An Altar Call for Evangelical America: Moore, Russell
Former Southern Baptist pastor and Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore calls for repentance and renewal in American evangelicalism.
way. While the witness of the church before
a watching world is diminished beyond recognition, congregations are torn
apart over Donald Trump, Christian
nationalism, racial injustice, sexual
predation, disgraced leaders, and
covered-up scandals. Left behind are
millions of believers who counted on the
church to be a place of belonging and hope.
As greater and greater numbers of younger Americans bleed out from the church, even the most rooted evangelicals are wondering, “Can American Christianity survive?”
In Losing Our Religion, Russell Moore calls his fellow evangelical Christians to conversion over culture wars, to truth over tribalism, to the gospel over politics, to integrity over influence, and to renewal over nostalgia. With both prophetic honesty and pastoral love, Moore offers a word of counsel for how a new generation of disillusioned and exhausted believers can find a path forward after the crisis and confusion of the last several years. Believing the gospel is too important to leave it to hucksters and grifters, he shows how a Christian can avoid both cynicism and complicity in order to imagine a different, hopeful vision for the church.
The altar call of the old evangelical revivals was both a call to repentance and the offer of a new start. In the same way, this book invites unmoored and discouraged Christians to step out into an uncertain future, first by letting go of the kind of cultural, politicized, status quo Christianity that led us to this moment of reckoning. Only when we see how lost we are, we can find our way again. Only when we bury what’s dead can we experience life again. Only when we lose our religion can we be amazed by grace again.
https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Our-Religion-Evangelical-America/
Russell Moore's Preaching to the Choir - ‘Altar Call for Evangelical America’
1. Lost Credibility - We don’t seem to really believe Christ’s gospel
message — particularly all that “woke” stuff about turning the other cheek
and loving our neighbors or the church’s moral
teaching, he says.
Believers take bold stands in defense of movements, causes or institutions but often lack character and have “deadened the sort of conscience needed to hear the call to repent.”
Fears of growing secularism lead some to “act in ways that tie the witness of the church to forms of power that actually fuel secularization.”
2. Lost Authority - We’ve forsaken objective truth for the truthiness of our tribe, embracing divisive conspiracy theories and falsehoods as means to ends, and saying things we know aren’t true so we don’t offend tribal gatekeepers, he charges.
We willingly comply with authoritarian and totalitarian strong men whose main interest in religion is co-opting it.
We swear allegiance to crazy ideas — remember that secret pedophile ring in a D.C. pizza parlor? or that stolen election? — until they’re proved false, then we replace them with newer, crazier ideas. We’re characters in Orwell’s Animal Farm, devotedly chanting “Four legs good, two legs bad” until we chant the opposite.
3. Lost Identity - We change the world through culture war, not evangelism or charity, unaware that our battle against secularism is another form of it, he continues .
We don’t find our identity in Christ, but in Christian nationalism, “a kind of Great Commission-in-reverse, in which the nations seek to make disciples of themselves, using the authority of Jesus to baptize their national identity.”
We’ve bargained away “the blood of Christ for blood-and-soil.” It’s a bad deal.
4. Lost Integrity - We embraced a promiscuous, profane, thrice-married casino magnate Republican, but condemned a sex-with-intern Democrat, showing the world we believe character matters only when advantageous, Moore says. Donald Trump personified what we’ve long felt deep down: “lack of Christian character is actually a benefit.”
We’re daily proving what many of our fellow Americans have long suspected: We’re hypocrites interested not in morality but in political power and cultural dominance. “We’ve embraced a moral relativism that would make a postmodernist deconstructionist slink out of his faculty lounge in shame.”
5. Lost Stability - We ask God to send revival but would rather God help us “take America back” to some nostalgic golden era that few women, people of color or people under age 70 want to revisit, he says. For us, revival isn’t altar calls inviting repentant sinners to give their hearts to Jesus. It’s voter mobilization.
Moore says he talks to more pastors who want to become bi- or even tri-vocational, not because they lust after wealth, but because they are anxious about a career in which they’re always “one church uprising away from being uprooted.”
Death Comes Before Rebirth
Moore isn’t sure where the evangelical movement is headed. Is it imploding? Is God tearing it down? Can it survive?
Like a good revivalist preacher, he makes clear that only Spirit-born revival — not any nifty seven-part makeover plan — can save evangelicalism from the deep hole it has dug itself into.
Is the movement even savable? Who knows. But Christ and his body live on.
Asked in the interview about the SBC’s recent annual meeting, Moore paused before saying, “I really love and care about these people and I grieve when I see things going awry. … It’s a tragic time.”
American Evangelical Church Is in Crisis. There’s Only One Way Out.
