Matthew Kaemingk:
Welcome to Zealots at the Gate, a podcast of Comment magazine. I’m Matthew Kaemingk.
Shadi Hamid:
I’m Shadi Hamid.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Together we research, politics, religion, and the future of democracy at Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life.
Shadi Hamid:
We are writing a book together. This podcast represents an informal space where we can talk about how to live with deep difference. Thanks so much for joining us.
Welcome to Zealots at the Gate, a podcast of Comment magazine. I’m Shadi Hamid, and that over there is Matthew Kaemingk. Together we research, politics, religion, and the future of democracy at Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life. Make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And Matt, do you want to introduce our guest?
Matthew Kaemingk:
I’d love to. Dr. Moore is Christianity Today‘s editor-in-chief. He’s the director of the Public Theology project, previously served as the president of the Southern Baptist Church’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. He’s the author of several books on faith, politics and culture, including most recently, an excellent new book called Losing Our Religion: an Altar Call for Evangelical America. We’ll leave the link for that book in the show notes, but yeah, Dr. Moore, welcome sir. It’s really great to have you here.
Russell Moore:
Thanks for having me.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I have a number of different directions I’d love to take this conversation, but the first one I want to press to you and then I want to see how Shadi responds to my provocation, and it has to do with your history of challenging your own evangelical tribe on issues of politics.
One of the things that we talk a lot about is a healthy political tribe is one that can endure self-critique, reform, grow, deepen and so forth. And over the last 10 to 15 years, you’ve been pushing evangelicalism on its political habits, its political speech, its relationship to Donald Trump, and a variety of the movements towards Christian nationalism and so forth. What I was hoping you might do is just reflect a little bit on what it means to challenge your own tribe and how to do that well. Maybe you’ve learned from past mistakes about how to challenge your own tribe. And then I’d like to see how Shadi responds to that just as a little bit of a preview, because Shadi has challenged his own Islamic community on a number of issues regarding their political behaviour. And this particular podcast is really fascinated with these questions of tribalism and pluralism and how we relate to our internal tribes and to the different tribes in American democracy.
Russell Moore:
Well, I don’t really see what I have been doing is challenging my own tribe. It’s more in terms of speaking to a beleaguered group within what some may define as a tribe, asking what is the tribe. And I think that a lot of that is definitional. Some of that has to do with the fact that evangelicalism, in some ways this is a strength, in some ways it’s a weakness, isn’t an institution. It’s a renewal movement within institutions. And so there’s always been in the history of evangelicalism, splintering calls, repentance calls to get back in touch with roots. And that’s just part of what evangelicalism is. So I think right now it’s not so much about challenging the tribe to go in a different direction as it is in realising that the tribes are being redefined and seeking to define them as we go.
Shadi Hamid:
So maybe on that note, before I jump in, could you help listeners and viewers with some of, first of all, what does it mean to be an evangelical in your conception of the term? Obviously, it’s become an increasingly contested word to use, and there’s debate about what it means, whether there’s agreement over what it means. And then also maybe just say a little bit about your own background, leaving the Southern Baptist Convention over internal disputes and your discomfort with the Trump, the Trumpy aspects of certain parts of Evangelicalism moving away from theological conviction and moving towards political partisanship.
Russell Moore:
Well, to some degree, evangelicalism has always been a contested concept. And that’s especially been true over the past, say, 50 years. One of the reasons it’s been so ill-defined is it’s been in everybody’s interest to keep it relatively ill-defined. And so if you can have a movement that can include both Tim Keller and Prosperity Gospel preachers such as Benny Hinn, Paula White, I mean, that’s not a coherent movement. It’s a label that’s being very haphazardly applied for the outside world. It gives a category to say exotic sorts of protestants in their view. And from the evangelical perspective, it gives a sense of bigness and solidarity that didn’t really exist until it was defined politically rather than theologically.
So I think that’s always been contested to some degree. What I think Evangelicalism historically has been is a movement within the church that emphasizes the personal, the need for a personal relational experience with God. People come into the kingdom of God not nation by nation or village by village or family by family, but person by person. And with that, an emphasis upon the authority of scripture. And so keeping those things central. It’s not that other strands of Christianity don’t talk about those things, but evangelicalism has been the place of emphasis for those things.
