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Kerry Nolan: This is All Of It. I'm Kerry Nolan, in for Alison Stewart. Theologian Russell Moore was once a senior official in the Southern Baptist Convention. He served as president of its Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the SBC's public policy branch. Then his staunch opposition to Donald Trump set him apart from most white evangelicals. He left the denomination, but not his faith. He writes about it in his new book Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America. Russell Moore, welcome to WNYC.

Russell Moore: Well, thanks for having me. Good to be with you.

Kerry Nolan: Nice to have you here. Russell, I'd like to get a sense of your religious background. Were you raised at Southern Baptist?

Russell Moore: I was. I came from one half of my family was Southern Baptist, the other half was Roman Catholic. My grandfather had served as pastor of the church I grew up in before I was around, but he had served as pastor for many years there.

Kerry Nolan: Those are two giant pillars to grow up between.

Russell Moore: Yes.

Kerry Nolan: What was your relationship with faith as a child?

Russell Moore: I was in church all the time. I often tell people, I'm sure the first sound I ever heard was my mother's heartbeat, but the second would have to be Amazing Grace or some hymn played on the organ because I was there all the time. Came to faith at a very early age and experienced what we would call a call to ministry really early as well. I love and have loved the church all along.

Kerry Nolan: Let's start with some definitions as we move forward here. What beliefs and traditions are we talking about when we talk about evangelism?

Russell Moore: Well, evangelicalism is hard to define because it's a very fuzzy category. For me, I think it's the emphasis in orthodox Christianity, it's more of orthodox Christianity on the personal, on the need for a personal relationship with God through Christ. A sense of the personal nature of biblical authority, Bible is written to you and speaking to you. Those would be the main emphasis. For a lot of people right now though, it's come to mean just another political action committee. Often when people even use the word evangelical, they have to unpack every assumption that's in someone's mind before they can even talk about the actual doctrine.

Kerry Nolan: Do you still identify as evangelical?

Russell Moore: Yes, but I have to define what I mean because there's so much confusion. One of the things that I found really interesting is that the people who will say to me, "I don't like the word evangelical, I don't want to use it," usually are the most committed evangelicals. A lot of people who are adopting the language are people who don't even go to church, but who identify with the political or cultural movement. That's a bad trade in my view.

Kerry Nolan: Listeners, if you consider yourself a member of evangelical Christianity and you want to share your experience with how your church has become perhaps more politicized over the past few years, we want to hear from you. Our number is 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Let us know what you've been feeling about the growing ties between the evangelical movement and the conservative political movement, or how your church has reckoned with the values espoused by Trumpism. Or if you've got family members who are evangelicals, give us a call. Tell us how you've seen the relationship between your loved one's faith and their politics change in recent years.

The number, again, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You can also reach us on our socials. The handle is @AllOfItWNYC. Russell, in your book, you specifically name conservative white evangelicalism and its allegiance to Trumpism as one of the major shifts that caused you to question the role of this movement that you have really given a significant portion of your life over to. What were you seeing and hearing from your colleagues inside the church leadership that made you reconsider?

Russell Moore: Well, many of us had been saying for years that character matters in terms of leadership. It matters in terms of leadership in the church, it matters in leadership in business, and it matters in political leadership. We saw a real shift when it came to how we talked about character and integrity 2015, 2016. That's shown up in the data. You have a huge swing of evangelical Christians who previously would've said personal character and integrity is necessary for public leadership to an almost mirror image of that now. This was an unusual political season in the sense that there's been this close tie between white evangelical Christianity and Republican Party for a long time.

That's not new. What is new is that there was a sense of exile for people who couldn't get on board with Trump or Trumpism. There was a level of of vitriol and of enthusiasm that we really haven't seen, I don't think in our lifetimes. I think that's one reason why a lot of people thought, "Let's just get through the 2016 election or the 2020 election, let's get through COVID," whatever it was. I think a lot of people started to say, "Wait a minute, we're in a perpetual stage of this kind of anger and discontent. It's not just a season."

Kerry Nolan: Why do you think that is?

