The New Yorker Radio Hour - Russell Moore on Christian Nationalism

Episode Date: November 4, 2022

Russell Moore, a prominent figure in the Southern Baptist Convention, resigned over the church’s response to racism—which Moore considers a sin—and documented sexual abuse allegations. The theologian sits down with David Remnick to reflect on the intersection of Christianity and American politics. “Jesus always refused to have his gospel used as a means to an end,” Moore says. “People who settle for Christianity or any other religion as politics are really making a pitiful deal.” Plus, the contributing writer Eliza Griswold reports on an energized movement of Christian nationalists aiming for statewide power in Pennsylvania. They believe that the authority to rule comes from God, not from a plurality of voters. “This isn’t about injecting Christian values into society,” Griswold notes, “this is about overthrowing secular democracy.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Our contributor, Eliza Griswold, has been reporting from Pennsylvania on the political trends affecting the midterms. There's the Senate race between Mehmet Oz, Dr. Oz, and a lieutenant governor, John Federman, who suffered a stroke this year that's impacted his campaign, particularly after he struggled in a recent debate. But there's also something else going on in Pennsylvania, an energized movement of Christian nationalists aiming for power in state government.

Those nationalists see God, not the will of voters, as the source of authority and government. Our writer Eliza Griswold says the movement is truly significant at the state level where it can put far-right candidates into the legislature. Eliza, this is not your old-school Christian right that we used to talk about,

the era of Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, is it? Not at all, David. This is something really different. This isn't about injecting, you know, Christian values into society. This is about overthrowing secular democracy. In what sense? In the sense that what we see is people who believe that a God-ordained government requires that they take over the institutions of democracy. It's actually kind of thinking called dominionism that's growing very popular in some circles in Christianity. So how is that influencing the races in Pennsylvania?

Well, let me take you back to an event that happened in early July. Any free men and women in the house? This took place in the rotunda of the state capital building, which is a beautiful building that nobody ever goes to in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. What a great day. Thank you. And Doug Mastriano, who is the Republican candidate for governor, he was a headliner to this. And what did he have to say? What were the ideas that he was espousing? So this is a press conference that marked in Pennsylvania the Charter Day, which nominally it's a day that recognizes the anniversary of King Charles II, granting William Penn the land, essentially, that is now Pennsylvania, which he did in 1681.

Now, William Penn did that. He came to America because he needed religious freedom. And that's the idea, really, that Mastriano is seized on. The William Penn had a dream given to him by God of a place that we know later on as Pennsylvania where men and women can live as AC fit and not as any king or magistrate or governor's sovereign. Mastriano and many other members of the Christian nationalist movement, use William. Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, as a kind of model and precursor for their imagined recapturing of history.

Having suffered so much for his faith in being castigated for being a Christian and condemned in the media and judged by those people who think they're so self-righteous and better than others that they can stand in judgment of other people. What Maastriano means is freedom is freedom for a tiny minority. He doesn't mean when he talks about persecution or persecution by the media or, or persecution by the media or religious freedom. He isn't talking about diverse freedoms. He's talking about freedom for Christians like him. Now, Eliza, my understanding of the politics of the midterm elections revolves around inflation, around basic economic issues, around crime, around whether you like Joe Biden or not,

or whether you think he's too old to be president, and all kinds of what's usually called kitchen table issues. This is something quite different. Is it really an animating part of the governor's race in Pennsylvania? It is an animating factor because it fuels, in Pennsylvania, what's happened, as has happened elsewhere, is that it fuels the idea of basically stop this deal. The idea that God gave this Christian nation also gives people the obligation to overthrow what they say is illegitimate governments. And that's really how these two movements have fused between Christian nationalists who claim the moral authority of God and election deniers who are looking for a base who will support them in their claims that 2020 was fraudulent and we have to

massively change voting for the future. Another person who spoke at that event along those lines is a woman named Abby a Buildness. Can you tell us who she is? So Abby a Buildness calls herself an apostle in this movement to literally capture state legislatures and bring America back to an imagined past when it was a Christian nation. She has risen to prominence as a leader of these Jericho marches, which really sprang up in the wake and got powerful in the wake of the 2020 election and in many ways became a precursor to what we saw on January 6th. Okay, we're at the middle of the Jericho march going around.

We just did the first two times around. The idea at the core of them is that the state capital, the secular government, the seat of secular government is evil, as evil as the city of Jericho was in the Bible. And these guys are calling on God to knock down the seat of secular government so that they can, inspired by God, come in and take it. it over by walking seven times around the Capitol. And you will see me bring it down. God will bring it down.