And that’s why right now in the contemporary environment where evangelical has come to mean, in an American context, Trump supporter in many people’s minds, a lot of campus ministries and other places don’t use the word evangelical because that people assume you’re handing out red hats in the campus ministry. And a lot of evangelicals, especially younger evangelicals, don’t want to use the term at all. Those who typically meet most of the historical criteria for being evangelicals tend to be the most reluctant to use the word. I’m not married to the word evangelical, but I haven’t found an alternative to explain this particular strand of Christianity.
Shadi Hamid:
And could you just say a little bit about your resignation from your leadership posts in the Southern Baptist Convention?
Russell Moore:
Well, it really was about three different things. One of them had to do with the politicization and the Trumpism. Another had to do with racial justice questions, and probably the most important had to do with church sexual abuse. And so I came to the conclusion I really… Like a lot of institutions, I think that most people wanted to do the right thing. Certainly most people who assembled every year in the annual meeting, but there were different psychologies at work. And I’ve seen this happen in congregation after congregation as well. It might be just 10% of the congregation that really wants to create havoc, but if the 90% assume, “Well, we really can’t acknowledge that this is going on. And if we do, we need to just assume that we can give 30% of what those people want and then they’ll be like we are, ready to move on in unity,” that’s not the case. So those were some factors in deciding.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay, great. And so I want to jump now into maybe the meat of the debate that I think Matt and I have been going back and forth on now for a couple years. And we often come back to a sort of puzzle, which is Matt would say, if I can speak for him for a moment, that his own theology gives him the resources to not be overly politicized, to delay judgement, to not see everything as an existential battle for the soul of America where religion has to be kind of repurposed into politics or partisanship. And I think the idea of delayed judgement is a really inspirational one.
I’m obviously… Well, maybe not obviously, but I’m not an evangelical, I’m not a Christian, I’m a Muslim. And I’ve found deep inspiration in the work of the Dutch theologian, Abraham Kuyper, who Matt introduced me to, and in Kuyper’s thought the idea of the imperfection of this world and perfection only being possible with Christ is a powerful thought. The idea that we have to kind of sit with imperfection and that definitive judgement will not be possible until some later time. And in theory, that should allow us to chill a little bit.
But what we found with evangelicals in America today, we see increasingly the opposite, an inability or unwillingness to chill, and to invest a lot into politics and specifically into a kind of Trumpian politics. About 80% of evangelicals, of white evangelicals, I should say, supported Donald Trump in the 2020 election, that is an overwhelming majority. And also unfortunately, according to various surveys, evangelicals tend to be the most anti-Muslim or Islamophobic demographic group in America. And that’s also coincided with the Trump era. And of course, so maybe not so surprising in that sense, but why is it that you and Matt and other evangelical figures in the community, you’ve tried to push back against these negative tendencies? And not to say that voting for Trump on its own is necessarily bad. What we’re talking about here is tying evangelicalism to Donald Trump and not being able to separate them. I think that’s what we’re really concerned with here. And you’ve tried to push back against those developments, but it hasn’t seemed to work. And I guess the question is, why hasn’t it worked up until now?
Russell Moore:
Well, I mean for one thing, well, there are multiple different questions in there, and so I’ll try to get to each of them. The one about the fact that it hasn’t worked, it depends on what one means by worked. I think there are some people probably whose goal is to let’s redirect the institutions of evangelicalism in a different way politically. That’s not what I’m trying to do. What I’m trying to do is to speak to those people who believe in Christ, want to follow Christ, don’t want Christianity to be a means to an end of some political movement of any sort, and to say there actually is a different way for the future. That’s what I’m trying to do.
When it comes to evangelicalism and the politicization, the lack of chill, I think there are a number of things that are involved here. I mean, one of them is I don’t think that people are paying enough attention to the white in white evangelicalism. So if you look at those numbers and then you look at the traditionally liberal mainline Protestant denominations, they’re not that much lower once you sort them out into white people when it comes to Trump support. So there’s a national and regional sort of Trumpian effect that on its own is overwhelming.
Then when you add to it the evangelical part, I think everything, every strength has a shadow side. And in evangelicalism, one of the strengths has been a kind of entrepreneurialism and a, for lack of a better word, market-driven approach to existence. So this was really effective on the frontier evangelizing people. They didn’t have to be a college of bishops to approve church planting and evangelism throughout America. Billy Graham didn’t need to check with an institution before he started his crusades. Those things have always been, in one way, a strength, but with them, they bring a danger. And a danger is an entrepreneurial market-driven sort of approach to ministry can lead, as the Guardian newspaper put it in 2016, can easily lead to a market driven approach to truth. And that leaves a movement vulnerable to hucksters and demagogues and everything else as we have seen.