Russell Moore: I think there are a lot of factors. One of the factors being a breakdown of community, of people actually knowing their neighbors and having what Wendell Berry calls a sense of prepaid forgiveness. I really feel as though I need my neighbors, and so we really can't demonize each other that way. That has broken down, and social media has been an accelerant that it's almost impossible to quantify.

Especially when pastors are talking to me about situations in their churches, often they will say, just because of the age demographic that tends to be involved in that particular part of the controversy, "When I look on Facebook and I see the way people are relating to one another, I think, what have I been doing for the past however many years?" I think that's really had a deleterious effect on us.

Kerry Nolan: Why do you think so many white evangelicals are drawn to Donald Trump and the things he espouses? What is he providing to them that's resonating with them?

Russell Moore: Well, for some of them, they weren't really comfortable with Trump, and some of them still aren't, but they believed we only have a couple of options here, and we have to go with the best one. For a lot of others, though, there is a sense that he's a fighter, that he actually stands up to people who denigrate people with basic religious beliefs. Many people believe that the culture is out to bulldoze them out of the way. That's not an entirely unreasonable assumption. I just think the antidote is the wrong one. As a matter of fact, I think the antidote in this case is an accelerant. I think that what is meant to fight back against secularization is actually fueling it.

Kerry Nolan: That's very interesting. Can you elaborate on that at all?

Russell Moore: Well, I think it's fueling it in a couple of ways. One of the ways being that when you have people who are looking at evangelical Christianity and what they're weighing are not the claims of Jesus or the call to repentance of faith, but whether or not this is a joining of a political movement, especially this kind of political movement, that furthers secularization. It's also because I think that many of us in the evangelical community are not aware of how we have secularized in even the things that many people find attractive about Donald Trump. It's that sense of what previously would've been seen as pagan virtues and not as Christian virtues.

Kerry Nolan: Let's take a call. This one's from Camilla in Bed-Stuy. Camilla, welcome to All Of It.

Camilla: Hi. Thank you for taking my call and thank you so much for featuring the author and this book. Right now, I consider myself a follower of Jesus. I'm from San Diego, California, and grew up in evangelical churches that were primarily what you would call multicultural. For me right now, in my faith, I've had to find a way to reconcile and be interconnected with following the tenets of Jesus as well as a person of color and rejecting the ideology of Donald Trump.

A lot of times what happens, and my experience has been in white evangelical churches, is that it's weaponized, i.e., you're not a Christian if you don't vote for Trump. As someone who's very digital, I found myself having to listen to several pastors, and then work out what's true for me. For me as a believer, what it comes down to is following who Jesus was and His principles, and rejecting really the idea that Donald Trump is this prophetic voice that represents all Christians.

Kerry Nolan: Thank you. Go on.

Russell Moore: There are several things that Camilla said that are very familiar. That sense of using the language of a follower of Jesus, rather than evangelical Christian, that's an easier way to communicate what it is that one is seeking to do. Also, that sense of hurt for many evangelicals of color, as they look at white evangelicals and are saying, "Wait, I thought we were part of the same family and on the same team. How do these things not matter to you?" I hear that quite a bit.

Kerry Nolan: You've spoken out against white supremacy. In a 2017, Washington Post op-ed, you wrote that, "White supremacy is Satanism. Even worse, white supremacy is a devil worship that often pretends that it's speaking for God." The Southern Baptist Convention has done some wrestling with its racist past. They passed a resolution in 1995, committing the denomination to eradicating racism. What do you think happened?

Russell Moore: I think it's a complex picture. I do think there are large sectors of the Southern Baptist Convention and other primarily white evangelical spaces that are African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, and are bringing quite a bit of energy to these conversations. Right now, we're in a place where it's astounding to me the backlash that we've seen in American life, and often in American church life about what are, sometimes you will have people labeling as critical race theory things that are just basic book of Galatians, book of Ephesians, a sense of unity in Christ and bearing one another's burdens. You look at that, along with this rising blood and soil white supremacy and white nationalism, not just in North America, but all over the world, that is a very worrisome development.

