Moore went all-out condemning religious conservative figures who, in his view, traded their moral principles for first-class seats on the Trump Train. The same movement that condemned Bill Clinton for his immorality and denounced feminists for their hypocrisy in sticking by Clinton for the sake of holding on to power has produced leaders who have done exactly the same thing. For Moore, they are morally bankrupt, and the world knows it, even if they don’t. And it’s their own fault:
.. The next generation of these evangelicals pack orthodox confessional universities and seminaries, are planting orthodox confessional churches with astounding velocity. The evangelicals who are at the center of evangelical vitality are also the least likely to be concerned with politics. Again, this is not because they are liberal but because they keep a priority on the gospel and the mission that they do not wish to lose. The leaders they read and listen to are also often fairly indifferent to politics. … Those who do care about politics, and who lead populist movements, tend to be theologically vacuous, tied to populist “God and Country” appeals that seem simultaneously idolatry and angry to younger Christians, and often form a kind of “protection racket” seeking to silence Christian voices as “liberal” who wish to speak about such matters as racial justice.
.. See what Moore’s getting at here? He’s saying that the best way to influence the culture for Christ is to stop trying to “influence the culture for Christ”, but rather to be deeply and thoughtfully Christian, and to allow your countercultural life to be your testimony.
.. A Religious Right that is not able to tie public action and cultural concern to a theology of gospel and mission will die, and will deserve to die.
..One of the assumptions of some in the old Religious Right is that the church is formed well enough theologically and simply needs to be mobilized politically.
.. The fundraising structure of political activism, left and right, means that often the most extreme and buffoonish characters are put forward. For the Religious Right, the strangeness to the world is not where the New Testament places it—in the scandal of the gospel—but in the willingness to say outrageous things on television. Some would suggest that even broaching this topic is “intellectual snobbery.” And yet, imagine a 1960s civil rights movement led not by Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, but by Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright.
.. Moore is comparing the in-your-face, sky-is-falling political rhetoric from certain Religious Right Evangelicals to the Jack Van Impe/Hal Lindsey End-Times mumbo-jumbo that used to electrify Evangelical audiences in his youth. He’s saying that it risks making Christians cynical about things that are truly important, because they’ve heard it all before, and it’s never true.
.. If we lack a radical commitment to the Gospel, said Moore, all we have to offer is moralism. “We must remind ourselves that we are not inquisitors but missionaries,” he said “that we can be Americans best when we are not Americans first.”
.. Christians are not called to save a nation or a culture, but to be instruments through which the grace of God reaches out and saves those lost souls.
.. Compare what you’ve just read to this well-known passage from Father Joseph Ratzinger in 1969:
The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.
She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges. . . As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members….
It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek . .