Russell Moore: “Losing Our Religion”

These were not the indictments we were waiting for, but that made them feel even more explosive and damaging. Good morning, and welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. It is Friday. July twenty eighth two thousand twenty three, and we’re gonna do something interesting today.

We have a very special guest. Doctor Russell Moore, who’s the editor in chief of Christianity today. And, he leads its public theology project You might remember, doctor Moore formally was the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. And he has a new book out, losing our religion, an altar call for evangelical America. I’ve talked with doctor Moore before and written about him in my book.

In the before times before Donald Trump, Russell Moore was a rising star in the Southern Baptist convention. But when Trump came along, he was one of the few leaders who said, wait. Is this really who we want to be? And his story is extraordinary. We’re gonna talk about it in-depth in just a few minutes, but we have to obviously start.

With the breaking news of the day, three new felony charges against Donald Trump, for attempting to alter, destroy, mutilate, or conceal evidence. Kind of sounds like a cover up. Inducing someone else to do so. We have a new defendant. And a new count under the espionage act related to a classified national security document that he showed to visitors at his golf club in Bedman New Jersey.

So the cover up is what always gets you, and it’s very dramatic. I have my boss vibes about how they wanted to destroy the evidence. But I have to think that the big one is the fact that Jack Smith decided to add this charge about the Perloined war document that, trumpet flooded at his golf club. Remember, this is the document that he admits on tape that he did not and could not declassify. And it’s a document he later said did not exist.

Jack Smith has the document. Jack Smith has now included it in the felony charges against the former president. So Happy Friday there. You all remember the tape that we’re talking about because this was a bombshell inside the bombshell of the First Mar a lago indictments. CNN first had it.

It is included now in the indictments that the transcript is included in the indictment. And just to refresh your memory, this was, Donald Trump sitting around at Bedminster talking to some biographers for Mark Meadows and bragging about, you know, the fact that he had these secret war documents. Let’s play a little bit of that.

This was done by the military, given to me.

I

think we can probably. Right?

I know. We’ll we’ll have to see. Yeah. We’ll have to try to

—

Deep bless you out

says president, I couldn’t be closer.

No, I can’t, you know, but this

is Yeah.

Now, we have a problem.

Is that interesting?

Yeah. Isn’t that interesting? I always found this interesting. As president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t. Now why is this so significant?

Well, by bringing the additional charge on that document. Jack Smith has just made it much, much more likely that that tape is going to be admitted as evidence in the trial and played for the jury. The jury is, I think, far more likely now to listen to Donald Trump sitting around flaunting flourishing, brandishing these documents, that he admits were top secret, that he admits were still classified and that he admits that he did not have the power to declassify. So in my morning shots newsletter, I walk through some quick takeaways, from this superseding indictment, which was really kind of an extraordinary moment because we kind of had a a triple tsunami today. You had the everybody was focused on DC, the DC Federal Court House where the grand jury was meeting earlier in the day.

We had heard that Trump’s lawyers had met with Jack Smith’s team in a last ditch hail Mary effort to get them to not criminally charge the president. Again, that’s not going to work. And then, of course, we had the stories out of Fulton County, Georgia where they’ve now put up barricades around the courthouse, which would suggest that the indictments are imminent there. And everybody is focused on what’s happening in DC and looking at Georgia. And then suddenly this bombshell drops out of Florida.

The new indictments, I think, and I write this in morning shots, which you should subscribe to if you don’t already do that. They give us a really dramatic glimpse, I think, into Jack Smith’s work habit. Here is his modus operandi. I mean, he intends to keep going. I mean, he is prepared to escalate even after the original indictments are issued.

Now keep that in mind, When he drops the January sixth Ron DeSantis, that that is not the last word that whatever he issues could, in fact, just be, you know, number one. It’s a I think David from tweeted out, like the Apollo program, Apollo one, Apollo two. So we’re gonna have Trump one, trump two, trump three. So you may get this massive indictment coming down from the grand jury next week involving January sixth. That is not necessarily Jack Smith’s final word.

He could add more charges. He could add more defendants. That’s number one. I also think that the original Sarah Longwell a document case was already strong. Yesterday’s new Charlie Sykes it a lot stronger.

The Guardian has a very interesting quote from former Trump White House lawyer, Ty Cobb, who said I think the original indictment was engineered to last a thousand years, and now this superseding indictment will last an antiquity. I think he meant eating eternity. He said this is such a tight case. The evidence is just so overwhelming. I also think that the new indictments shred two of Trump’s most prominent defenses that he had cooperated, you willingly shared surveillance footage.

I mean, this blows that up, and that he was just blustering. Was just bravado when he said he had the actual Iran document. I think it’s also pretty clear that Trump’s attempted cover up is gonna take center stage at this trial. The obstruction of justice is going to be central. And it’s one of the things that sets, of course, this document case apart.

It is not just that he took the documents. Other people, as we know, have also taken the documents. The question is what happened when the federal government said you need to return those documents and issued subpoenas. He not only defied the subpoenas. He clearly tried to obstruct justice, which once again is very much on brand for Donald Trump.

Donald Trump obstructs justice because he knows that he can obstruct justice. That was one of the lessons I think that he took from the Mueller investigation that even though the Mueller report documented all of the ways that he obstructed justice, he was never held accountable for that. And the fact is that Trump Thanks, Trump knows that he was successful in obstructing justice. So why the hell would he not try it again? It’s also clear that Jack Smith and the prosecutors are trying to flip the third defendant Charlie Sykes oliveira, who is the property manager.

And Trump knows how damaging that could be. And so the indictment goes through, you know, a transcript of where people are talking about whether or not Carlos is good. The Carlos is going to be loyal. And apparently, Trump at one point calls him and tells him that Trump would get him an attorney. Another example of the way in which irony is dead.

Semaphor’s Benjie Sardolin notes, the man who spent seven years telling rally crowds about how Hillary Clinton’s lawyers destroyed email servers with bleach. It was actually software. Is now accused of telling his underlings to delete surveillance footage that was requested by the government. Yes. So much for that.

Now will this actually make a difference? Will this be the straw that breaks the camel’s back? Absolutely not. Hacks are gonna hack. Josh Holly is already out saying we cannot allow this to stand.

But I think it is interesting. As we step back and and and look at what just happened, our colleague Bill Crystal tweeted out yesterday. Jack Smith has done more for American democracy in eight months. The Republican Party has done in eight years. Next week will obviously take a much deeper dive into this.

And, of course, this is just one chapter in a continuing saga. Our very special guest today is doctor Russell Moore, editor in chief of Energy today. Welcome back to the podcast, doctor Moore.

Oh, glad to be here. This is my favorite podcast. So I’m I’m always honored to be on

that is high praise. Your new book, is out this week, losing our religion and altar call for evangelical America. I found it just an extraordinary read. And I I wish you could see all the bookmarks, including the first line of the book. If we wanted to find Jesus, we would have to lose our religion.

So this is the theme of losing our religion. And you mentioned one of my favorite songs of all time. And I want you to talk about this because you you mentioned This particular song.

Like who’s in my religion, try and keep

REEM. When my hair was much darker and much thicker. So what do you mean? Talk to me about this. What do you mean if you wanted to find jesus, we have to lose our religion.

Well, the REM song usually plays anytime that there’s a segment about someone becoming an atheist or walking away from the fade. But what I found was that that’s actually not what the song is about. It’s about the old Southern expression. I’m gonna lose my religion, meaning I’m so angry. I’m about to move from politeness into rage.

And it seems to me, these really aren’t two different things right now. Because a lot of what I’m seeing is not so much people kind of drifting away from the faith, although that always happens, It’s instead people who are looking at what’s going on in this wreck of the American shirts right now and saying, This is awful. It’s not a I want to escape from the two strict morality of the evangelical church. It’s we think that the evangelical church is not itself moral. And we’ve given them lots of reasons to think that.

And so that kind of frustration, I’m hearing every single day.