Evangelicals can have revival or nostalgia—but not both. - by
Russell Moore
The No. 1 question that younger evangelicals ask me is how to relate to their parents and mentors who want to talk about culture-war politics and internet conspiracy theories instead of prayer or the Bible. These young people are committed to their Christian faith, but they feel despair and cynicism about the Church’s future. Almost none of them even call themselves “evangelical” anymore, now that the label is confused with political categories. “Sometimes I feel like I’m crazy,” one pastor said to me just days ago. “Does no one see that the Church is in crisis?”
Indeed it is. I am a conservative evangelical—previously the head of the public-policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention. For years I dealt with evangelical backlash, including from some of my closest allies and friends, over my opposition to Donald Trump and my views on issues such as racial justice and Church sexual abuse. I hardly thought of myself as a “dissident.” Instead, I believed I was just what I’d always been: a loyal Southern Baptist evangelical trying to apply what I’d learned from children’s Sunday school onward about basic Christian morality and justice. Still, I felt like an outcast and a heretic. I felt homeless. And two years ago, I left the Southern Baptist world I loved.
I know that other evangelicals struggle with similar feelings. I am hard-pressed to think of one congregation that is not divided—or in an adrenal stance of tension about the imminence of division—over the turmoil of the political moment. This should be a time for revival in our churches. Revival is a concept with a long history in American evangelicalism, rooted in the Bible, that says a people who have grown cold and lifeless can be renewed in their faith. It is a kind of resurrection from the dead.
Yet the language of revival is now riddled with cynicism, and is associated with some of the worst aspects of American evangelicalism. Entrepreneurial American evangelicalism built a programmatic structure for “revival”—whether in the spring- and fall-meeting schedules of little Bible Belt churches like the one in which I grew up or in massive stadium events traveling across the country like rock concerts. As The Guardian noted in an editorial after the 2016 presidential election, “In the end, a market-driven religion gives rise to a market-driven approach to truth, and this development ultimately eviscerated conservative Christianity in the US and left it the possession of hypocrites and hucksters.”
However, the confusion of nostalgia with revival is not simply the terrain of MAGA-right evangelicalism. Many mainstream evangelicals assumed that we were all just waiting out a moment of disorder: If we can just get through the 2016 presidential election, the pandemic, the racial-reckoning protests and backlashes, the 2020 presidential election, and the seemingly constant evangelical-leadership sex-and-abuse scandals, we’ll end up safely back in 2015. That’s clearly not happening.
Crisis shakes up an old order—ripping apart, as the apostle Paul put it, what’s made of “wood, hay, stubble” (1 Corinthians 3:12). Now every moment is a possible apocalypse—in which what’s been around us all the while is revealed—and thus every moment is an hour of decision.
The idea of revival as a return to some real or imagined moment of greatness is not just illusory but dangerous. In the supposedly idyllic Christian America of the post–World War II era, the evangelical preacher A. W. Tozer wrote: “It is my considered opinion that under the present circumstances we do not want revival at all. A widespread revival of the kind of Christianity we know today in America might prove to be a moral tragedy from which we would not recover in a hundred years.” Tozer knew that the confusion of revival with nostalgia could amount to exactly what contemporary psychologists tell us about trauma: What is not repaired is repeated.
That’s why the crisis before evangelical America is not necessarily bad news. Many people, myself included, lament what we see as the fragmentation of the evangelical movement. People who once led ministries together no longer speak to one another. People who prayed together for decades now say to one another, “I don’t even know who you are anymore!” All of this is in the context of an American culture that also seems to be fragmenting—a process accelerated by the collapse of mediating institutions and the growth of a social-media ecosystem—in ways that the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt compared in this magazine to the destruction of the biblical Tower of Babel.
And yet, the problem with the Tower of Babel was not fragmentation. The problem was unity. The builders were united by their own hubris in building something that would ultimately destroy them. The confusion of the languages and the scattering of people were the work of God. The answer was not to reassemble the old architectural plans and start again. The answer instead was in the next chapter—with a lone figure, Abram of Ur, who heard a promise and trekked out into the desert, not knowing where he was going.
The answer to the crisis of credibility facing evangelical America is not fighting a battle for the “soul of evangelicalism,” with one group winning and exiling the losers. John and Charles Wesley did not replace the 18th-century Church of England to create Methodism, but their renewal movement still resonated throughout the world and with other Protestant denominations. Billy Graham was cast out from many of the fundamentalist sectors in which he had learned to preach the Gospel, but he carried the Gospel where his mentors never could.
The answer is instead what it has always been: Those who wish to hold on to the Old Time Religion must recognize that God is doing something new. The old alliances and coalitions are shaking apart. And the sense of disorientation, disillusionment, and political and religious “homelessness” that many Christians feel is not a problem to be overcome but a key part of the process. The insight of evangelical Christianity, at its best, is that any pilgrimage cannot start with a road map of certainty but must begin with the cry of faith that says, like the noble disciple Thomas wrongly labeled as a doubter, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” (John 14:5).
