More than 100 of the denomination’s 46,000 churches have threatened to cut off financial support for the SBC’s umbrella fund
.. What’s stunning about this is the blow Moore’s firing, if it comes to that, will be to Southern Baptist credibility and witness.
.. If the Southern Baptist Convention removes him from the presidency of the ERLC, it will signal a dramatic win for the old-guard Religious Right within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. It will also spark the biggest war within the Southern Baptist Convention since the 1990s fight between conservatives and liberals.
.. If the Southern Baptist Convention removes him from the presidency of the ERLC, it will signal a dramatic win for the old-guard Religious Right within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. It will also spark the biggest war within the Southern Baptist Convention since the 1990s fight between conservatives and liberals.
.. I saw a cultural Christianity cut off from the deep theology of the Bible and enamored with books and audio and sermon series tying current events to Bible prophecy—supermarket scanners as the mark of the Beast, Gog and Magog as the Soviet Union or, later, Saddam Hussein or al-Qaeda or the Islamic State as direct fulfillments of Bible prophecy. When these prophecies were not fulfilled, these teachers never retreated in shame. They waited to claim a new word from God and sold more products, whether books or emergency preparation kits for the Y2K global shutdown and the resulting dark age the Bible clearly told us would happen.
.. I was left with the increasingly cynical feeling—an existential threat to my entire sense of myself and the world—that Christianity was just a means to an end. My faith was being used as a way to shore up Southern honor culture, mobilize voters for political allies, and market products to a gullible audience.
.. So when, in the middle of my spiritual crisis, I saw the name C. S. Lewis on the spine of a book called Mere Christianity, I was willing to give him a chance—and he saved my life.
.. All I needed was for this drinking, smoking, probably dancing and card-playing man on another continent to tell me the truth, to point me to a broad, bustling Church that took serious questions seriously
.. At its best, the religious right reminded all of us that there are realities more important than political or economic success
.. At its best, the religious right kept the focus on a vulnerable minority that easily becomes invisible to those with power: unborn children. Douthat is correct that without some form of religious right, the space left behind can all too easily be filled by European-style ethno-nationalism or Nietzschean social Darwinism.
.. if Moore is fired, that is. There are a lot of younger Southern Baptists who are not willing to return to the Republican Party at Prayer mode of public engagement.
.. This conflict, and its resolution, will have a serious impact beyond the SBC. It will determine the future of Christian conservatism in America.
Christians in the Hands of Donald Trump
For several years now, Moore has been the energetic and winsome spokesman for a next-generation religious right — one that no longer regards itself as a moral majority, that recognizes that traditional religion in all its forms has become a counterculture in the West
.. Having spent the late Obama years trying to reconcile themselves to growing marginalization, to sudden secularization and increasing liberal pressure on their institutions, they suddenly find themselves with a real share of power — with allies all over the Trump cabinet, whatever the president himself may believe — in a political alignment that almost nobody saw coming.
.. But Dreher’s deeper, “how to build a counterculture” argument matters regardless of whether his prophecies are accurate
.. how do you think we got Trumpism? There is blame enough to go around, but the weakness of religious community is an important part of the story
.. if every Protestant megachurch were one degree more liturgical and theological
.. Being a bit of a dogmatist myself, I’m skeptical that a robust institutional Christianity can be built on the premises of contemporary liberal theology and the cultural shifts that it accommodates.
How to speak Christian truth to political power
Moore was one of the few prominent evangelicals this election season to remain an outspoken critic of Donald Trump throughout the presidential campaign. He challenged the candidate on issues that seemed fairly obvious to any practicing Christian (the serial lying, immoral business practices, questionable sexual ethics, etc.) in surprising contrast to many others on the religious right who ignored or even made excuses for the candidate’s behavior.
.. The criticism being leveled at Moore by his religious counterparts says more about what the evangelical establishment mistakenly values today than it does about anything that Moore has done wrong. And it misunderstands the true role that Christians could — and should — play in the public square under a president who is likely to be dismissive of their cause.