So you have these gut wrenching accounts of the sexual abuse crisis in the church and the way in which many of the church elders refused to deal with it, looked the other way, felt that it was somehow disloyal to bring these things up. And, of course, the whole, trump era and you have this, again, this extraordinary line where you say I couldn’t help but wonder if the plot twist to the story of American Conservative Christianity was that what we thought was the shire was Mordor all along.

Yeah. Well, I told someone who’s kind of like watching the sixth sense or some other m night shyamalan movie for the second time. Because then you can see how all of these things fit together. That previously I mean, my gut would say to me, what’s going on. I mean, Glenn Beck is doing the restoring honor message on the National Mall in twenty ten, and you have a lot of my fellow evangelical saying this is preaching gospel.

But I would think, this is just an anomaly. It’s something that’s on the fringe. And then later, we turn around and see what’s not fringe at all. And I think maybe the the moment that that became clearest to me was October seventh, two thousand sixteenth.

I remember the day. When

the access Hollywood tape was released. Because my first thought was I need to really be compassionate for Trump supporting evangelicals because they just didn’t see this coming. They’re not gonna know how to deal with this. And so I would even say to to other people who are kind of like minded. Let’s be patient with people.

Help them through this. They’re really going to be grieving through it. And then I turned around, and nobody seemed to have a problem at all. As a matter of fact, on television that weekend, even when Mike Pence wasn’t on the air. It was basically Rudy Giuliani and some evangelical leaders.

Who were coming on to do the locker room talk stuff. And that, I think, really reframed where we were going.

But, I mean, wasn’t that also part of this moment where the evangelical Christian Church decided that, look, Donald Trump was a flawed individual, but He was the lesser of two evils. And that comes up over and over again. Right? And you quote Hannah Arand on the question of what happens when you choose the lesser of two evils. How did that play out in the church?

Well, that’s what worried me all along. It wasn’t that I thought when people would say, well, I’m voting for him because I don’t want hilary Clinton’s appointments and and so forth. I understand that. That’s not the calculation I made, but I could get it. But the sort of American environment we’re in right now, you just aren’t going to have people who are saying, well, my guys right on these things and wrong on these things.

And they tend to instead just meld into the leader, and that’s exactly what happen. You didn’t see a lot of people saying, look, I like the appointment of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, but Donald Trump’s a a terrible human being. Mhmm. Or I kind of like some of these administrative changes happening in the executive branch, but Charlotteville and Helsinki are awful. I mean, that just didn’t happen.

Yeah. You tell the story after this all happened and you were being uprated for calling out Donald Trump. You’re right after a meeting in which one mega church pastor abraded me for not supporting Trump to pastor side and said, he’s an evil immoral man. And then you point out that during the administration, rather than, you know, supporting him when he agreed with him and then criticizing him when he didn’t, You point out this leader praised Trump consistently on television as a great president as a champion for the values we cherish. And again, this now seems like kind of an old story.

And you and I have talked about this before. I mean, I still wrestle with it. You still wrestle with it. And so let’s go back to your analysis, which I think is so interesting because you asked the question. Is all of this this this embrace of, I think, you call it caligula like vulgarity and Machiavellian cruelty.

How does this connect to? What you describe as a market driven ethos? That has led to an evangelical Christianity that is determined to be as angry as the people in the pews. Yeah. I mean, how did we get to the point where white evangelicals are statistically the least likely people in America to agree that social justice is an important priority.

It’s one thing to say that there are people who are peddling snake oil, but you ask the question but why do people want the snake oil? So I wanna go back to all of that as opposed to just rehashing Trump and what happened with Trump, you take a much deeper dive into the ethos of the church and the appetite for the snake oil.

Yeah. Well, I think you saw test runs for this happening with pastors and and other leaders. I mean, you had this combination of immorality, cruelty, and craziness. Happening long before in sectors of evangelicalism. I mean, just look at a figure such as, Jim Baker.

For instance. You can just go through example after example after example where you have people who they’re right back And they’re right back because they know how to appeal to that limbic system. Somebody’s coming to get you And that means that you need to suspend all your normal way of doing things and support me, send your check-in. And so Donald Trump was just a secularized version of that. And I think it’s because every strength has a shadow side one of the reasons that evangelicalism was able to grow so quickly in America is it’s entrepreneurial.

