one who found this passage and was talking about it one day over coffee and I went and read it and couldn't believe it because what Tozer was saying is we don't want Revival if what we mean is Reviving the situation as it is right now in that case all you end up with is a zombie and all of the dysfunctions and and traumas are made then permanent instead what you need is death burial crucifixion carrying the cross and resurrection and I think that's what biblically Revival is so we ought to have a sense of the way God always works is tearing things up leaving a branch growing something out of that and I think that's what in every healthy Revival that we've ever seen in the history of the world since Pentecost that's the way that it has happened are you seeing signs that that's happening what encourages you about the moment if we're looking for a renewal like that yes because what I'm seeing is that you have bewilderment that I actually think is a sign of Grace because I really think that's where God wants us to be is not okay here's our road map to what things are going to look like in 20 years but instead to like Peter going under the water you have to get to the point of saying Lord save me and then you're you're pulled up I think that's where we are and so seeing the kind of bewilderment that's going on is cheering to me not disconcerting and I also think that you see all of these new alliances and and coalitions that are happening I know how problematic this idea is and how it's used the fourth turning I was just reading that new book the fourth turning is here and one of the things that really was compelling about the book to me Brooklyn can you tell me what the fourth turning is fourth turning is this idea that there are Cycles to history and that there's a a moment of great crisis that happens this person finds a way to generationally track it and predict it that that's not what I'm talking about you don't have to agree with that but he's saying there's this moment where something happens that completely changes the reality around you a civil war depression World War II those sorts of things that change almost everything and that that is necessary that it's not enjoyable to go through those kinds of crises nobody wants them but on the other side of it nobody wants to go back to what was there before that now whether that's true in history or not and I think there's a lot of it that is true it's certainly true in the way God works and so you have a crisis moment where a lot of people are finding the old kinds of assumptions of who I'm not supposed to like and work with are just not true anymore and the old kinds of lazy patterns are being ripped up whether we like them or not and so there's a moment and a time for doing something new as long as we don't get jaded and that can show itself either in well I just am going to give up or it can show itself in well that means I just have to play the game as it is if we avoid that I think that there's really something bright on the other side of that and if you look at what God's doing around the world I mean I think of I had Tim Keller come I think I may have mentioned this in our in our episode honoring him to a class I was teaching the secular students and one of them said why do you all use this word Evangelical when it's so politicized and toxic now and Tim said because most of us are in Africa and Asia and Latin America and the North Americans don't get to just choose what we're called well that's true you have God working across the world in ways that really ought to be cheering to us and that's especially true when you look and you see okay how has God worked biblically and how has God worked historically this is not a time for falling apart in fear yeah it brings me back to something we were talking about earlier you use the word bewilderment a moment ago and we were talking about disillusionment I think one of the underlying roots of where we are is that we don't really have a great place in our minds for the moments where we do lose right the moments where Things Fall Apart you know experiences of grief and you know one of my obsessions the last few years has been the story of Elijah chapters 18 19 he has this incredible victory over the prophets of Baal and you can just almost imagine him in this place going okay we did it we won and then he comes to find out there's thousands more people who want him dead and he flees to the desert and he wants to give up and he wants to die and I think what's so important about that story or Peter's denials when he sees Jesus arrested and watches Jesus die there's a normal rhythm in in the Christian Life I think to having your dreams kind of fall apart often the places where God does the most work are those times when it seems like he's silent and absent and you look back and only in retrospect do you see oh those are actually the most important times in my life when God was doing all of this stuff in a Subterranean sort of way that I couldn't see the metaphor of yeast it's working its way through but you don't see it and one person said to me in the middle of the really darkest times that I had versus said if you go back and you look at your life very few people will say the most important times of my life were the moments of Triumph it's almost always in those moments that feel like complete defeat and failure because then you actually are by God's grace able to reevaluate what's really important and what's just an idol that I've built in my life and called Christian but what is next like do you have a sense at all of what comes next from here well I I really do think that's the wrong question and that's the question that we all ask consistently because I think what we want is okay here's what's going to happen and here's what we need to do over the next five years 10 years 15 years and I've noticed that there'd be a lot of kind of gatherings of like-minded uh Evangelical Christians who all sort of see the crisis the same way or similar ways but who will often say yeah but what do we do and what they want is here's a curriculum or here's a church planning strategy or here's a whatever and some of those things are important and good but in almost every case what God does is that Pillar of Fire giving just enough light for the next step and so I really think we're in a moment where what God's calling us to do is not to have a road map of programs and possibilities but to step back in to say God we're baffled and where are you taking us I mean that's actually not a defeat that actually is a victory at this point to say we don't know where we're going but our eyes are on you given your personal journey through all of this how cynical have you become how have you wrestled with that and then relatedly how would you encourage worn out and discouraged disillusioned Christians to resist cynicism I don't think that cynicism was ever my temptation as much as despair was and and by that I don't mean despair about the future of the church but despair over my place in the church that was the case and it's been really disorienting when the most important part of my identity after follower of Christ was as a son of the Southern Baptist convention that's who I was taught to be all of my life literally from birth on and so having that change is really difficult and I think that there were moments where I was despairing of that and just thinking I don't want to ever go through that again so I don't want to ever risk going through that again if that was the Temptation I think that I had more than anything and also people will sometimes say do you wrestle with bitterness and I really don't but it's not because I'm so Sanctified it's because I have kind of the opposite sin which is a kind of nostalgia and a longing for things to be back the way that they were before that's what hits me constantly and my wife knows that because she knows that I will often say I feel guilty for leaving where I was and I should have stayed because and I think of all the people that I love and want to help and she will always say you don't remember and I'm going to be here to tell you that this kind of Stockholm syndrome is not healthy for you and I think that's true that's where I'm often drawn for others then how would you encourage others who feel the Temptation towards cynicism or despair well I think it's like a lot of things the minute that you notice it is when you start to get power over it so if you start to notice I'm becoming bitter or I'm becoming cynical or I'm starting to rearrange my conscience to fit in with my tribe if you notice that then it's Max with the wild things you look it in the eye and it backs down and so just noticing that that's happening with you is a huge part of it and then what that means is once that starts to happen find the people in your life who really are signs of Grace and tell those people I'm having a really difficult time here and I feel like my faith is faltering and I need you to to stand here with me I found in some of my most difficult times that I really didn't need people who would give me Sage wisdom what I needed were people who would laugh and kind of show life on the other side of whatever I was going through so I find those people and I think you'll see a huge difference coming from that all right well the book is losing our religion an altar call for Evangelical America Russell thanks for letting me borrow your seat for the day I'm excited that that the book is coming out and the people will I think they'll be well served by it so thanks for having this conversation with me thank you thanks for hosting the Russell Moore show is a production of Christianity Today executive producers are Eric petric Russell Moore and Mike Casper host Russell Moore producer Ashley Hales associate producers Abby Perry and azaray Phelps CT Administration provided by Christine kolp social media by Kate lucky director of operations for CT media is Matt Stevens audio engineering provided by resonate recording video producer Abby Egan and the theme song for The Russell Moore show is Dusty Delta Day by Lennon Hutton [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Christianity Today

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Length: 40min 49sec (2449 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2023