.. So what is it that Moore said that these ostensible moral leaders don’t agree with? The statement that “if character matters, character matters”?
.. Perhaps it was that he pointed out how it was “a scandal and a disgrace” that when the sexually predatory “Access Hollywood” tapes were released, virtually all of the reaffirmations of support for Trump came from religious conservative leaders.
.. access is now the end goal of Christians in Washington... Christian leaders who think that having access means that they’ll be taken seriously when it comes to policymaking have been disappointed, including during the tenures of self-declared Christian presidents like the evangelical George W. Bush or Barack Obama... But where Christian leaders should be seeking influence, especially in a rapidly secularizing society in which their views seem ever more countercultural, is in trying to remain a respected moral voice worth engaging with — not by setting aside their most distinctive values in a grab for shifting political power. The most persuasive religious leaders will be those who, like Russell Moore, remain distinguishable from everyone else. Attacking the most principled among themselves is an attack on Christians’ best chance for survival in the public square.
The Evangelical Reckoning Over Donald Trump
White, conservative Christians voted for the Republican candidate by a huge margin, but this election revealed deep fractures among leaders and churches—especially along racial lines.
.. But for some evangelical leaders, and particularly women and people of color, this election was never about power jockeying or compromise. To them, Trump represents a bigoted, misogynistic worldview and an existential threat. More than all the nasty barbs exchanged the campaign and the months of divisive arguments, this is the greatest challenge evangelicals have to reckon with in the wake of the election. White, conservative Christians may have thought they were just casting a vote for president, but some of their brothers and sisters in the church see their choice as a direct and personal assault.
.. Moore, said Falwell, “doesn’t speak for the church members or the evangelical public any more than Louis Farrakhan speaks for all Muslims or I speak for all evangelicals. It’s just one person.”This is one of the big questions about Christianity in the Trump era: Who really speaks for the “evangelical worldview”?.. Some of them are effectively historical artifacts: Ralph Reed, who led the Christian Coalition during the ’90s, for example, has been a big Trump supporter and is often quoted in the press. But when I spoke with students at the evangelical Liberty University, many said they’d never heard of him... “I don’t make the distinction between evangelicals who aligned themselves with Trump versus evangelicals who didn’t,” he said. “I instead think the division is over motive and mode of operation.”.. Roughly 81 percent of white evangelicals supported Trump, but many seem to have low or mixed opinions of him. The divides are also racial: Only 60 percent of all people who identify as Protestants voted Republican. The gap between that number and the number of white evangelicals who voted for Trump reflect the views of evangelicals of color, along with some theologically liberal or mainline Protestants... This election was not a race to the top on matters of personal integrity; as Al Mohler, the vocally anti-Trump president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said during the campaign, if he were to support Trump, he would have to apologize to Bill Clinton.. “You’ve now hitched your wagon to the GOP and Mr. Trump in ways that just ruin moral credibility in the country,” said Thabiti Anyabwile, a theologically conservative Baptist pastor in D.C. “I don’t know how you recover from that.”.. Some evangelical leaders who supported Trump dismissed the allegations of misogyny as a distraction... But a few predicted that this election could permanently damage attempts to create unity among evangelicals... Anyabwile anticipates that it will be harder to get people to engage with his church, which is in a heavily black area of D.C., and harder to get his congregants to engage with evangelical culture more broadly. That could pose a huge demographic challenge for churches that are trying to engage with an increasingly racially diverse American population. “Evangelicals in this vote have created a pretty deadly and chilling effect on their witness to Christ and the gospel and the scriptures,” he said. “There’s not only a credibility problem in terms of the body politic. There’s also an evangelistic problem.”.. Others say that Trump is a new man, that everything he’s said on the campaign trail—about women, Mexicans, Muslims, the “inner city,” and more—does not reflect who he truly is. “I’ve seen a lot of change in him in the last year or two. He’s a different man,” said Falwell Jr. “I believe everybody is redeemable, and I think Donald Trump has been positively influenced by the American public that he’s interacted with over the past year.”