You add to that what I think is a secularization of evangelicalism that coincides with secularization trends elsewhere, but manifests itself in a particular kind of way where there is the sort of chill that you’re talking about with Kuyper, you can see this going all the way back to Augustine and city of God dealing which seemed to be the catastrophe of the fall of Rome. And emphasizing this is important, but there is something more important.
When you have categories redefined so that, for instance, categories of spiritual warfare, which throughout Christian history emphatically do not apply to human beings, apply to what scripture calls principalities and powers in the heavenly places, when you apply that to human beings and to political movements, you have secularized whether you realise it or not. And that has contributed quite a bit.
So a lot of what we’ve seen, for instance, is really similar to what I would have seen as a kid with if a church really wanted to grow, one of the ways that the church would do that, depending on where it is, is to emphasize Bible prophecy. And so we can take the things that you’re already interested in, the Cold War, what’s going to happen with that, and explain it to you. “Here is how you are in the terminal generation. These are the last days.” People liked that for all kinds of reasons, for one reason because it gives a sense of transcendent meaning we are the last ones here, we’re the last guards. We are here for the end of history as we know it. That is happening right now, except it’s not coming from the Book of Revelation or the Book of Ezekiel. It’s coming instead with this secular apocalypticism. You’re here for the Flight 93 end of civilization and you’re a key part of that. So all of those things are ways that transcendence has been lost.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. So I’d love to just kind of stick with that for a little bit and perhaps you could talk us through just a little bit more this secularization of the evangelical movement in America. What might be some examples that you see happening today of how evangelicalism is becoming an increasingly secular movement and what does that look like?
Russell Moore:
Well, one of the ways one can look at this is in terms of evangelism. And I will find myself often talking to secular progressive sorts of people and saying, “You are very fearful of proselytizing and evangelizing because you see that as some sort of bullying, intimidation, cultural imperialism. You’re really going to miss it when it’s gone.” And that’s one of the things that we’re seeing.
For instance, Shadi brought up anti-Muslim attitudes. I can track whether or not a church in a particular area is going to be clamouring for the city council to zone a mosque out of existence almost 100% based upon whether that church is doing evangelism with Muslims and others in their communities or not. And the ones who are are the least likely to be calling for mosques to be zoned out of existence. And that has everything to do with the fact that, one, they actually are making an effort to connect with their neighbours. Two, because they’re being trained to try to persuade people, to talk to people as human beings who actually can be persuaded, not as demons to be eradicated. And because they see spiritual success as not being the vanquishing of enemies, but the carrying of good news. And so when you have a loss of that and instead what you have is a primacy of a kind of culture war mentality, that is a secularized view.
So look at, for instance, these Christian nationalist movements. The problem for me with Christian nationalism is not that it’s too conservative, it’s that it is what previous generations of evangelicals would’ve called modernism, social gospel. The idea that people can buy external conformity through national identity or ethnic identity or behavioural change, be right with God and blessed with God. That’s not an evangelical view. So this is itself a kind of secularization in the exact same way as in the early 20th century when what the liberals in Protestantism were seeking to do, is to Christianize the world, not in terms of individual transformation, personal transformation, but in terms of outside structures. The so-called fundamentalists were the one who said, “That’s not what Christianity is,” and they were right.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So what about the rise of people who would identify in polling as evangelicals, but do not attend church, do not participate, volunteer, pray, give, or sort of show any of the sort of institutional connections to the community? What do you make of the rise of these unaffiliated, so-called evangelicals? The second part of the question is, what does that mean for American public life that we would have unaffiliated evangelicals?
Russell Moore:
Well, I think there are a number of factors. One of those factors being a reversal of the typical paradigm we were expected to see throughout the 20th century, which is strong religious life, meaning congregational church life in more rural communities and a lack of that in urban communities. That’s still true when you’re looking at self-identification, but if you’re looking at the strength of the religious communities themselves, it is almost completely reversed. So if you look at rural congregations and churches though, they’re facing the exact same sorts of problems as, for instance, coal mines and rural manufacturing towns and are under a great deal of stress. The churches that are doing well and actually are cohesive, are more likely to be in places such as Raleigh or Minneapolis or Denver than they are to be in places such as rural Pennsylvania or rural Mississippi. And so that’s one of the changes.