Mhmm.

We

don’t need permission from bishops. To go out onto the frontier and establish churches. That has a lot of good side to it, but it can also lead to the Guardian newspaper in England, said after twenty sixteen that this market driven approach ultimately leads to a market driven approach truth. And that leaves any movement in the hands of Hucksters because they’re able to come in and say, okay. What really get the amygdala lit up in people.

And it’s not the doctrine of the trinity. It’s instead you’re under attack.

So this feels like it relates to a lot of other things we talk about in politics. I mean, the fact that you’re engaging in fan service, get more clicks, get more subscribers, what actually gets the most reaction, And once you turn the focus to that, then if you say, okay, the people in the pews are angry, we have to find a way not to challenge the anger, but to feed the anger and to turn it to our purposes, it it becomes a marketing tool.

Yeah. And it’s an uneven match because you have some people who are trying to turn the the anger into a marketing tool And they’re opposed by people who want to kind of avoid the anger. And so you can have one pastor who says, okay, my people think that the was stolen or COVID is a pandemic, and I’m gonna really lean into that. The pastor down the road is somebody who’s saying, I know all of that’s not true. I want to serve my people, so I’m gonna try to sidestep all of that for now.

For completely good motives, but that’s not an even match.

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Okay. So one of my favorite chapters in the book, you break it into the sections, you know, losing our authority, losing our integrity, etcetera. You have a chapter on what happens when people think that Jesus is going liberal on you? Yeah. And I just wanna read a passage.

It is not unusual for a church to wonder whether a youth minister is going liberal on them or something maybe even the preacher. But when a church decides that Jesus might be going liberal, we are really entering a new era.

Yeah.

So talk to me about that.

Well, I mean, someone was just telling me, yesterday about, one of these. So we call them Theo Bros, a kind of, evangelical populist trolls out on on, Twitter and other social media who said something along the lines of, whenever you hear someone say the way of Jesus, know that they’re talking about a progressive liberal agenda. And you just sit back and say, how on earth did we get to this point? And it’s something that there came a point somewhere around twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen when I started hearing this, over and over and over again of pastors saying, I can’t say turn the other cheek or any other part from the sermon on the Mount because people are going to say, you’re weak. And when the pastor says, I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ.

Yes. The congregant will say, well, that doesn’t work in times like these. That works in a neutral culture, but it doesn’t work in a hostile culture. So you have this flight ninety three sort of mentality. Right.

And you just step back and say, the sermon on the Mount wasn’t given in Mayberry? This is Roman Empire. How is that a neutral culture? As opposed to this.

Yes. If you’re saying that that doesn’t work in times like this, you’re basically moving on from the sermon on the means you’re moving on from the new testament. And yet people who say that think that they are putting on the armor of Christ. Right? I mean, that they are they are the champions of god while they are explicitly rejecting what he was trying to tell them.

Yeah. And one of the things that’s really interesting to me is this secularizing that is happening, but in a completely different way, than what we were warned about. So the warning was always, you’re gonna have the secularization going on all in the outside world and that’s going to lead your children astray. Instead, what you have happening is a secularization happening on the inside on the right in terms that we can’t use biblical and Christian methods. Those don’t work.

We can’t have the Bible. That doesn’t work. And even with the language of spiritual warfare, for instance, which the entire point of spiritual warfare is to say your enemies aren’t your neighbors.

It’s

not human beings flesh and blood. You’re wrestling against something deeper than that. That language is turned against people, and so it gets conflated with culture war issues. And the metaphor is so important because What it says, if you use spiritual warfare language for political or culture war combat, what you’re saying is The people who are against me are irredeemable — Mhmm. — totally evil, and that means pull out all the stops to do whatever it takes.

That’s just a very different mentality than and I know a lot of my secular friends get really creeped out by evangelism. Mhmm. And churches that want to try to persuade people to believe in Jesus. But the mentality behind that, whatever you think of it, is my neighbors are my mission field. I have to love them.

And when you move to this, it’s a shift.