Kerry Nolan: Why do you think that is? Why do you think so many evangelical Christians are so openly racist? Where's the comfort being provided to them?

Russell Moore: Well, I don't know that that's particularly evangelical. As a matter of fact, I don't think it is. If you look at what's happening, for instance, in Europe, authoritarian movements always love to use religion because you can have a sense of you can't question me. That's especially true when you tie it not to beliefs or belonging in a universal church, but in national identity or ethnic identity. We are seeing a resurgent paganism, and by that, I don't mean not Christian, I mean literal Thor, Valhalla type paganism in tropes and memes around the world and in the United States as well. There's something about the fallen human condition that wants to prize one's own ancestry or one's own ethnic tribe and to exalt that over and against other people. It's just completely at odds with the Christian gospel.

Kerry Nolan: The book is Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America. We're talking with its author Russell Moore, who's the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. We're going to take a quick break, come back, talk a little more with Russell, and take your phone calls at 212-433-9692. This is All Of It on WNYC.

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This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Kerry Nolan in for Alison Stewart. We're talking with Russell Moore. He's the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, and the author of the new book Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America. We'd love to take your calls at 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. Russel, you write that you've not lost your faith, but you have lost your religion. What's important about that distinction?

Russell Moore: Well, I spent some time thinking about the old REM song Losing My Religion, because this, of course, is what's played anytime there's a story about someone losing his or her faith, and whatever it is. I was struck by the fact that it's not actually about losing faith. It's about a kind of anger in which politeness is about to give over to something else. I'm going to lose my religion, if I have to stand in this line at the DMV one minute longer, or something like that.

That's what I see happening with a lot of people who are concerned about this, not because they don't love the church, and they don't love the gospel, but because they do. That's certainly where I find myself. I take this very seriously because I actually believe that Jesus is raised from the dead and that the Church is the Body of Christ. The misuse of those truths that I believe to be the most beautiful things in the universe are disturbing to me.

Kerry Nolan: Let's take a call. Monica, in Brooklyn, welcome to All Of It.

Monica: Hey, thank you for talking to me. I just want to comment about religion. There's a narrative that politics has taken a larger part in religion and churches, starting with Trump. I went to evangelical and mega churches all throughout the '80s and '90s with my family. I remember clearly politics being a major topic of conversation and a major topic of movement within the church. I was on an anti-abortion float in a parade when I was a child. We would organize and go protest abortion, we would go protest pornography, there was a big movement to go try to get Bush Quayle elected. I've seen this happen my entire life and I left the church when I was 16. For me, it's nothing new.

Kerry Nolan: Okay, thank you so much for your call, Monica. So many issues in today's politics, Russell, are framed as issues of faith, abortion, same-sex marriage, gay, lesbian, and transgender rights. How do you approach that?

Russell Moore: Well, I do think that there's, of course, a big place for people who are coming into public debates and arguments. We're all shaped and formed by something and religious people are often shaped and formed by their principles and their convictions, whether that has to do with debating issues of abortion, or refugee treatment, or so forth. We all come with those questions. That's a very different thing, I think from identifying the faith itself in terms of a political movement, or particularly a partisan personality.

Kerry Nolan: Now, this book is written specifically to speak to people who are part of the evangelical movement. You're not talking about the movement, you're talking to these people. How do you want your fellow believers to approach the ideas in your book?

Russell Moore: Well, what I hear most often from people is, "I feel homeless. I feel as though I don't quite fit anywhere. I'm still a committed believer but I can't get on board with some of these other things." I actually think that's a sign of hope. I think that a certain kind of homelessness is what the Christian church was in the first and second centuries, and really what we should be. I'm usually telling people, "Embrace the disillusionment in the right sense of losing illusions but don't become cynical." That's the primary worry that I have, is that people will become cynical, either by saying, "I can't trust any institution now," or by saying, "Well, this is the way the game is played. Let me play it this way." Either of those directions, they lead to the same place and that's not good.

Kerry Nolan: Let's go to Kevin, who's calling us from Denver. Hi, Kevin. Welcome to All Of It.