The other is a change in cultural Christianity. So for most of the 20th century, in most parts of the country, being a part of a church was necessary to being a normal American. Whether one believed in anything or not, it took a great deal of courage to opt out of church life and to say, “I’m not a part of a church.”
The culture of Christianity morphed and changed not by going away, but by decongregationalizing. And so you have an ability to claim a self-identity as a Christian, not just to say if somebody asks you, “Are you a Christian?”
“Well, yes,” but to have a very militant sort of social media presence as a Christian without having any congregational tie at all. A lot of that has to do with even the possibility of that can only happen with loss of connection with people who know you, who can say, “Wait a minute. Why are you posting this on Facebook about you haven’t been to church since the first Bush administration?” That’s only possible with technology like we have now. But the other part of it is that what we end up with is there’s a political scientist, Daniel Williams, who says what we have ended up with is the worst of both worlds. So you end up with just as much dogmatism and just as much certainty and just as much fundamentalism, if you will, but without connection and community and shared mission. And so we end up with a perfect storm.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, I mean that’s what Shadi and I are working on right now this summer. So we’re developing this book on religion and democracy. One of the things we want to make an argument for is the good of institutional religion, that rather than sort of an individualistic spirituality that you sort of live your truth on your own, with an institutional religion, like if you’re involved in a church, you’re volunteering, you’re leading, you’re debating what to do with the local congregation, you’re learning democratic practices and habits. You’re a part of a community. Sometimes you win the argument as to what the church should do, and sometimes you lose, but you stay within the community. You learn to negotiate and you have a sense of a feeling of belonging. And so you don’t feel lonely or vulnerable or isolated. And when you don’t feel those things, you’re less vulnerable to a charismatic politician because you have a sense of belonging and you know how to compromise and you grow in wisdom.
Shadi Hamid:
Well, this question of what makes someone vulnerable to a demagogue or a charismatic figure I think is a really interesting one. It is worth noting that in the Republican primary 2015 and 2016, initially, evangelicals were quite sceptical of Donald Trump. There was actually a survey of about a hundred evangelical pastors about who their first choice was in the Republican Primary, and not a single one said their first choice was Donald Trump. This is earlier on in the Primary. And over time that would begin to change obviously, and more people would become Trump curious.
But that leads to, I think, another sort of puzzle, if you will, which is, if we’re talking about people who have a personal relationship to Christ, presumably that would mean they would have defences against excessive partisanship or a falling under this sway of a charismatic leader. But very quickly, we saw some of those defences fall to the wayside. And it’s not just lay evangelicals, if you will, but also evangelical leaders who are presumably more theologically trained and you would think would be able to resist more easily. That didn’t happen.
I’m curious if you just say a little bit about through your own experiences among evangelicals, what you saw happening. Because in some ways it was a gradual shift, but in other ways it was quite sudden. I mean, we aren’t talking about a long period of time where we see this shift. And I’m also thinking too of Tim Alberta’s book on, I think The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, where he talks about his father, an evangelical pastor, who from 2016 to 2020, he started to notice that members of his church would come to him increasingly with political questions. They weren’t coming to him with questions about theology, salvation, the Bible, the nature of Christ. They were asking him, “What are your positions on these hot topics? Do you agree with Trump or do you not?” And it seems to me that a lot of evangelical churches became consumed by those political questions, and again, which raises this sort of puzzle of how did that come to be.
Russell Moore:
Well, in the broadest sense, that’s not really surprising. I think what all of us want to do is to find a one particular experience, ideology, system, institution, or something that will inoculate people from any of these sorts of personal or social disorders. Christianity, above all idea systems, has never claimed that that would be the case. Most of the New Testament epistles writing to people and saying, “Stop conforming to the outside world and be renewed. Remember who you are in Christ,” that’s a perpetual sort of problem.
Then you add to that, look at a similar sort of problem happening in a completely secular arena with the strength of the political parties themselves. I remember in 2015, 2016, I would be talking to Republican elected officials and leaders and saying, “This Trump thing is really moving along. What are your…” And they sort of would wave that away and say, “Ah, at the end of the day, the Republican Party still Republican. You’re not going to have this happen.” But none of them were able to say to me, “Okay, this is what is going to happen that will prevent that.” They were simply basing that off of previous strength of those party systems no longer exists right now in this sort of institutional reality.
That’s even more true when you’re talking about evangelical Christianity in the United States because it is a populist movement in good ways and bad from the very beginning. And so the leaders of evangelicalism are not Tammany Hall bosses who are able to move their constituencies and give politicians this set of votes or the other. I mean, the illusion is that that’s the case. So that for some, Jerry Falwell was able to come in and convince people, “Okay, I’m bringing my people along to Ronald Reagan instead of Jimmy Carter.” It’s not because of Jerry Falwell’s power. It’s because you had people who were moving to Ronald Reagan instead of Jimmy Carter. And Jerry Falwell channeled that and explained that to the outside world.
So what happened in 2015, 2016 is, yes, you’re right. You had most evangelical leaders who were not supportive of Trump. At the time, I said, talking about the leaders, I said you basically have the sort of Billy Graham evangelicals are for Rubio or Bush or someone along those lines. Your Jerry Falwell sorts of evangelicals are solidly behind Ted Cruz. And your Jimmy Swaggart evangelicals are solidly behind Donald Trump. Meaning if you look at who were the religious leaders supporting Donald Trump early on from day one, they tended to be Pentecostal or Pentecostal adjacent figures who weren’t the people that most politicians wanted to have with them on a platform. So you would have evangelical leaders who would say, “Ah, Trump has the island of misfit toys.” That was a common phrase that was taking place. But what mattered was where were the people, and that was being defined less religiously than it was politically. And so the leaders then adjusted themselves to the crowds.
That was one of the reasons why I was saying in 2015, 2016, when so many evangelicals are saying, “Well, I don’t really like what’s happening with Trump with the misogyny and all of these things, but we’ll just say we’re going to be for the people he will appoint rather than for him.” And when I said at the time is, that’s just not the way things work in American life right now. And it didn’t. So many of these people who said, “We’re going to call him out when he does things wrong and we’re going to support him when he does things right,” there was almost no one with any sort of platform who was willing to say, “Well, we like Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court. We can’t stand what you’re doing with the way that you’re demonizing people.” I mean, nobody was doing that. Instead, it became a wholehearted sort of movement and mission as is that that’s the way American life is right now, and we were not immune to it at all.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So as we think about, you’ve been a leading scholar, teacher, writer within Evangelicalism for many, many years. And I’m curious, thinking back to 20 years ago, if you could rewrite some of those books knowing what you know about what was coming, do you have maybe regrets? Or if you could go back and shape the evangelical political imagination differently in say 2004, so 20 years, 20 years back, and as a seminary professor, training pastors, getting them ready, imagine you had 10 to 20 years to prepare them for 2016, what sorts of things within the evangelical political imagination would you want to deepen, to transform, to create a sort of sturdier evangelical political imagination that could handle a 2016 better?
Russell Moore:
Well, I mean, if we’re talking about the evangelical political imagination, of course, if there were a magic wand that could change that, I would change that. And the same thing would be the truth with the American political imagination in recent years. When it comes to, for instance, my books, I wouldn’t change almost anything there because in many ways I go back and read my books and I think whatever part of me was writing those books was maybe more aware than my conscious mind was of what was happening.
Tempted and Tried, for instance, in 2010, is talking about the third temptation of Christ and politicization, and particularly reflecting on the Glenn Beck restoring honour rally that was using these very secularized Christian terms for starkly political demagogic sorts of purposes. I think that this is something I’ve been concerned about since I lived through it as a 15-year-old and looking at this and saying, “Is this all that Christianity is?’
And that part of it, I think one of the things that I noticed early on was the way that Christian Talk radio served as a metaphor for what was happening across the board, so that you had, for instance, this way of responsiveness to the crowd that was inevitably going to lead to some of these issues.
So you had, for instance, in 2004, if you’re talking about 2004, you had in some ways a similar kind of all-in devotion to George W. Bush, the difference being that George W. Bush was a grownup and wasn’t himself defined by that. And certainly the people in the Bush administration weren’t willing to be defined by that to the same degree that we see now. So a lot of these impulses were already there, they just had the institutional restraints removed. And once those are removed, all kinds of things happen and the ability for people to communicate with one another in a different sort of venue.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. And one thing that has come up a lot in this conversation, but any conversation really about American politics today, is just the fact that everything is overly politicized and we’re all casualties of that. So in that sense, evangelicals aren’t entirely unique. Most of us have been shaped often negatively by our political surroundings.