So Windleberry wrote a novel back in two thousand called Jabber Crow. And and and you quote this in your book. And in in one of the scenes in the book, Jaybor is at Barbara in Kentucky and he’s cutting the hair of this sort of right wing Christian named Troy. A man was convinced that they were surrounded by communists, and they should all be rounded up and shot. And so Jabber the barber stops, looks at him and says, love your enemies.

Bless them to curse you. Do good to them that hate you. And the guy in the chair says, where do you get that crap? Yeah. Yeah.

And Jeez, Jesus Christ, And you say when you first read that twenty years ago, you actually kinda rolled your eyes. You you thought it was a little bit over the top, but you say I don’t think that now.

Yeah.

Because as you describe, if you actually quote the words, people are going, yeah, you’re all woke.

Yeah.

You’re all alive.

Yeah. Yeah. At the time, I thought, that’s a little on the nose. And I’m a Windleberry superfan. So that took a lot for me to say, but there came a point where I thought, oh, this is happening now all over the place.

And I just never would have never would have imagined this.

So you go on to say that around the world, if you ask what comes to mind when a person hears the word and evangelical. It it is not Christian charity and everything. It is not even a commitment to traditional family values and the sanctity of human life. The answer would most likely be Donald Trump. And so — Mhmm.

— you asked this question. I guess this is the hard ones. I mean, no, why the evangelical churches become so associated with make America great, which has little or nothing to do with some of the Christian values you were just describing. And and you describe the The seeming cognitive dissonance of choosing a promiscuous profane thrice married casino magnet to restore morality to America. Well, some people outside church might just shrug their shoulders at the perplexity of that.

Others will say that it proves what they have suspected all along. That evangelical Christians are hypocrites, not interested in morality at all, but in political power and cultural dominance. Yeah. Well,

Well, I think what we’ve seen is that evangelicalism is not one thing. And I think it was in the interest of those of us who are evangelicals to have this huge, big, seemingly cohesive movement we’re a moral majority, for instance. The the implication is the majority of people are with us, and we just need to organize and there’s something really powerful about being able to say, there are forty million evangelicals or forty five million evangelicals In reality, that’s fragmenting right now. And I don’t think the fragmentation is a bad thing. I think instead it can free up some new things to happen, but it’s painful.

In the short term. It’s very, very painful. And I think we’re going to lose a lot of people who are going to be casualties of all of this.

Well, obviously, the whole Trump has been painful, but I think the most, and I think I’ve used the phrase gut wrenching portion of your book is your description of the way that the Baptist Church, the the denomination you were affiliated with, dealt with sexual abuse allegations. Yeah. Talk to me about that because from the outside, it’s very hard to understand how people in responsible positions who are Christians would take the attitude that women who are being abused should basically just shut up about it, that we should not hold people accountable for first of all, tell me your experience, and then we’ll get into the the motivation behind it. Because am I right in reading this that, obviously, the Trump issue was a breaking point for you, but also the position of the church involving women in girls who are being sexually abused, that also seems like a real breaking point for you and and for your wife.

Yeah. Yeah. It really was because, I mean, you had multiple different motives. I think for some people, the motive is let’s protect the institution. And we can deal with all of these shady problems later on, but we can’t do that if we publicly say we have a problem.

I think some people had that mentality. And then with some other people, I think there are darker motives going on. I think there’s There are real sectors of misogyny. And when you have a situation where there aren’t women at the table in large numbers, It’s easy for people simply to dismiss them and to move on. And that what I concluded was in order to deal with this, I’m going to have to have a huge fight that I don’t want to have, and I’m not sure that at the end of it, it’s worth it.

And that was kind of the conclusion I came to at the end of it. Not that the issue’s not worth it, but that I didn’t think it was as reformable as I thought it was.

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So this is a particularly dangerous moment as you describe it. And you point out, look I’m gonna read from you both. If evangelicalism is just political idolatry or populist demagoguery or white nationalism or toxic masculinity or something else, then we can get at that problem merely by addressing all of those. Mhmm. But then you say you have to face the reality that as awful as all of those horrors are They are made worse when they are framed as badges of religious identity.

