Russell D. Moore

Review: Losing Our Religion

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Losing Our Religion, Russell Moore. New York: Sentinal, 2023.

Summary: A call to repentance, to come to Jesus, for an evangelical church that has lost its credibility, authority, identity, integrity, and stability.

“The problem now is not that people think the church’s way of life is too demanding, too morally rigourous, but that they have come to think the church doesn’t believe its own moral teachings.”

Russell Moore, p. 44.

Russell Moore has experienced first hand shattering disillusionment with a church that no longer seems to believe its own message. He was at one time the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is a popular author and has spoken trenchantly on the moral issues of the day, grounded in his belief in the authority of the Bible. That all changed when, seeing the immoral behavior of our former president in his candidacy, he refused to endorse him. Added to that, when an investigative report uncovered hundreds of cases of sexual abuse in his denomination, he advocated for the survivors of abuse when denominational leaders were stonewalling the issue. For the first offense, there was a popular backlash that included withholding of contributions. For the second, he was called on the carpet for being divisive and jeopardizing the support of church mission programs. He was attacked and demonized. At the end of his term as president of the ERLC, he resigned and joined a nondenominational congregation, leaving the body he had been a part of since he first walked down the aisle in response to an altar call.

Moore has wrestled with the parlous state of an American evangelicalism being abandoned by those who no longer think the church believes its own message, that has embraced political rather than spiritual power, that has justified the immoral for the end of “winning” a culture war, that has jettisoned a belief in truth, and turned to a nostalgic wish to return to some unspecified past greatness rather than to trust and walk with Christ into his future for his people. He sees the crumbling of such a “religion” to be a good thing. We ought to lose such a religion. Moore recurs to the practice of the altar call, a time of decision and turning from all these illusions and returning to our first love for Christ who alone can save us.

In five chapters, Moore outlines what he sees evangelicalism has lost. There is lost credibility, the growing gap between professed belief and actual behavior. There is lost authority as churches have embraced the tribal narratives of different political groups rather the truths they profess together in the creeds. There is a loss of identity in the embrace of a Christian nationalism of blood and soil rather than the multiethnic pilgrim exile community who follow Jesus. There is a loss of integrity in the acceptance of moral compromise to “win” battles–a far cry from Christian faithfulness that prioritizes trusting obedience over “results.” And we have lost the stability of nostalgia that fails to face the traumas we have endured in the recent past, where we end up repeating what has not been repaired.

Each chapter not only addresses the losses both of our failings and our crumbling illusions. Moore addresses how the faithful live when the ruins are falling. He urges us to embrace rather than resist disillusionment, to face rather than deny judgment. He calls us to tell the truth and avoid foolish controversies. A telling challenge for me was that he urges us to not “self-censor.” Most of extremist lies come from a very small but vigorous group who persuade truthtellers to go to ground. He urges us to refuse secularization and false framings of warfare that target people rather than spiritual powers. He urges the cultivation of intergenerational community. He challenges “whataboutism” that justifies immoral acts by the immorality of the “other” side, calling us to long-term integrity rather than short-term success. He movingly describes his growing friendship with Beth Moore, of whom he once spoke critically as he urges us to new communities and friendships with those whose gospel faithfulness transcends other differences.

As he concludes, he speaks of revival in very different terms. A reviving of American moral and religious greatness might actually be a bad thing without repentance and the hard work of the deep healing of our spiritual woundedness. Nostalgia seems so much safer and yet this is like going back to slavery in Egypt rather than following God in the uncertainties of the wilderness. His final words recur to his title: “Maybe only when we lose our religion will we be, once again, amazed by grace.”

This is both a hard and hopeful book. Moore unflinchingly names the failures of evangelicalism. He doesn’t offer any glowing promises but simply, for those who will hear, a call to press through our disillusionment to repentance, through our cynicism to belief in Christ, through our culture warring divisions to engaging local communities, and through the fog of a post-truth and post-morality world to integrity of belief and behavior. There are no promises here that these things will save evangelicalism or America. Rather, the only hope offered is that come what may, we will be saved, along with those drawn by gospel faithfulness. That is the hope we all find at the altar.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: Onward

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Onward

Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel, Russell D. Moore. Nashville: B & H Publishing, 2015.

Summary: Written by a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention, this book describes an agenda for a post-Moral Majority church, centered around both cultural engagement and gospel integrity.

I found this a heartening book in many ways that articulated, at least in the words of one denominational leader, the journey the Southern Baptist Convention has been on over the last few decades. Russell D. Moore is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and a frequent contributor in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Christianity Today and First Things.

Moore writes about what a church that has had Bible Belt roots and Moral Majority political clout does when these conditions no longer hold. His contention is both that the church needs to reconceive its cultural engagement, and use this opportunity to reaffirm its gospel integrity. He begins by affirming the importance of the life of the kingdom not only in its “not yet” dimensions but rather in the present. The kingdom must be first and he calls us to “be pilgrims again, uneasy in American culture.” He contends that the true culture war must be first to embody the life of the kingdom in gospel communities. He argues for  mission that preaches both justice and justification, reconciliation both between people, and between people and God and these two must not be pitted against each other. He then focuses on three particular issues he believes need to be emphasized in this effort to bring together gospel and culture: human dignity, religious liberty, and family stability.

In a chapter on Human Dignity, he begins with a statement of the dignity of black lives, and argues for a Whole Life dignity perspective, within which he advocates compellingly for continued pro-life engagement around issues of abortion and euthanasia. In discussing religious liberty, he freely invokes the Baptist history of separation of church and state, and argues for the liberties of all religious peoples, while acknowledging that in our present context, gospel integrity will be increasingly “strange” and not always supported. I loved his concluding statement in this chapter affirming, “We are Americans best when we are not Americans first.”

The chapter on family stability particularly struck me as one that might surprise some. One the one hand he is uncompromising in naming the sins of fornication and adultery rather than deploying euphemized equivalents and arguing for chastity rather than mere abstinence. On the other hand, he seeks to extend compassion to those wounded by today’s libertarian sexual ethics, acknowledges the need for stronger support of the abused, speaks of the connection between poverty and family instability, and argues that living wages are important for these families. He affirms the role of church as family for all, not just for couples with children. At the same time, he has some challenging comments about young couples waiting to marry because of economic considerations, that ends up leading to moral compromise. He’d contend that we are never ready for marriage, economically or otherwise!

His concluding chapters speak about the vital importance of speaking with both conviction and kindness, and for the fact that the hope for the American church is in the transforming power of the gospel, that leadership is not genetically inherited and the next “Billy Graham” may currently be an alcoholic, or come from another part of the world. God has ways of breaking out of both liberalism and legalism and raising up new generations.

Moore can turn a phrase and one has the sense that this was material adapted from oral speaking. At the same time, it felt at times that the organization could be tighter. Reading this felt like listening to rambles, albeit very engaging rambles, around a theme.

It is heartening to me that this book can be published by a Southern Baptist publishing house. It reflects a pilgrimage from a segregated, culture warring church focused on personal rather than social ethics to a church that is beginning to wrestle with what it means to hold justice and justification together. True, some of the material on questions like the environment, gun violence, economic justice and more are still very cautious, and I suspect most Blacks would like to see them go even further on issues of race and confronting the history of racism in this country. Yet the fact that these issues are talked about in the context of the dignity of all life and the gospel of the kingdom by a Southern Baptist leader is an encouraging sign and one that I hope will encourage similar conversations throughout the American church.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher via Netgalley. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”