In your most recent book, Losing Our Religion, which we’ll include a link to in the show notes, you do argue for evangelicals leaning into their strangeness and avoiding making compromises for the sake of politics. So I don’t want to say that’s not really about withdrawing from the world, but there is a sense of separating oneself from the temptations of political life.
And if I can just play devil’s advocate here, if you will, what I’ve heard from Trump supporting evangelicals is it’s a very political argument, and sometimes they’ll embrace it. They’ll say, “Look, we consider abortion to be tantamount to murder. And if tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of soon to be children are being killed with the support of our government and institutions and so forth, then if Trump is the flawed vessel which allows us to prevent the killing, these mass killings in effect, then that is a price that we’re willing to pay.” And they’ll say straight up, “We understand that there’s a trade-off here. We understand that it’s not ideal. But in the world of politics, you have to make compromises. If you want to actually improve things, you do sometimes have to accept otherwise unacceptable things.”
I’m just curious, because I’m sure you’ve been in any number of these types of conversations, part of me thinks that that’s actually… It’s not an argument that I personally find very compelling because I don’t feel the same way about abortion, but if I did, I can imagine being swayed by that.
Russell Moore:
Yeah. Well, then you would be literally playing devil’s advocate because the argument that they’re giving to you is almost directly from the devil’s voice in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. The question is, what are the ultimate goals and what are the ultimate priorities? And so even if you accept the idea that, “Well, Donald Trump agrees with us on abortion,” I do not think that you can long-term deal with a question of abortion, which has to do fundamentally with a view of human dignity, has to do with a particularly Christian view of vulnerability and of the image of God. You cannot do that with a blood and soil nationalism, and an Access Hollywood misogyny cannot sustain it.
And that’s also true if you look at, for instance, the example of Ireland, which for a long time was an outlier in Western Europe when it came to questions of abortion and other family sorts of questions, is no longer and in many ways is the most pro-choice place in Western Europe. Why? What made the difference? Well, Fintan O’Toole’s biography of Ireland, makes a very compelling case as to where that came from. And it was the loss of moral credibility of the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of the sex abuse scandals. Taking an evangelical movement and saying, “Everything that we’ve said previously about personal character is gone because we’re making a compromise when it comes to our political identity.”
And that’s especially true when we have hitched the entire identity of the American evangelical movement, not the global evangelical movement, but the American evangelical movement to this figure that very few of us have any doubt that history will regard as a uniquely morally horrific human being. That’s not, in my view, a good trade.
And we look at, some people would say, “Well, Dobbs decision was decided, and Roe versus Wade is gone.” Right. And I’m glad Roe versus Wade is gone. The abortion rate hasn’t gone down. And that’s especially true when you look at just demographically what’s happening. I fear that we are creating the most resilient pro-choice majority when it comes to abortion that one can possibly imagine because we’ve tied the pro-life movement to this noxious figure. That’s not a good trade, in my view.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, I think that argument’s right on. I have to say that in doing that, you’re undermining the credibility of the argument itself.
Russell Moore:
There were always people who would say, and I was arguing against these people for 20 years, who would say, “Let’s not treat abortion as a legal category. Let’s simply talk about it in terms of changing minds and hearts.” And I say you can’t do that if you do have an understanding of abortion as having to do with two vulnerable human beings and not one, and this really is a social justice movement. Then that means that there has to be a legal recognition of the vulnerability of both women and their unborn children.
But now you have sort of the opposite argument, which isn’t happening. If you look at the grassroots sort of people who are actually doing something about the pro-life movement, women who are working in pregnancy resource centres and other things, they’re the people who really do understand persuasion, care for people, vulnerability. They do understand that you cannot have that and this sort of misogyny and the sort of… I mean, look at the Barstool Sports sexualization of the American right along with the European right. A pro-life movement cannot be sustained in that. It just can’t.
Shadi Hamid:
So we focused on the sins of the right more so. I do want to just dwell a little bit on whether my own side, Democrats, leftive centre folks, bear some responsibility for the difficulties that evangelicals find themselves in. I mean, it wasn’t always the case that evangelicals were overwhelmingly Republican as recently as 1990, 40% of white evangelicals were Democrats. And I think that part of the issue here is that the Democratic Party leaned into a harder line secularism.