And this is one of, again, the moments because every demagogue, every dictator, seen this, because with religion, you can’t just claim power, but you can do it with the unquestionable authority of the divine. I mean, it’s very powerful to say support us or you’re out of the tribe. I mean, that’s real. That is real psychological resonance, but how much worse is it saying support us or you might not be right with god. And that’s what’s happening right now is that all of these things, these toxic elements are really being supercharged by being made into religious positions.

And that’s the real crisis that we’re in right now.

Yeah. And it’s one of the reasons why I’m so upset about this is because I actually believe this. I I really believe in gospel, Christianity. I I was, out at university of Chicago the Institute of politics out there. And there were, you know, these students weren’t most of them had never been around an evangelical Christian before.

And they they knew me from the Trump stuff and the race stuff and so forth. And so I think they kind of assumed I was maybe a more liberal kind of person, and after asking some theological questions, one of them said, hey, so you’re kind of like a real deal bible Right? Is that is that offensive? And I said, no. I feel so seen.

That’s exactly what it what it is. I really do believe this stuff, and that’s why it’s so enraging to see it weaponized and turned into something completely different. And if you turn to people and say, unless you support our demagogues or our movements or our politics, then your problem is with Jesus. And, the issue is and it’s not just that you’re wrong. You’re with us or literally to hell with you.

That has a power, and it’s a really destructive power. And, I mean, you can see that over and over again in people who are burned out, broken down by this because eventually, people see it for what it is.

So back to your title, losing a religion, one reaction to all of this is to walk away and say, I I can’t be associated with this. This is now bolted on to things that I find absolutely repellent. So I’m going to lose my religion. And many of these people do walk away from the church altogether. Them atheists, they become non practicing, they become disengaged.

How is this playing out? You and I have talked about this about the division within the church before, the pressure on pastors and individuals that wanna push back against it. You know, you’re talking about the fracturing. How many of the people are just walking away and disappearing from the church?

Well, here’s one of the problems, is that you have a lot of people who take the doctrines the most seriously who are the ones who are having these crises

—

Mhmm.

— of

saying, can I really be here? Is this all a sham? I don’t think it’s all a sham. And that’s one of the reasons why I fight against the the cynicism there.

At

the same time that you have this wave of non church going evangelicals who are globbing onto the movement. There are surveys that show that, non church going protestant would be the largest single voting block in the south, for instance, because it’s a different kind of cultural Christianity. Well, that’s a bad trade.

These would be the people that if you actually read the text of the sermon on the mountain will go where are you getting that crap from?

Yeah. Yeah. Or who mean, there was always a kind of, especially in the bible belt. You needed to be a church member to be a regular person. You’re not gonna be able to sell real estate, if you’re not, or or whatever.

Those days are gone, but you have a lot of people who they don’t have to be a part of any church, they just have to post Christian things on Facebook, which usually are just political and culture war things with this veneer on it. And so you end up with this, political scientist Daniel Williams did a piece on this saying you end up with the worst of all worlds because you have all the dogmatism and certainty, but without the community and the connection. And that’s that’s a dangerous mix.

You talk a lot in this book about the traditional, the altar call. Mhmm. And the role that it plays and the role played in your own life. So can you briefly just explain for those of us that are not from this tradition what the alter call is Okay. What is it?

At the end of a service in a typical Southern evangelical church and some others, there would be a time for anyone in the congregation who needed prayer or who wanted to come to faith in Christ or something else to walk down the aisle. And to pray with someone or to stand in front of the congregation. And it really was a reminder every week that we’re all sinners and that we don’t give up on anybody. And I think it really shaped my life in significant ways. And that’s why I say alter call with this because with an altar call, you have to have bad news and good news.

You have to tell the truth. You can’t just get up and say, Hey, uncle Ronnie, your drunkenness is we’re just going to ignore it. You have to say, Hey, you’ve got a problem. And you also have good news in the fact that there can be redemption. And I think right now what we see is either kind of despair.

