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Russell Moore’s Evangelical Imaginarium
I posted what follows on my own blog site. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea as it relates primarily to the growing cultural and theological fault lines within American evangelicalism. I’m pretty sure the fracturing that is currently taking place there is not confined to evangelicalism per se, so maybe this will have some interest to a few outside the evangelical sphere.
Dr. Russell Moore gave a talk at a Plough Magazine event. The transcript is posted here. I take exception to Dr. Moore’s remarks. In part because he puts his thumb on the scales in support of progressivism. But, more importantly, he does so in a way that lacks forthrightness and transparency. I’ve seen his kind of movie before, and I find it both oily and uncompelling.
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Dr. Russell Moore would have us all understand that, as a 15-year-old boy, he seriously contemplated suicide. His despair, he says, was driven to a large degree by his childhood perception that evangelicalism was plagued by hypocrisy. You can read about this in the transcript linked to at the top of this post.
Now, I’m in no position to dispute Dr. Moore’s characterization of his early teenaged despair. But I do want to observe that any teenaged boy who is so concerned with the hypocrisy of others that he wants to kill himself is, at once, precociously self-absorbed and shockingly disturbed.
I was a 15-year-old boy once, and one who was serious about his faith to boot. But I had concerns that were rooted rather closer to home than in the random evangelical hypocrisies that appeared in the newspaper from time to time.
I needed work. I needed to save up for car insurance which, if I was going to drive in a few months, I had to pay for myself. I also wanted to play my guitar. And, whenever I could, I spent my Saturdays playing basketball, or tennis, or sometimes even tackle football in the grassy expanse of the median on Brawner Parkway. I can confidently say that neither myself nor my friends were too concerned about the hypocrisies of people we mostly didn’t know. Good heavens, the antics of distant evangelicals were irrelevant to our faith, much less did they carry any implication for the contemplation of suicide. In hindsight, Jane Austen’s character, Miss Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice, best described our own worldview at the time (I paraphrase):
“We were only resolved to act in that manner, which would, in our own opinion, constitute our happiness, without reference to any person so wholly unconnected with ourselves.”
Some of my friends did have concerns closer to home. Not every home was intact. As a group, we were familiar with all of the cultural challenges of 1970’s youth. But what was happening all around us was far more significant to us than anything else. Happily, there was no Internet.
To whatever extent I had any temptation at all towards despair, it tended to be over my own failures and not over the failures of others. But I am prepared to take Dr. Moore at his word, that the failures of others, so obvious to him even now, caused him to despair of life. I have no reason to doubt Dr. Moore’s boyhood struggles just because his alleged reason for them is peculiar.
But whatever the veracity of Dr. Moore’s characterization of his childhood concerns, there is an essential incoherence to his use of them to bolster his current complaint regarding evangelical hypocrisy. On the one hand, he suggests that the hypocrisy of evangelicalism was of such momentous significance that he was tempted to take his own life. But on the other hand, he says he himself had been surrounded by a community of people beautifully modeling their faith. He shares a relevant story of how he came into possession of a copy of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity:
I know that the reason I even went looking for C. S. Lewis is that I had been taught the Bible, in a good, loving church. I had seen genuine love and community and authenticity, week after week in Sunday school and Training Union and worship services and Vacation Bible Schools – I knew that it could exist, and what it would look like when I found it.
So the reader is left with the impression that, though the community of faith around him was beautiful and loving, nevertheless the hypocrisy of perfect strangers nearly drove him to suicide.
Dr. Moore’s childhood crisis is more than slightly relevant to his purpose because he himself bookends the totality of his remarks with reference to his childhood mental state. Dr. Moore’s present thesis is that young evangelicals are losing their faith because the adults in their churches have been hypocritical, most notably by their commitment to this or that conservative political policy. Also by their willingness to vote for morally flawed candidates. Such voting Moore believes stands in hypocritical contrast to the way evangelicals responded to, say, Bill Clinton.
What Moore is engaged in here is the construction of what I’m calling an “evangelical imaginarium”. (Here I borrow from Carl Trueman’s explication of the “social imaginary” in his stunning book.) Moore is painting a picture and telling a story but not really in any way that can actually be substantiated. Making broad-brush characterizations about social phenomenon is a popular thing to do these days, but it is almost always fraught with superstition. The fact is, a person like Russell Moore can offer anecdotal vignettes in support of his belief regarding why young people are leaving “the church”, but reality is almost certainly far more complicated than that.
To be perfectly honest, I think what Dr. Moore is really doing here is less about understanding and more about accusation. There are apparently evangelicals with certain political commitments who have gotten under Moore’s skin, and he has concocted this imaginarium as a way to pin the blame on them for something: the apparent declining engagement of young people with their faith. This is something, of course, which almost everyone considers to be a tragedy. Dr. Moore would like to place the blame on evangelical conservatives.