But Pennsylvania really is pleading from our founder. Abby Abilness really brings together a lot of these different elements, right? Because on one hand, she is, you know, an apostle in this movement we've been talking about. On the other, she helps lead the biblical prayer caucus in Pennsylvania. These prayer caucuses are across the country. They are the way that over the past decade, we have seen the far right take over state legislatures by infusing these different kinds of biblical bills like, well, gay people can't adopt children, right? Constitutional bans on abortion. That's really associated with this group.

And it's growing and it's powerful. And it is a way that the old school Christian right has become something very new and full. far more muscular. You know, we hear the term Christian nationalist all the time. And as someone who's been reporting on this movement, tell me what the term means to you and also how many people identify truly as Christian nationalists in this country? So what the term means anybody, most of the people who espoused these ideas, most of the people who believe in these ideas don't like that term at all. They reject it as like a liberal construct. Mostriano asked me, is this a term you fabricated? So how it's different from the old school Christian right is this idea

that Christians, of course America's a Christian nation. Now that's something, according to a recent study, 45% of Americans believe, which is alarming enough, right? But then you take that idea, it's not just that America is a Christian nation. Christians are duty bound to take over the instruments of government and society. And that really is different. Now, how popular is it? That's a harder question to answer. The truth is a lot of this is rooted in Pentecostalism. Speaking in tongues, this is the fastest growing religion in the world, right? It's highly decentralized. It doesn't have numbers attached. And people claim their own authority, right? These people are prophets and apostles who say that God has told them to do certain things. And that is really new. And that is pretty concerning. help asking the decisive race in this these midterm elections may be the Senate race in the state of Pennsylvania some months ago we would have thought that Mehmed Oz just didn't have a chance I mean he was being described quite roundly in Pennsylvania as somebody who doesn't live in the

state as someone who is improvising all the time in terms of policy and the worst possible sense and just somebody destined to lose, Fetterman, but then things changed. He had a stroke, and the recovery process has been very complicated, and that culminated in what I have to think was a problematic at best and possibly disastrous debate with Oz. So where is that race now? Good question. So that race is too close to call, and will be for some time. John Fetterman, who is six, eight, right? Like, in shorts, in snow, like, he's a burly Democrat, right? Which we may see as the future of the party. Like, maybe that's helpful when we talk about, like, left populism, right? There is something very human about his hesitations now, which I, myself, experienced with him

when I interviewed him, which we had to do with closed captioning, right? Like, he couldn't do that in person. And we make all kinds of allowances for people. So just to say that. But at the same time, the people who he's going for, the disaffected white working class who went for Trump and peeling them off the Republican Party, which is one of the places he's been so successful, these are not a lot of guys who are looking for empathy and talk about ableism, you know? So the question is, can he hold them if he doesn't look competent? What has been the course of the numbers in the last couple of months? The margin has just gone down and down, right?

He was leading with a super comfortable margin. Oz exactly looked like a joke, especially. And Federman was so good with that. Like, you would drive around, you'd see signs. On lawns, you'd see signs for Federman and Mostriano, right? Those days are behind us. And it's hard to know, is that because of his health? Is that because race is always tightened, right?

It's unclear. And Republicans, I've talked to several this week, who are actually gleeful, you know, and also feel generous enough to say, well, I hope the guy's okay. But you can see that they think they scored a major point, and we'll have to see how that plays out. Eliza, thank you so much. David, thank you. You can read Eliza Griswalt's reporting on the Pennsylvania election campaign and much more at New Yorker.com. In a moment, we'll look more deeply at Christian nationalism with the theologian Russell Moore.

That's all ahead today on the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Russell Moore is a leading thinker in the evangelical Christian movement. And until recently, he held a key position in the Southern Baptist Convention. But Reverend Moore left the SBC last year after taking a firm stance opposing racism in the church and criticizing its response to sexual abuse allegations. Now, although he's not a progressive or a liberal in our understanding, Moore has repeatedly denounced the politics of Christian nationalism,

which we were speaking about earlier in this program. In one of his recent editorials, he referred to Christian nationalism as liberation theology for white people. Russell Moore is the editor of Christianity Today. Now, I'd like to really begin by asking you about the church that you grew up in in Mississippi, well, Markett Baptist Church. Tell us a little bit about that church that you were raised to. Well, that church was the center of my identity because I was there all the time.

It was the rhythm of the week. It was the rhythm of the year. And it was a really strong community. And I was able to see the best of what you were. Christian community actually can be along with some of the, some of the darker things that I saw as well. And part of that was I had a grandmother who was the widow of my grandfather who had been pastor of the church before I was born. And she would make sure that I was there constantly, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. But we would never go on the first Wednesday of every month, which was congregational business meeting.