There’s no way that this can ever go anywhere except down. Or this sense of is somehow an act of disloyalty If you say what’s going on. Instead, we just need to have happy talk about all the good things we’re doing, and there are a lot of good things. That we’re doing in American evangelical Christianity. But if we simply say that, we end up gaslighting The very people who are asking, is this real?

And I think the stakes are high with that, not just in terms of American democracy, although I care about that, but the church itself, which I care about even more.

Listen by your Bulwark call. And you write the scary thing about an altar call is that you don’t know where you’re going, and you did this when you were a little Southern Baptist in Mississippi. Right? How old were you? I was twelve.

Yeah. Okay. You’re twelve years old. And this is what you write. What if a time traveler were there?

Stop me in the aisle and said, let me tell you Russell. Let me tell you about evangelical Christianity several decades from now. Let me tell you about Donald Trump. Let me tell you about ongoing racism and nationalism constantly trying to masquerade as Jesus. Let me tell you about all the people who faces, you will see the rest of your life.

People who are violated at the deepest core of their being by the church. Would I have listened to you, Rod? Would I have turned around and headed back to my pew or what I have kept going straight through the foyer and out the back door? I don’t know. Yeah.

So talk to me about it. He said, I don’t know.

Yeah. And that’s that’s one of the reasons why I have compassion for people who are going through this time of disillusionment. And I don’t really give up on them. I think there are a lot of people who are working through what is real and and what’s not who are going to end up in a good place, but they’re just working through it because I was at a point by the time I went through twenty sixteen and beyond, I had been through enough. That I kind of had a category.

I could differentiate Jesus from some of these awful backroom meetings that I was in. If it happened an earlier time in my life, I’m not sure I could have.

So you conclude that evangelical America in crisis is not good for anybody, but crisis is also a time for revival. Yeah. Right? So, I mean, is this a moment Is this something you are wishcasting, or is it actually happening? I mean, revival is a long tradition.

It’s rooted in the Bible. It’s about being renewed in faith. For people who’ve grown old and lifeless. It’s not about returning to the nineteen fifties. It’s not about putting us back in twenty fifteen.

That’s not happening. So what do you think is happening?

I think something new is happening. If you look at what’s going on around the world, I mean, the world just is not becoming Norway in the way that some people predict it. Circularization is happening, but so is flourishing of Christianity in places that are really unusual taking up the leadership role of Christianity. And I see what’s happening in the United States as a tearing down of some old institutions and alliances in really bad and dangerous ways but that’s freeing up the possibility of new things. So, I mean, think about it even in terms of the politicization of evangelicalism.

I watched as I know you did, this evangelical event with the presidential candidates in Iowa.

Oh my goodness.

And what’s really fascinating about that is the fact that it’s moderated by Tucker Carlson, who isn’t motivated and energized by the typical sorts of Christian values kinds of questions.

I think that’s safe to say.

Yeah. It’s about Ukraine and are you pro russian enough and and so forth. And you have people who are Mike Pence deeply committed to the things that, evangelical Christians have cared about politically. Received very tepidly, and the people who are tucker carlsonites applauded.

By the way, that event seems like a perfect encap solution of what you write about in this book.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s moved to that point. I mean, and even if you think about the way that And there are many people who have pointed this out. It’s not likely that if Donald Trump’s the Republican nominee that he’s going to choose a Mike Pence as a running mate.

He doesn’t need that. In twenty sixteen, you really needed needed it. You all know this as an upstanding guy, whatever you think of his politics. You know this as a person of character. He doesn’t need that now.

He’s already proven that. And that’s why sometimes I would have reporters who would say, don’t you think that Trump not going far enough on abortion and blaming the midterm elections on too much pro life activity. That that’s going to lose him evangelical votes would say no. Because we’re at a point now where it’s not the pro life issue motivating trump support, but in many cases the other way around. So Donald Trump can say virtually anything he wants, and he’s not going to lose his constituency.

Including his religious constituency. He’s proven fifth avenue rule.

So what happens, though, after he’s gone? Let’s take him out of the picture. Yeah. How has the church been transformed? What do they do going forward when they don’t have the orange god king to follow.

I think they go in multiple different directions. I wouldn’t have said that a few years ago. A few years ago, I would have said, look, let’s try to get through twenty sixteen. I think I was even saying that in twenty twenty. Say, okay.