The narrative Moore has concocted goes like this:
- When I was a kid I wanted to kill myself as a consequence of the threat to my faith prompted in part by the hypocrisy of evangelicals.
- Happily, kids aren’t killing themselves over evangelical hypocrisy today but they’re certainly leaving the church over it.
- These young people are repulsed by what they perceive as their parents’ and grandparents’ conflation of the gospel with “conservative” politics.
- Also, these young people are repulsed by the hypocritical inconsistency of their parents and grandparents, some of whom actually voted for Trump after decrying the sins of Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
- And, by the way, characterizing CRT and “social justice” as having Marxist roots is misguided – these ideas are just reflections of God’s concern for justice and “social responsibility” – and anyone who “labels” them otherwise doesn’t really even believe what they’re saying. (i.e. they’re hypocrites)
(I urge the reader to check my summation of Moore’s narrative by reading for yourself the transcript of his remarks.)
And thus Moore constructs his imaginarium – an intuitional/conceptual model for how to think about the rift within evangelicalism. It’s an imaginarium because it isn’t rooted in anything particularly verifiable. It’s really more of a sentimental narrative supported by anecdotes. He means for the narrative to establish a set of sentiments and axiomatic assumptions in his listener. But the narrative mostly just reflects, I’m afraid, Moore’s own disposition and inclinations, which he has synthesized into an overarching explanation of reality where present evangelical struggles are concerned.
So far, I have taken no position on whether Moore’s imaginarium is accurate or not. I only mean to point out what is actually going on here. Moore is constructing, for his listeners, a mental model for how to think about the perceived rejection of evangelicalism by Gen-z’s and Millennials. The model he proposes is to imagine it as related to their disgust at what they perceive as the hypocrisy of their elders. Moore is sympathetic with the views he attributes to them, and makes that clear by framing his imaginarium in the context of his own similar youthful revulsion at the hypocrisy of others. The emotional heft of his personal teen suicide ideation is put in service to his accusations.
My own reaction to Moore’s argument is that it is a slyly crafted polemic against conservatism in general, and Trump voters in particular.
Why do I say that?
Well, for one thing, he attempts to tar evangelicals who voted for Trump as hypocrites by assuming the moral equivalence of Bill Clinton’s actions as president, and Donald Trump’s actions in the years prior to taking office.
Twenty years ago I watched people suggesting that it was liberal Baptist theology that allowed many to wave away a president’s sexual behavior as irrelevant to his office. Then I lived long enough to watch the same people suggest that those who did not wave away such behavior from another president might not be “real Christians.”
I am no fan of politicians. I strongly incline toward the view of the Psalmist who wrote, “put not your trust in princes”. But it doesn’t take much imagination to perceive that there’s a reasonable argument to be made against the moral equivalence of a sitting president who has sex with an intern in the oval office, and one who came to the presidency with a history of moral failures prior to his assumption of those duties. I’m not defending Trump here. But Moore’s charge of evangelical hypocrisy in this instance rests upon the moral equivalence of Clinton’s oval office antics and Trump’s pre-presidential antics as they related to the question of political support. He is glossing over any possible distinction between someone who abused the powers of his office and someone who, as far as we know, did not. A person doesn’t have to be a Trump fan to observe that maybe one of these things is not like the other.
Moore decries what he sees as the tendency of evangelicals to conflate conservative public policy prescriptions with the gospel itself. But it is not conservatives who have lately been expanding the meaning of the gospel to encompass every trendy interest of the political left. How many times have we heard, these past few years for example, that “social justice is a gospel issue”?
Don’t mistake my point here. I am not saying that conservative evangelicals have never larded up the gospel with other concerns. I am saying that Russell Moore is not being remotely even-handed in his analysis. He is not providing anything like a fair account of the propensity of both sides to steal the valor of the gospel by putting it in service to passing political concerns. The perceived politicization of the gospel, which Moore is so eager to condemn in evangelical conservatives, he ignores in evangelical progressives. Moore assures us that any concerns about the progressive pursuit of race essentialism (i.e. CRT) or collectivism (i.e. social justice) are misplaced. They merely reflect the biblical God of both justification and justice, along with a proper concern for social responsibility. Nothing to see her. Innocent as lambs. Move along.
Moore is putting his thumb firmly on the scales in favor of progressivism, and not really owning up to the fact that he’s doing that. That is what I object to.
I’m afraid the obstacles to standing firm in their faith, being faced by young evangelicals, are far more dire than Russell Moore’s concerns of whether this or that evangelical voted for Donald Trump, or advocated for whatever conservative public policies. These things may exercise Dr. Moore, keen as he seems to be to detect hypocrisy in others, but I fear that he is engaged, metaphorically, in papering the attic while the basement is on fire.