And I just assumed you just didn't go to that. And it wasn't until I was grown that I said, well, why did we never go for a business meeting? And she said, well, I didn't want you to see that. I wanted you to, I wanted you to be a Christian. So she protected me from some of the wilder aspects. You mentioned the darker side of things. What do you mean? Well, I had a spiritual crisis as a 15-year-old, not because of my church, but because of the Bible Belt generally, looking around and seeing. some high-profile TV evangelist scandals that were going on. It was more this sense of seeing the way that religion could be used in order to fleece people. Along with persistent

racism, I couldn't understand how Bible Belt Christianity couldn't recognize something that is very explicit throughout the New Testament. And then to see the way that politics was using the religion. And so I started to wonder, is this all just a means to an end? Is this all just politics or just racism or whatever, some form of social control? And then you add to it, of course, there was a great deal of Bible prophecy speculation at the time. For instance, we're right on the brink of the Second Coming, which is similar. in many ways to the things that we're seeing now with QAnon and other conspiracy theories. They're really a secularized version of the worst forms of that.

Why did you pursue a life in the church rather than go in another direction? Well, because I became convinced that Jesus of Nazareth did in fact, was in fact raised from the dead and did establish a church. And the other thing is, being as familiar with the Bible as I was, it was hard to have the kind of idealized picture of the church that could lead to existential disappointment. I mean, so the new test. Did you know that you were, it's a tough bargain. In other words, it seems that you knew that you were headed for a life of opposition and difficulty. I don't know that I knew that. I think my father knew that. My father was a pastor's kid. And when I told him later on that I thought I was being called into ministry, he was not happy. And he said, I'll support you. I'll never bring it up again. And he didn't. But he said, but I wish you wouldn't do it.

Because he thought what was going to happen? Because he had seen his own father, I mean, growing up in a parsonage right next door to a church, he had seen the sorts of, the sorts of backroom politics and those sorts of things up close. And he didn't want to see that happen to me. So evangelical Christians, as we know, have been active in politics for a long time. How have things changed since the era you grew up in with Jerry Falwell Sr. and Pat Robertson, the moral majority and so on. How have things shifted to where we are today? Well, in one sense, if you just think about the language of moral majority, there was a sense in the 1980s and the 1990s that evangelical Christianity, if not theologically, then certainly morally, really represented the country. So things that were going on in the country that were seem to be a decline, moral decline, were being imposed on the country.

It's not where most people were. And so the way that you countered that was by mobilizing regular Americans, real Americans. I think what's happened since then is right now there's a kind of contradictory set of impulses that will retain some of that. We are the real America and elites are the problem, those who are in power culturally, politically in the country. And this sense of being a beleaguered minority. And so there's an existential threat coming. So you put both of those things together. One is the real America that the nation's a Christian nation. Most people are people who agree with you. And yet, you're attacked and marginalized. That then becomes this sense of, it's a unique form of threat that's experienced by some.

You wrote something very interesting. Before you left the Southern Baptist Convention, you wrote an internal memo, which was eventually leaked. You refer to what you called the perennial temptation toward political captivity of the gospel. Yeah. What were you thinking? What does that mean? Well, I think that there are always going to be opportunists or strongmen who are going to want to take religion and use it to make whatever position they have seem transcendent. I think that's as old as Pharaoh with the Egyptian gods. It's what we see now with European blood and soil, ethno-nationalist movements, wanting to use Christianity, which what they mean by Christianity is being French or being German or being Dutch, not being whatever the outsider is deemed to be.

And you see it in the United States of America. We hear a lot about Christian nationalism now. In your view, what is Christian nationalism? And does it bear any resemblance to what we used to call evangelical politics in the period that you were growing up in the 80s and 90s? No, this is a different thing. And that's kind of one of the problems with there are secular people who have really see every engagement by evangelical Christians in the civic arena. as being theocracy and so forth. So they're often not able to tell the difference between that and genuine, genuine theocracy

or genuine Christian nationalism. And what Christian nationalism is, in my view, is the use of Christian doctrines or symbols for the maintenance of an ethnic or a national identity. And that... And it's anti-democratic by nature, isn't it? It's anti-democratic by nature, yes. And racism, I'm afraid, seems to be a deep component of this. You've been very clear in your view that racism is a sin.

It violates your faith. And you feel a duty to fight it. But many in the Southern Baptist Convention, and at many other churches, apparently, don't share your view. Tell me about that. There are very few people who will say, I'm for racism. I'm against racism.

racial harmony, but they're defining it not just personally, they're defining it emotively. And so I'm not for people actively hating each other because of the color of their skin. When you start talking about, though, the actual implications of that, then that becomes often labeled as Marxism or critical race theory or something along those lines. And so there are many of us who would be facing often charges of critical race theory who are as far away from any sort of critical theory as possible. That sin and injustice, it's not just a problem for the people it hurts. It also is a problem for the people who are captive to it. And so standing against racism is, in my view, not only good for the people racist oppress, but for the racists themselves.

