Original (Archive)
Imagine being the lone evangelical preacher who saw Donald Trump for what he was: the complete betrayal of everything the church had taught. A moral reprobate who didn’t even pretend to go to church, misquoted scripture, slept with porn stars while his wife was at home with a baby, bragged about sexually assaulting women, never donated to charity but used charity funds to commission full-size paintings of himself, and never once apologized or showed remorse for any of this.
How do you square that away with your religious beliefs? Russell Moore, a top official at the Southern Baptist Convention, couldn’t abide. His church’s embrace of Trump, white nationalism, and a sexual abuse coverup led to fierce words, and he was subsequently drummed out of his leadership post at the SBC. Now he has nothing but harsh words for his former colleagues from his perch as editor-in-chief of Christianity Today magazine. Among the harshest? The realization that his own congregants now consider Jesus too liberal.
Moore was the subject of NPR’s “Main Character of the Day” podcast, and there are some truly salient points.
We liberals have long argued that Jesus was liberal. It’s amazing that upon coming to that same realization, these conservative congregants don’t rethink their hateful ideology to better align with the teachings of their god. Instead, they declare the teachings of Jesus as “liberal talking points,” call him “weak,” and then cast him aside as anachronistic.
Of course, there’s always a Southern preacher willing to take these souls and give them a hateful, vengeful, conservative version of Jesus, one that skips over the Sermon on the Mount.
That’s why Moore has clearly surrendered trying to win back the soul of his old denomination. They’re gone. He talks about working “small and local,” which as a liberal atheist I’d translate to “join the local Episcopalians or Unitarians.” Not every church is hateful and bigoted.
This was also interesting:
This issue is so much bigger than church attendance. Social media, suburbia and its fences, cars, television, gentrification, mass mobility and migration, and almost every other technological and sociological advancement of the last 100 years have served to disconnect people from their communities. COVID didn’t help. For some people, that is a godsend (no pun intended). I was happy to ditch attendance at Catholic mass for the internet, and I found (and founded) a community there. But I’ve learned that introverts like me are the exception, not the rule.
My son and I, both deep introverts, thrived during the pandemic. It almost broke my incredibly social daughter. Connection is important to most, and it’s true that church was historically connective tissue for communities, but it’s been a long time since that was the case.
COVID certainly did a number on a great many churches. Once people got used to “attending” service via Zoom, why bother showing up in person? Yet it was that person-to-person connection that brought real value to those gatherings.
But that person-to-person connection has also been utterly mangled by our polarized political environment, and that’s where Moore focuses a great deal of his attention. He argues that "almost every part of American life is tribalized and factionalized," and that includes the church. And while there is an audience for a church that worships Trump as a false idol, it also cuts out a percentage of the congregation who see through the charade. Even in deeply red rural communities, 10%-20% of residents are Democrats. Not a lot of businesses can survive the loss of up to a fifth of their customers, and churches are no different.
According to the Annual Church Profile, the Southern Baptist congregation is down significantly since its heyday in 2006, from 16.3 million to 13.2 million, a drop of around 25%. Factor in the overall population growth, and the decline is even more stark. Half a million of that loss was in 2022, and 1.5 million since 2018. Moore argues that political polarization is part of that story. Another part is the loss of young evangelicals on issues like LGBTQ+ and climate change issues.
But in the end, it all comes down to that one congregant who thought the Sermon on the Mount was “liberal talking points.” There’s a church that would work to educate that radicalized individual and bring him back to Jesus’ actual teachings in the Bible. And there’s a church that has thrown out its entire moral high ground to embrace Trump’s gospel of selfishness and bigotry.
The Southern Baptist Convention, unfortunately, chose the latter. And if they hadn’t, well, someone else would have done so anyway.
Imagine being the lone evangelical preacher who saw Donald Trump for what he was: the complete betrayal of everything the church had taught. A moral reprobate who didn’t even pretend to go to church, misquoted scripture, slept with porn stars while his wife was at home with a baby, bragged about sexually assaulting women, never donated to charity but used charity funds to commission full-size paintings of himself, and never once apologized or showed remorse for any of this.
How do you square that away with your religious beliefs? Russell Moore, a top official at the Southern Baptist Convention, couldn’t abide. His church’s embrace of Trump, white nationalism, and a sexual abuse coverup led to fierce words, and he was subsequently drummed out of his leadership post at the SBC. Now he has nothing but harsh words for his former colleagues from his perch as editor-in-chief of Christianity Today magazine. Among the harshest? The realization that his own congregants now consider Jesus too liberal.
Moore was the subject of NPR’s “Main Character of the Day” podcast, and there are some truly salient points.
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" — [and] to have someone come up after to 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.
We liberals have long argued that Jesus was liberal. It’s amazing that upon coming to that same realization, these conservative congregants don’t rethink their hateful ideology to better align with the teachings of their god. Instead, they declare the teachings of Jesus as “liberal talking points,” call him “weak,” and then cast him aside as anachronistic.
Of course, there’s always a Southern preacher willing to take these souls and give them a hateful, vengeful, conservative version of Jesus, one that skips over the Sermon on the Mount.
That’s why Moore has clearly surrendered trying to win back the soul of his old denomination. They’re gone. He talks about working “small and local,” which as a liberal atheist I’d translate to “join the local Episcopalians or Unitarians.” Not every church is hateful and bigoted.
This was also interesting:
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.
This issue is so much bigger than church attendance. Social media, suburbia and its fences, cars, television, gentrification, mass mobility and migration, and almost every other technological and sociological advancement of the last 100 years have served to disconnect people from their communities. COVID didn’t help. For some people, that is a godsend (no pun intended). I was happy to ditch attendance at Catholic mass for the internet, and I found (and founded) a community there. But I’ve learned that introverts like me are the exception, not the rule.
My son and I, both deep introverts, thrived during the pandemic. It almost broke my incredibly social daughter. Connection is important to most, and it’s true that church was historically connective tissue for communities, but it’s been a long time since that was the case.
COVID certainly did a number on a great many churches. Once people got used to “attending” service via Zoom, why bother showing up in person? Yet it was that person-to-person connection that brought real value to those gatherings.
But that person-to-person connection has also been utterly mangled by our polarized political environment, and that’s where Moore focuses a great deal of his attention. He argues that "almost every part of American life is tribalized and factionalized," and that includes the church. And while there is an audience for a church that worships Trump as a false idol, it also cuts out a percentage of the congregation who see through the charade. Even in deeply red rural communities, 10%-20% of residents are Democrats. Not a lot of businesses can survive the loss of up to a fifth of their customers, and churches are no different.
According to the Annual Church Profile, the Southern Baptist congregation is down significantly since its heyday in 2006, from 16.3 million to 13.2 million, a drop of around 25%. Factor in the overall population growth, and the decline is even more stark. Half a million of that loss was in 2022, and 1.5 million since 2018. Moore argues that political polarization is part of that story. Another part is the loss of young evangelicals on issues like LGBTQ+ and climate change issues.
But in the end, it all comes down to that one congregant who thought the Sermon on the Mount was “liberal talking points.” There’s a church that would work to educate that radicalized individual and bring him back to Jesus’ actual teachings in the Bible. And there’s a church that has thrown out its entire moral high ground to embrace Trump’s gospel of selfishness and bigotry.
The Southern Baptist Convention, unfortunately, chose the latter. And if they hadn’t, well, someone else would have done so anyway.