Democrats stopped spending as much time trying to appeal to people and communities of faith. They embraced causes that were seen as antithetical to a religious ontology, especially recently with various aspects of wokeness, debates around gender and so forth. And in this context, it seems that many conservative Christians have… They perceive themselves as being under existential attack. Maybe similar to what I said earlier, they will kind of offer up this argument that the normal rules no longer apply because so much is at stake. If America is at risk of being so thoroughly secularized that it can’t come back from that, then desperate times call for desperate measures. But I wonder if Democrats should look back at their own sort of conduct in all of this, and could they have done a better job keeping white evangelicals on side by not falling into this hard line secularism? What would you say to that?
Russell Moore:
Well, absolutely. I mean, if you look at the difference between, for instance, the way that Jimmy Carter in 1976 is communicating with the American people, dealing with the secular world seeing him is odd and strange because of his emphasis on being born again. The difference between that and now where that would be inconceivable on the left, absolutely inconceivable, there’s been a massive cultural change there. And then you add to it the same sort of audience capture that’s happening on the right, just in a different way.
So for instance, when I’m with Republican-elected officials, people are whispering, “You’re completely right about Trump, the guy’s crazy.” Even people who are saying on television the opposite. When I’m with democratic elected officials or other interest group leaders, they’re usually whispering, “This gender stuff is crazy.” But they’re not saying that publicly because they feel like they can’t say that publicly.
And then you add to it, for instance, the Hosanna-Tabor Supreme Court decision, which was 9-0 that religious institutions have a right to choose their own leaders. 9-0, but the solicitor general in the Obama administration is arguing the other way. You see college campus after college campus where secular progressive administrators are driving Christian campus ministries off of their campuses because they expect those leaders of those ministries to be Christian. I mean, that sort of hubris is not… It’s not just morally wrong. I think it is morally wrong, but it’s also completely unsustainable in a pluralistic democratic republic. And there was very little self-reflection on that in a way to say, “Do we really want to see to it that the only people who support national health insurance are the people who think one can force nuns to pay for birth control? [inaudible 00:50:52] only people we want to include in this conversation. I think that was a mistake.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. Yep. And as we just start to close up here, I do want to put a question to you about working within institutions versus working from outside of them. As we mentioned, you left the Southern Baptist Convention. And in some ways, you’re less part of the institutions of Evangelicalism now than you were 10 years ago. And you see some of similar developments-
Russell Moore:
Really?
Shadi Hamid:
I’m sorry.
Russell Moore:
As the editor-in-chief of Billy Graham’s Christianity Today?
Shadi Hamid:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, we should mention you are the editor-in-chief.
Russell Moore:
I do not think I’m outside of the institutions of American evangelical life.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, I mean, but perhaps less so than you used to be. But I also think about other conservative Christian authors who have become anti-Trump like David French for example, who has maybe lost some of his influence with traditional evangelical conservatives.
I mean, there is a risk of the more you speak to a secular audience, and in his case he’s a columnist for the New York Times, obviously that is a more secular progressive leaning audience. There is sometimes a trade-off that the more you leave some institutions and join others, you’re making choices about which audiences you’re trying to appeal to, which audiences you’re able to reach more effectively.
So maybe just thinking about this more broadly because I think it’s something we all debate in our various contexts, and I know Matt, again, not to speak for you, but you’re someone who does speak to different audiences constantly in your work, and you have to sometimes code switch and go back and forth. But the risk is in speaking in a more kind of anti-Trump way to secular audiences that Christian audiences see that and say, “Oh, this person’s moving in that direction. He’s no longer one of us.” There is that risk it seems to me.
Russell Moore:
If that were the consideration, there would be no evangelical movement. We would still be medieval Roman Catholics. That’s in fact what evangelicalism is, and for me as a Baptist, particularly what Baptist life is. Southern Baptist Convention was not established in AD 33. The Baptist movement came about from dissenters within Anglicanism who were saying, “This is not what Christianity is to be.” The Baptist movement in the United States of America started with a dissenter, Roger Williams being kicked out of Puritan colonies. If what Williams had said was, “In order to retain influence with the Puritans, I have to be quiet about what happens with infant baptism and a state church,” all of the country would be New England right now. So I don’t accept that line of argumentation. I think in every successful movement, especially within Christian history, this starts with people saying, “Wait, there is another way to go.” And organically, that then grows up. So I reject the idea that in order to have a healthier evangelicalism, that means that the only evangelicalism the rest of the world should see is completely Trumpified evangelicalism. There should be at least some people who are saying, “There actually is a different stream of evangelicalism that is here.”