We’re gonna go through this. We’re gonna have a boring sort of time in American life. And A lot of the old simmering tensions will settle down. And Eric Mataxas, David French, will be right back together. Right.

You know, the band will all be back together. That’s not going to happen now. But instead, I think what you have happening are people who really didn’t know that they were on the same team are realizing they are, and some new kinds of collaborations are coming out of that. In church planning movements and mission strategies and in all kinds of ways. So it’s not gonna be the same sort of cohesive movement.

It’s going to be different, but in history, that’s always how it happens. John and Charles Wesley don’t take over the church of England. They step out and start something new. And I don’t think we’re gonna have a big battle for the soul of evangelicalism and somebody’s going to win and somebody’s going to lose. I think instead you just have a a splintering And that’s one of the reasons why, yes, you have a lot of tension going on in churches, but not the same as what you had in twenty six seen in twenty twenty, largely because people are sorting.

Even Trump supporting evangelicals are completely different from the people who are gay, I’ll vote for guy, but that doesn’t define my life. From the people who are the true manga types, they’re kinda sorting into their own congregations. And, I mean, someone said to me, one time it must be terrible to have people coming up to you in churches and and screaming at you. And I said, that never happens to me. Because if somebody’s going to talk to me, they’ve kind of already made the calculation I can live with it.

Mhmm.

Even if they don’t agree with it, I can live with it. And it sort of filters that out. I think that’s what’s happening in church life too.

What do you think the reaction is going to be this book? Because one of the most interesting things as I’m reading through it is is how shocking it must have been in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen when you took positions that you regarded as self evident, the the kind of blowback that you got From people that you would know in your whole life, including your old Sunday school teacher who called up and yelled at you for criticizing Donald Trump after access, Hollywood, So this is the invasion of the body snatchers. We’ve talked about over the years, the kind of the shock. What is the reaction now? What do you think the reaction now of suggesting that perhaps the conservative evangelical church was mortal or all along.

You expecting Blovac?

No. Not anymore than that.

Because they kinda know where you’re coming

from now. Because they kind of know where I am. What I am expecting is that the main thing I hear from people is I thought I was crazy.

Right.

Because you have people who are, you know, in a church in Nebraska or in Washington state or someone, and they feel completely alone. Or they have family members who are saying if you’re not on board with this, you’ve abandoned everything we ever taught you. All of that, it’s just a very surreal time. And there are a lot of people who have said, I I really was starting to wonder, am I just insane? And I usually just say, well, maybe, and maybe there’s two of us who are insane.

But

No. I I’d actually mark that because, of course, that’s a theme of podcast of the Bulwark in general. And and you’re right. Maybe you weren’t of those people in just such a dark night. Perhaps you look around at the rest of the and culture and wonder if you are the crazy one, maybe you hope this book is a road map to a better evangelical future.

You said it is not. However, What you do argue is that this is perhaps the moment for the church to be born again. So how optimistic slash hopeful are you? And there’s a distinction between optimism and hope as we’ve discussed, I think, in the past.

I’m hopeful and long term optimistic because I see what’s happening among young evangelical Christians. The sort of hucksterish demagogic, right is peeling off into kind of Jordan Peterson Tucker Tucker, Joe rogan, kind of expressions, and the typical evangelical christian that you meet on a college campus is real deal. They’re wanting to know how do I pray, how do I read the Bible, And even when they’re talking about, what do I do about my mom and dad who have gotten into QAnon or who just wanna argue positive? They’re not asking how to win the argument They’re asking, how do I remain connected to my mom and dad through all of this? I see that as a good sign.

And that is the challenge Doctor Russell Moore is editor in chief of Christianity Today today, formerly the president of the Ethics and religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist convention, And his new extraordinary book is losing our religion, an altar call for evangelical America Doctor Moore, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast today.

Thanks for having me. Always get to talk to each other.

And as always, thank you for listening to this weekend’s Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes will be back next week and we will do this all over again.

That’s me in the spot. My goose in my religion.

The Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.

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