Young evangelicals are being indoctrinated – not by other evangelicals, but by their teachers, social media, their friends and, they’ll soon discover, their employers – that it is unkind and unloving to tell the truth where certain subjects are concerned. They are about to find out that they will be excluded from gainful employment by a growing number of companies if they do not affirm, for example, that women can be men, and men can be women. And if they do not profess their allegiance to the new moral order by openly uttering untruths along these lines, they will find their ability to provide for their families impaired.
Theodore Dalrymple observes that the implications of such compelled lying has a long history in totalitarian societies and carries unhappy consequences for anyone who succumbs:
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed.
To the extent that young evangelicals have been ill-served by the evangelical community, it has been due to the lack of moral and economic imagination which has caused their forbears to fail in guiding them toward alternative approaches to education, and toward the development of essential skills that would have armed them better for these emerging threats to their faith. If nothing changes, the coercion they are going to experience over moral issues in the public square is going to dwarf anything ever experienced by their parents or grandparents. And it will have precisely zero to do with whether some evangelical somewhere once disparaged Bill Clinton and later voted for Donald Trump.
Surely the enemies of the cross of Christ, and the spiritual forces of evil the apostle Paul talked so much about, have at least as much to do with our current struggles as the political concerns of those evangelical Christians whom Russell Moore finds so offensive.
Published in General
Or Moore is lying his ass off.
That’s the most likely explanation. It’s very similar to Phil Vischer’s recent statement on his podcast that it wasn’t until he was an adult that he learned black people could be evangelicals, too. Which I believe is another lie from the pit.
I think your criticism of Moore is spot-on. I’ll only add that when it comes to hypocrisy, Moore is pretty good at it.
2020 Moore: “Voting for Trump is wrong! Voting for Trump makes you a bad Christian! You are destroying your Christian witness by supporting Trump!”
2021 Moore: “Oh, you know, Christians should just abstain from politics . . .”
Progressives are now taking control of huge Christian denominations the way they took control of the universities 50 years ago.
Mr. Moore has only discovered that human beings are flawed. They are flawed whether they believe in God, or if they don’t believe in God. Good luck to him on that search for the perfect human being, he’s going to need it.
The inner lefty in him is crying to get out.
Or , he is wearing self righteousness on his sleeve. If so. I wipe my nose on that sleeve.
I’m not a fan of Phil Vischer. I almost referenced him in my post as being another example of a particularly slippery communicator. I wrote up my impressions of Vischer’s “Race In America” videos here. Both Vischer and Moore are good story tellers, but they put their skills to use by misdirecting, misleading, and accusing. In the most winsome possible way, of course.
Why do guys like this never lament those in their pew’s that voted for Clinton or Biden.
Ray High School? (I was at Carroll.)
Mary Carroll high school, class of 1978
These guys act like discernment is an algorithm that, if properly applied, yields correct results every time. And fails to apply that algorithm elsewhere…
They are also blissfully unaware of the culture these men have been incubating in. Trump at least has the defense of being elected at the height of cultural degradation. Clinton was elected at the beginning of it all.
I’m watching House, MD and you know who is depicted as the moral conscience of the show? The man with a history of cheating repeatedly on his wives, getting divorced, and marrying again quickly.
Clinton’s little bit of Oval Office fun spun off discussions on whether oral sex is really sex. No kidding, that was actually a debate. Trump’s serial monogamy feels so passé in our culture, I don’t know how I could expect more of him.
Trump also may be the first man elected to office who admitted to not knowing God was real. The rest said they were Christian and didn’t act like it. Judging Trump through the church is a direct mishandling of scripture.
Like a Chinese buffet at Reno.
Thanks @henrycastaigne, you just made me spit my coffee all over my laptop screen.
He should have already found him if he is, in fact, a Christian.
Kind of seems like he hasn’t.
In the body of Christ, I often refer to myself as a nose hair; I’ll help.
Sounds positively Anti-Christ.
Then, one day, made a detour after Golf to ask a church to pay for him.
The pastor therein almost got cancelled for saying ‘sure’.
There’s the seeking agnostic – I don’t know if he’s real, but if he is, I hope I know him before I go. So all of you who do know, pray for me that I might believe, too.
Then there’s the passive agnostic – I don’t know and it doesn’t bother me if I ever do know. Its not big on my list of things to worry about.
Then you get to the atheists that aren’t really seeking anything.
Of all the presidents we have ever had, we have had some doozies come up from the Christian church. I think, outside our founders, the most earnest of all of them was Carter, wasn’t it? And he was haphazardly and naively a disaster. Certainly, the last offerings of the left had some obviously questionable connections to Christianity. Obama was a very obvious narcissist (personality, not psychology). Clinton was a womanizing pervert (and they knew it before putting him up for president!). JFK cheated on his wife all of the time (while in office).