This is no way to live. This year, an independent investigation of sexual abuse in the church outlined how leadership refused to address very extensive allegations of sexual abuse. How has this affected Southern Baptist churches? I think there were some of us, and I would be one of them, surprised by how that played out. Because I would have predicted that there would be some apathy. And the kind of apathy I typically would find would be from people who would say, well, that's a horrible thing, but it doesn't happen with us. And that's something that happens in the Roman Catholic Church or somewhere else,

but it can't happen with us, or even the people who would say, well, it could happen somewhere, but it couldn't happen in my church because we know each other and we trust each other. And when the independent third party report came out, and I was expecting, you know, having dealt with this for so long and been stonewalled and everything else with this, I expected that I would be the least surprised person in the world by what the report detailed.

and I was mouth open shocked by how bad it was. Now, Reverend, you've written about how men and women have different roles, different responsibilities in society, and that belief is known as complementarianism. Do you think that these traditional gender roles may have enabled some of the predatory behavior by men in power in the church? I think so. The scripture speaks of men and women,

mostly in terms of how we are the same as human beings. There are references to our differences. But when there's an exaggeration of the distinction, then that can be used in all sorts of twisted ways. And I think that was the case, simply because of how few women were in the room where decisions were being made. So it's a systemic problem that sexual abuse kind of grows out of a systemic

problem is what you're saying. Yeah. It's not just the failing of some targeted individuals. Not just a failing of some individuals. It comes with both this sense of the less than status of women or of the vulnerable. And then you add to it institutional self-protection. And that then becomes a system that's very, very difficult to overcome. Forgive me, but in your case, it makes me wonder why you don't, considering what you've been saying, drift toward a more, for one of a better word, liberal church. Because I'm not a liberal. I actually believe what the Bible teaches. I actually believe the historic Christian faith. I was on a campus, a very secular campus last year, and an atheist student was asking me theological questions.

And at the end of it, said, so wait a minute, you're a real deal Bible-thumping hellfire and brimstone sort of fundamentalist. And I said, yes, I feel very seen. That's exactly what I am. Well, an enormous way today is put by conservatives on culture war issues, gay marriage, medical treatment for trans kids, all kinds of things. And it's said that these are symptoms. of a vast moral crisis brought on by the left. You agree with that? Well, I think that there are things

that are symptoms of a moral crisis. I'm not sure that they're brought on only by the left. I think that moral depravity is not sorted by a political constituency, but is present in every person and all people. So I'm not sure how to assign blame for that. I do think there are things that are moral crises, and I do think that there are ways that Christians and others need to be speaking into those things. But I think that often what happens is that there is a reordering of priorities where the theology becomes the second step from the politics rather than the politics being an implication of the theology. And that's where I think things become very dangerous. And Christianity becomes the tool that you use to get to them,

then it becomes something other than Christianity. Rivermore, I can't help but ask, when you go speak on a secular campus or when you talk with public radio or secular press or the New Yorker magazine or what have you, do you feel like as if you are being, as you said, seen before? I heard properly, understood. I do think that there's a segment of secular America that doesn't understand what it is to be motivated religiously and who then thinks merely in cultural political terms.

I told a journalist one time, you seem to think that evangelicals are just like cicadas that go into dormancy between Iowa caucuses. and it's much more complicated than that. And I think it's sometimes hard for some secular people to see that. And I think it's also hard for some of my own religious people to see how they can secularize in ways that aren't NPR, mimosa drinking Sunday brunches, but can be a very, a very secularized, form of Christian nationalism. And you have to come and say, you've actually secularized.

How would Jesus Christ, in your view, have reacted to American Christian nationalism? I think it would be very dangerous to put words in Jesus's mouth there without actually becoming what I'm trying to oppose here. What I would say is you have Jesus who was, who always refused, used to have his gospel used as a means to an end. Because he had a, in has, a much bigger view of what's important and what the gospel actually is. And so people who settle for Christianity or any other religion as politics are really making a pitiful deal and settling for far too little. More, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Russell Moore is the editor of Christianity today. I'm David Remnick, and this is The New Yorker Radio Hour. One last thing before we go, the actor Jennifer Lewis, was on the show recently, and she had some very good advice that we should all remember this week. Do what the lady says, okay? This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a copay.

production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Breita Green, Callalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Puttaueuele. Along with Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, Jenny Lawton, and Michael May.

And we had assistance from Harrison Keithline, Meher Batia, and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Trurina Endowment Fund.