Consider This from NPR - Former Baptist Leader Sees A Crisis Of Faith In America — But Also A Way Forward

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

For years, Russell Moore was one of the top officials in the Southern Baptist Convention. But after he criticized Donald Trump, Moore found himself ostracized from many other Evangelical leaders who embraced Trump and Trumpism.Moore eventually resigned from his post, and found himself on the outside of a denomination that had, up until that point, defined his life.Today, Moore argues that Christianity is in crisis in America, and he explores a way forward for the faith he loves in his book, "Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call For Evangelical America."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. In times of crisis, people of faith may turn to prayer or to their church. But what if religious faith itself is in crisis and in need of a boost? What if Jesus Christ needs a marketing campaign? A rebel took to the streets. He recruited others to join him.

They roamed the hood and challenged authority. Community leaders feared them. Religious leaders abhorred them. We have to get them off the streets, they said. But they weren't part of a gang spreading hate and terror. They were spreading love. That's an ad for the multi-million dollar He Gets Us campaign, he being Jesus.

The campaign was created by a Christian foundation based in Kansas and backed financially by David Green, the CEO of craft chain Hobby Lobby and a heavy funder of evangelical Christian causes. And the aim of those ads? It was to reconnect Americans with Christianity. Because in recent years, it seems millions of people in this country have lost that connection. Jason DeRose reports on religion for NPR. Just 16% of Americans say religion is the most important thing in their lives, according to the PRRI study. The PRRI is the Public Religion Research Institute, which back in May pulled more than 6,600 adults from all 50 states.

Another interesting finding is that religious Americans are on the move. Nearly a quarter of respondents say they previously followed a different faith tradition than the one they practice now, mostly leaving Christianity or religion altogether. The poll's findings show a nationwide crisis of faith in America. And it's not just people moving away from religion, it's big shifts within religions themselves that have led many people of faith questioning how they fit inside a church they've been members of for decades. That's especially true within the American Evangelical Church. I also felt a sense of suffocation from being in an environment where everyone thought the same thing and sang to the same chord structure. That's John Ward, a senior correspondent for Yahoo News,

who recently wrote a memoir called Testimony, inside the evangelical movement that failed a generation. Today, the white evangelical movement in the U.S. is associated as much with politics as it is with God. A majority of white evangelicals support former President Donald Trump, for example, according to the Pew Research Center. And where does that leave people who may be turned off by that association? Consider this. What's the way forward for one of the most influential denominations in American religion? I talked about that with Russell Moore, a

former Baptist National Convention leader and current editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. My personal faith has become stronger. Where he finds that strength, coming up. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Friday, August 4th. It's Consider This from NPR. For years, Russell Moore was one of the top officials in the Southern Baptist Convention. Then Donald Trump came on the scene.

Moore criticized him publicly and found himself ostracized from many other evangelical leaders who embraced Trump and Trumpism. Then Moore criticized the Southern Baptist Convention's response to a sexual abuse crisis, as well as what he viewed as increasing tolerance for white nationalism within the church. And suddenly, Moore found himself resigning from his post and on the outside of a denomination that had, up until that point, defined his life. My personal faith has become stronger,

and I know that's surprising to many people given some of the awful things that I've seen. But I've also seen some remarkable signs of life and signs of grace as well. Moore's new book, Losing Our Religion, An Alter Call for Evangelical America, is an attempt at a path forward for the religion he loves. We recently sat down to talk about it. This is a book about a religion in crisis, and a lot of that crisis seems to be the culture wars and politics engulfing religion. And to that point, one of the sentences in your book that really struck me the most was, when a church decides Jesus may be going liberal, we are really entering a new era.

What did you mean by that? Well, it was the result of having multiple pastors tell me essentially the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount parenthetically in their preaching, turn the other cheek, to have someone come up after and say, where did you get those liberal talking points? And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ, the response would not be, I apologize. The response would be, yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak. And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis.

I mean, how do you even begin to fix that problem, though, when the central message of the gospel is something that a lot of people in the church do not seem to want to fully embrace? I don't think we fix it by fighting a war for the soul of evangelicalism. I really don't think we can fix it at the movement level. That's one of the reasons why when I'm talking to Christians who are concerned about this, my counsel is always small and local. I think we have to do something different and show a different way. And I see in history, every time that something renewing and reviving has happened, it's happened that way. It's happened at a small level with people simply refusing to go with the stream of the church culture at the time.

And I think that's where we need to be now. I see a fragmentation happening in American evangelicalism that's alarming to a lot of people. It was alarming to me at the beginning. But now I think that out of that fragmentation may come something really good. We may be seeing that some of our old coalitions and alliances weren't working and that maybe God's putting together something new. How much is politics part of the problem here? Are there big issues that have led to these problems that aren't politics? Because I think the politics and the culture war aspects of it certainly take up the most attention and certainly play out the most in public.