All I know is that where these pastors are concerned, I’d stay far away from their churches. They might welcome sinners, but they are welcoming them under the pretense that the sinner has done nothing wrong. If you are feeling convicted of your sin and seeking a savior, find a different church. These guys are poison. They’ll play the Pied Piper and lead you right over a cliff.
And if your sin is being low-bred and offensive to the sophisticated elite, they will find your sin to be unforgiveable.
Worth following: https://twitter.com/WokePreacherTV
Thanks to that Twitter account, I’ve learned all sorts of seemingly benign “celebrity preachers” are spewing out heresy.
Also bookmark: https://protestia.com/
Which I also think is doing a good job highlighting progressivism creeping (or in some cases leaping and bounding) into the church
Now read this: https://protestia.com/2021/07/19/docent-group-a-progressive-left-takeover-of-the-american-pulpit/
I think what bugged me most about anti-Trump evangelicals’ response to Trump was that they seemed to gleefully withhold any possibility of redemption for him. Didn’t matter how well he conducted himself while he was President; the fact that he had sins in his past, and they didn’t personally witness any sort of confession and repentance on his part, they refused to accept the idea that God would forgive the President.
To them, he was irredeemable and his sins unforgiveable — past, present, and probably future — and therefore it was sinful for any Christian to support him with a vote.
And they call us heretics . . .
In Carl Trueman’s recent book (which I link to in my post), he points out the extent to which, for many in western culture, morality has become something far less about truth than about aesthetics. Conservatism, Inc. has conducted themselves with grace and decorum for 60 years. Along comes Trump to the conservative garden party, where he belches loudly after the meal and wipes his nose on the table cloth. After which he points out that the progressives don’t care about their proper manners. What legacy conservatives can’t abide, as much as anything else, is to be called out for their inveterate priggishness. Conservatism, Inc. wants to tut-tut and feel superior to the guy raping his wife; Trump intends to slit the guy’s throat. See, for example, the continuous stream of conservative memes lauding the superior logic and consistency of a conservative worldview. The left is laughing at the right — they don’t care about consistency, they only care about the accumulation of power. Conservatives can feel as superior as they want so long as the left controls all the levers of power.
There was a fascinating Uncommon Knowledge video released yesterday where Victor Davis Hanson and H.R. McMaster discuss Afghanistan. It was a fascinating study in the utter obtuseness of McMaster, who got pretty irate over Hanson pointing out the corruption of our institutions and their mistreatment of, mostly, white working class kids from the middle of the country (they account for over 2X the deaths in Afghanistan compared to their representation in the overall population.) McMaster is so devoted to what the institutions were, that he is unable to see them for what they actually are – especially the military. I suspect this explains a lot of the fracturing we’ve seen, these last few years, along the Trumpian fault line.
I keep thinking that the central themes of the old John Wayne/Jimmy Stewart movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, offer important lessons for our time.
It’s propagandistic for this Russell Moore fellow to announce that young people are leaving your Church while omitting the other side of the story: where are they going instead?
Propagandists will always try to boil multivariate phenomena down to a single simple reason. I guarantee the truth is one thousand times muddier than his pat explanations.
Yes. This exactly.
You forgot the ones who found “god” looking in the mirror. BHO and Mayor Pete come to mind.
Outstanding exchange. Both are more optimistic about our future than I am. Hope they’re right. The Chinese will do their most to thwart our rebirth which, even without them, would be very difficult.
Great post.
I am more of a mind that young people are becoming uninterested in the truth of the Gospel because it tells us homosexuality is a sin and rejects other precepts of the woke agenda as sinful as well. They would have to pay a heavy social price to be in Christ. Yes we are all sinners and idolaters, but we still must call sin as sin and we certainly can’t have Christian leaders who engage in or promote sin. The younger folk are not willing to bear the cross of going against the culture. It would appear Russell Moore has problems with it as well.
I’m an outsider to this but I would say you’re right. Moore is being disingenuous. What 15 year old boy isn’t critical of hypocrisy across all of society. Reminds me of the J.D. Salinger novel, The Catcher in the Rye. For a grown man to point to this to substantiate his argument is really weak. He’s one one of those that is in search for a reason to criticize his church. It’s actually everywhere.
Don’t sell the young people short. Pray for them and exercise some optimism on this front.
Oh, I certainly do. This has just been my observation, and it doesn’t apply just to young people. The spirit of the age is something we all must struggle against. It will be more and more costly to be in Christ going forward and only those with the deepest faith will endure. Christians are now viewed as racist, misogynist, homophobic, etc. and this will only intensify unless we are given either a great awakening or a new earth! I pray for them, but I can’t see a reason for optimism barring one of these two solutions.
The church thrives in persecution.
Certainly he was the most self-righteous.
Absolutely.
Along this topic, I would recommend that believers watch The Chosen. Love it. If you could only watch 1 episode, choose season 1 episode 8 – the Woman at the Well.
The argument starts around minute 27.