Kevin: Hey, thank you for taking my call. Just anecdotally, I have an aunt who was, back in the '60s, I don't think she was even of voting-- No, she wasn't even of voting age.

She was still in high school. She was a Kennedy girl, who wore the buttons, the pins, Kennedy all the way. She was also an Italian Catholic. As soon as Reagan ran for office and was stressing the abortion issue and being anti-abortion, boom, she became a Republican overnight. Switched that drastically from being a staunch liberal Democrat to being an extreme Republican, which she still is to this day, even with Donald Trump. In my opinion, Donald Trump, as far as Christians are concerned, is the golden calf. Moses would have been ousting this guy into the desert. He's the golden calf of the Exodus story. I don't get it. I really don't get it.

Kerry Nolan: Thank you, Kevin. Let's go to Deacon Steven, who's calling us from Newark. Welcome to All Of It.

Deacon Steven: Thank you. I just want to say I'm a big fan of Russell Moore. At a time when many people have lost their faith as well as their religion, he has been a beacon of hope to those of us who feel the same way that he does that religion so often has been used to control which issues believers are meant to care about and which issues they're meant to not care about. Very often our attention has been directed to issues of social order as opposed to social justice.

We've been made to be complicit in injustice in order to fight for the things that we're told are more important. This attitude is very prevalent in a lot of churches. It's something that many of us are trying to resist. I really appreciate Dr. Moore's advocacy and his courage in challenging the Christian world to address those imbalances and that misuse of faith as he put it.

Kerry Nolan: Thank you so much for your call. Russell, since you've written this book, how have your relationships with people changed or have they changed? Do you still have friends in the Southern Baptist Convention?

Russel Moore: Oh yes.

Kerry Nolan: How are they receiving this book?

Russel Moore: I don't think there's any change of relationship there since the writing of the book. There was quite a bit of change of relationship during the events of the Trump era, the sexual abuse crisis, those things. I don't think that's particularly unusual, sadly, in American life right now. I can't think of anybody who doesn't have divided families sometimes or lost friendships as a result of the polarization of this time. It's part of the great tragedy here. On the other hand, I think we also have seen a lot of people who are forming new alliances and friendships and coalitions who previously didn't know that we were really on the same team and have learned that we have a lot more in common than we ever thought.

Kerry Nolan: Has anything surprised you in terms of the reception of the book? Do you find that non-religious people are reading it?

Russel Moore: Yes, I hear a lot from non-religious people who are seeking to understand, often religious people they know and love in how to communicate with them. Usually the response there, it's cheering in one sense, in a time when there's not a lot to cheer about it seems. That people who are saying, "I really do want to connect with someone that I don't understand." That's true in the Christian community as well. I'll often hear from young Christians who are saying, "My parents and I disagree over politics or some issue of culture. I want to connect with them. I really don't want to divide from them. How do I do it?" I think that attitude is a very good first step.

Kerry Nolan: Did writing this book change you?

Russel Moore: It was difficult in one sense to write, to reflect on some of the darker times. It was also invigorating because it really caused me to step back and say, "These are the things that I really truly, after everything, believe.

Kerry Nolan: You do see some hope in this movement moving away from the politicization?

Russel Moore: I see a lot of hope. That has to do largely with the fact that evangelical Christianity, we tend to think of it in terms of American terms or American political terms. Most evangelical Christians are not in North America. Not only are not voting in American elections, don't speak English. That's where the leadership of evangelical Christianity is going into the future. I think that's very helpful.

Kerry Nolan: The book is called Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America. Russell Moore is the author. He's the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. Thank you so much for spending the time with us today. This was really a very interesting conversation.

Russel Moore: Thanks for having me. I enjoyed talking to you.

Kerry Nolan: This is All Of It from WNYC. We want to call attention to you New Jersey listeners. We want to know what are recommendations that you have to enjoy some Jersey summer fun that we need to know about. Maybe it's someplace along the shore or a favorite restaurant or a park, a museum. We're taking your calls. That's next coming up right after the news. I'm Kerry Nolan in for Alison Stewart. This is All Of It on WNYC.

 

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