Nostalgia—especially of the sort wielded by demagogues and authoritarians—cannot protect religious faith, because it uses religion as a tool for worldly ends, leaving a spiritual void. The Christian Church still needs an organic movement of people reminding the rest of us that there’s hope for personal transformation, for the kind of crisis that leads to grace.
C. S. Lewis noted that the one prayer that God almost never grants is “encore.” Lewis wrote that our nostalgia for the “golden moments in the past” can be nourishing and sustaining, as long as we see them for what they are—memories, not blueprints. “Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths,” Lewis argued. “Leave the bulbs alone, and the new flowers will come up. Grub them up and hope, by fondling and sniffing, to get last year’s blooms, and you will get nothing.”
If evangelicals deny the depths of the crisis in front of us, and simply opt for the sort of public relations that can preserve the coalitions and power structures of yesteryear, we will lose a generation longing to see whether the Gospel is real or just another means to mobilize voters or market to customers. We will find ourselves in one more contest to see what kind of power we can leverage to make that happen—which, as always, will put us on the side of the crucifiers rather than on the side of the Crucified.
Churches must stop the frantic rhetoric and desperate lack of confidence that seek to hold on to the Bible Belt of the past. Instead, those worthy of the word evangelical should nurture the joyous and tranquil fullness of faith that prays for something new, rooted in something very old—namely a commitment to personal faith and to the authority of the Bible.
That starts not with manifestos and strategic road maps, but with small-scale decisions to reawaken the awe of the God evangelicals proclaim. We must refocus our attention on conversion rather than culture wars and actually read the Bible rather than mine it for passages to win arguments. No individual can change the “evangelical movement” alone. Change comes, first, person by person, then congregation by congregation. If enough of us would embrace this sense of homelessness as our new normal—as where we should have been all along—then we can rekindle a longing for a different Kingdom to call home.
In a country exhausted by the quest to make America great again, perhaps what we need is to make evangelicalism born again.
And, in the end, that’s not a strategy. It’s a prayer.
This article has been adapted from Russell Moore’s forthcoming book, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America.
Russell Moore is editor in chief of Christianity Today.
Many Christians Almost in Despair Over what Trump Did to Their Faith
Russell Moore, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said in an interview with Semafor recently that many evangelical Christians are secretly sick and tired of expending so much energy defending former President Donald Trump.
Moore said that, at its heart, this weariness comes from trying to reconcile the Bible's instructions for how to behave with the former president's allegedly criminal activities, not to mention his long history of alleged sexual harassment and infidelity.
"I’m hearing every day from evangelical Christians who are exhausted and almost in despair over the state of American Christianity," he told the publication. "They know something has gone terribly wrong but they are losing hope that anything could be different."
Moore went on to add that he believes "Trump to be a unique threat, both to American institutions and to the church’s witness.
Moore is also publishing a new book called "Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America" that examines Trump's role in reshaping evangelical morality, which he believes has been detrimental to the faith.
"While the witness of the church before a watching world is diminished beyond recognition, congregations are torn apart over Donald Trump, Christian nationalism, racial injustice, sexual predation, disgraced leaders, and covered-up scandals," reads the book's description. "Left behind are millions of believers who counted on the church to be a place of belonging and hope."
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-evangelicals-2662335577/
There Never Was An Evangelicalism:
In Dialogue with Russell Moore’s “Losing Our Religion”
...The Rot Runs Deep
Russell Moore’s central thesis is that the recent secularizing trends are due to young Americans newly believing the Church — particularly the evangelical church — is hypocritical and immoral. While he’s careful in his wording and quick to note the hypocrisies of the cultural evangelicalism he grew up around in the South, Dr. Moore sometimes sounds as though he thinks it’s evangelical hypocrisy itself that is new.
Take, for example, the following paragraph:
Where a “de-churched” (to use an anachronistic term) “ex-vangelical” (to use another) in the early 1920s was likely to have walked away due to the fact that she found the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection to be outdated and superstitious or because he found moral libertinism to be more attractive than the “outmoded” strict moral code of his past or because she wanted to escape the stifling bonds of a home church for an autonomous individualism, now we see a markedly different — and jarring — model of a disillusioned evangelical. We now see young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches. The presenting issue in this secularization is not scientism and hedonism but disillusionment and cynicism...
What Does It Profit a Christian to Protect an Institution but Lose Their
Soul?
Our ambition should take a back seat to our conscience.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2023/july-august/christian-protect-institution-conscience-judgment-morality.html
https://www.russellmoore.com/
https://www.russellmoore.com/2021/04/15/losing-our-religion/
https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/an-evangelical-america-in-crisis-isnt-good-for-anybody-russell-moore-on-post-trump-religion
Trump Is 'Unique Threat' to the Church: Christian Leader
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-threat-christian-church-evangelicals-russell-moore-1815233