I think that the roots of the political problem really come down to disconnection, loneliness, sense of alienation. Even in churches that are still healthy and functioning, regular churchgoing is not what it was a generation ago, in which the entire structure of the week was defined by the community. And I think there's a great deal of fear that comes from that. And then when you look around at legitimate concerns often that Christians have about the society around them, but when that's packaged in terms of existential threat, which I don't think is unique to the church right now. I think that almost every sector of American life is seeing this with what Amanda Ripley calls conflict entrepreneurs, people who are willing to come in and say,

everything is about to be lost and desperate times call for desperate measures. I really think that's the root of much of it. A lot in this book is about what is going wrong. And I wanted to ask you about somebody that you see as the right direction. And I noticed that you repeatedly throughout the book returned to C.S. Lewis as somebody who has been very important in your own life, very important in personal crises of faith that you faced. And one of the things that you mentioned right away is his welcome and encouraging tone in his writing. What was it about his words that helped you so much? I think what helped me as a 15-year-old,

I was looking around at Bible Belt Christianity and wondering, is this all really just politics or social control or something else, some means to an end? And because I had read the Chronicles of Narnia so many times as a young child, I recognized Lewis's name on the spine of the book and was able to read it. What struck me was the fact that he very clearly wasn't trying to market to me or to mobilize me for anything. He was simply bearing witness to what he had seen and what he knew to be true. And I really think that often in the history of the church, the people who can do that are people who seem to come out of nowhere. Lewis was an atheist literature professor, very antagonistic to Christianity until he became a Christian. We've seen that so often. So I often tell people when they ask, well, who's the next Billy Graham? The next Billy Graham

may not even be a Christian yet and might, as a matter of fact, be a person very hostile to Christianity. We've seen that before. I'm Catholic and I have found actually myself kind of struggling at times to explain religion to my kid. And we spent a lot of time reading the Narnia books in recent years and the passage of Lucy following Aslan when nobody else can see him and having to believe that he's there and be sure of herself when everyone's doubting her at this moment of like, actually, this is the best explanation of faith for a kid that I have come across. Yes. And if you think of what Lewis said that he was attempting to do, which is to get past the watchful dragons, as he put it, the way that we tend to guard ourselves against those more ultimate questions. And we can

cast them in ultra-familiar terms where we don't pay attention to them. The Narnia stories, we're able to sneak past all of that. And it does picture exactly what the scripture says faith is to be, which is a, it's not a roadmap. We don't see the roadmap in front of us. We're simply walking one step at a time into the future. You refer to your personal situation as almost accidental exile at points in the book. Are you glad that happened? Yeah. I am not someone who thinks of myself as a dissenter, and I don't like the role of dissenter. I like belonging. I love my community. And so it's a very unnatural sense of exile for me. But one of the things I've noticed is that since I've gone through that, I've talked to thousands of people who have experienced a very similar thing. They feel

homeless. They feel as though there's not one particular niche into which they fit in all of these warring tribes in American life right now. And again, I think that can be a good thing, that it can free us from some of these totalizing cultural identities that we see in American life right now. That's not just an evangelical problem though, right? I feel like cultural tribalism and political us versus them over everything else is a defining part of American life right now. Do you think, and there's a lot to talk about when it comes to that, but do you think there is any hope for the changes you want to see in the evangelical church if this all or nothing political cultural warfare moment continues across the country beyond its community?

Well, I don't think the all-or-nothing cultural warfare is sustainable. I think a lot of people agree with you on that, and yet here we are. Yeah, we are here, but I really do think that it's not sustainable in terms of – there's a passage in the scripture that says, beware if you bite and scratch at one another that you do not devour one another. And I think in American life right now, we're starting to realize we're devouring one another. And it's not healthy for any of us. I don't think it's sustainable long-term. The question is, is it replaced by a sense of resignation and apathy, or is it replaced by something constructive and beautiful? That's, I think, the real question right now.

And yeah, you're right. Almost every part of American life is tribalized and factionalized, but it shouldn't be that way in the church. The very existence of the church is to mean a group of people who are reconciled to God and to each other. And from the very beginning was standing apart from those sorts of factions. And so I think if we're going to get past the blood and soil sorts of nationalism or all of the other kinds of totalizing cultural identities, it's going to require rethinking what the church is. And I don't think that's something new. I think it's very old. I think it's recovering a first century understanding of what it means to be the church.

Russell Moore, his new book is Losing Our Religion, an altar call for evangelical America. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. IU makes bold investments in the future of bioscience and cybersecurity, cultivates visionary work in the arts and humanities, and prepares students to become global citizens by teaching more languages than any other university

in the country. Indiana University. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org.