And that’s especially true when we’re in a moment like we’re in right now. Billy Graham was by himself in the 1940s. He was not accepted by the National Council of Churches and the mainline establishment, and he was not accepted by the fundamentalist sword of the Lord reaction to modernism. He said, “There’s a different way.” And ultimately new institutions grew and came out of that. And I think the same thing is true right now. We’re at a time of institutional shaking, movement shaking, but it’s not a difference between anti-institutional and pro institutionalists. As a matter of fact, in most evangelical denominations right now, the people who are the most pro institutional are the least involved for all kinds of reasons.
Matthew Kaemingk:
I think we should call ourselves the dissenters, Dr. Moore. It’s a new movement.
Russell Moore:
There’s a perfectly good tradition of that, yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So as we wrap up, final question. We’ve covered some dark topics, and it’s been a little low. I’d love to wrap up just by hearing points of hope that you see within American Evangelicalism or maybe resources, people who are doing good work that give you hope. We’ve also really focused on white American evangelicals. I’d be curious if you see points of Hope within global Evangelicalism that might inform our troubles here in the United States. But yeah, when it comes to the future of evangelical politics, are there things that give you hope?
Russell Moore:
When I was teaching in a really, really secular institution, none of my students were Christians or even religious at all. Tim Keller came along with me one day for class. One of the students said, “Why do you insist on using this word evangelical when it has become so disgraced and politicized?” Tim’s response was to say, “Well, most of us are in Africa and Asia and Latin America, and the North Americans don’t get to just choose what we’re called because we’ve messed up the brand.” And the student said, “Fair enough,” and sat down.
My response was to say the most important thing that he said there was “us.” Evangelicalism is not centred on the United States of America, but is a global movement. There is a lot of health happening in global evangelicalism, not just numerically, but also spiritually. And even in places I really believe that if the regime, when the regime falls in Iran, people are going to be shocked at the numbers of Iranian evangelical Christians that are there and have been proliferating under great persecution.
So there are all kinds of signs of that. You look at 20 something evangelical Christians, I see a marked shift in, for lack of a better word, the sincerity of the sorts of questions that are being asked about basic spiritual formation in ways that I see to be good signs. That said, usually when people say, “Give us hope,” what they mean is give us reassurance. And what they’re asking for, “What are the signs that we can see that can tell us that the future’s going to be better?” I think there are those signs, but we shouldn’t be looking for them because as Jesus said it’s an adulterous generation that seeks after signs. And I find myself wanting to look for those things. But hope, Romans chapter 5, hope that is seen as not hope. In Romans chapter 8, hope, instead, comes out of suffering which builds endurance, and endurance which builds character. Character then leads to hope, and hope does not put to shame. So even if I didn’t see signs of life all over the world, I would still be ultimately hopeful because Jesus is alive.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Amen to that. Dr. Moore. We have really appreciated having you. Thank you so much. And thank you for humouring our tough questions. And we really do appreciate this. We wish you well as you continue to lead Christianity Today. Thank you so much for this great book, Losing Our Religion. We’ll put the link to that book in the show notes, but once again, very grateful, Dr. Moore. Thank you.
Russell Moore:
Well, if you think those were tough questions, you haven’t been to a Baptist business meeting. But it was fun to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Shadi Hamid:
Thank you. Good to see you.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Friends, thank you so much for listening to Zealots at the Gate. If you like what you heard, please leave us a rating. Hey, 5-stars is great, but we’ll take 4.5. Check out this podcast’s intellectualseedbed at comment.org, where you’ll find illuminating essays on politics, culture, and faith you’ll find stuff from Shadi and from me.
We want to hear from you, so connect with us over at Twitter, @shadihamid and @matthewkaemingk. Good luck spelling my last name. We wish you well. Or you can also write to us, send us an email at zealots@comment.org and you can expect a sincere exchange. Our thanks as well to our sponsor, Fuller Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life.
Shadi Hamid:
Zealots at the Gate is hosted by Comment magazine, produced by the great Allie Crummy, audience strategy by Matt Crummy, and editorial direction by Anne Snyder. I’m Shadi Hamid.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And I’m Matthew Kaemingk. We’ll see you next time.
