Tag: Russell Moore

Why do evangelicals like Trump? Because he’s one of us.

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Donald J. Trump the leading choice for president among evangelical voters right now. This isn’t going down well with some of the gatekeepers—and for good reason.

Russell Moore, head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, summed up nicely the problem with Trump:

He’s an unrepentant serial adulterer who has abandoned two wives for other women. He’s someone who has spoken in vulgar and harsh terms about women, as well as in ugly and hateful ways about immigrants and other minorities. I don’t think this is someone who represents the values that evangelicals in this country aspire to.

Moore is right. Yet for now at least, a plurality of evangelicals want just such a man—a serial adulterer who disparages women, immigrants, and minorities—to be their next president.

A lot can change between now and the first primaries. But how did so many evangelicals come to support a man whose values are so very far from theirs?

Maybe it’s because they’re not as far apart as we think.

You see, Donald Trump is a living, breathing, blustering manifestation of our culture’s addiction to outrage.

We live to be outraged, and Christians are no exception. In fact, we’re often the worst offenders.

We’re addicted to outrage because, as Tim Kreider observed, it feels good to be angry. “Somatically it feels a lot like the first rush of an opiate,” he wrote.

Outrage is a means of coping with our fears—rational or otherwise. We’re afraid of those who are different from us. We fear the loss of our cultural dominance. So we turn to outrage because it’s cathartic.

Not surprisingly, rage-filled posts spread more rapidly on social media than any other kind of content. Posts conveying other emotions, such as joy, trail far behind, according to a 2013 study.

Outrage isn’t always bad. It can be a healthy response to real injustice. But like any drug, it can be toxic. We use outrage to dehumanize those we don’t like. Conservatives use it to demonize Muslim refugees; progressives use it to hillbilly-shame Kim Davis.

We use outrage to delineate the boundaries of our tribe—who’s in, who’s out. As one writer put it, our communities are increasingly “defined by an ‘us’ and a reflexive exclusion of ‘them.’ ”

Christians have been doing outrage for years. We’ve spent decades nursing a persecution mindset and a culture-war mentality. We claim to be outraged by all sorts of injustices—some real, some not—but mostly we’re angry and fearful at the loss of our cultural dominance.

So we treat those who are different as enemies… by which I don’t mean we love them like Jesus actually told us to.

We look upon “outsiders” with suspicion, fear, and contempt.

In sermons and in blog posts, we cultivate a siege mentality among the faithful because, as it turns out, making people angry and afraid is a very effective way to build a platform.

But there are consequences.

When you teach people to be outraged all the time, they might end up voting for someone who is the personification of a YouTube comment section.

To those who are shocked and unsettled by Trump’s resonance among evangelicals, what else did you expect?

Donald Trump is exactly the kind of candidate we deserve. He is a reflection of us.

His popularity is an indictment of our addiction to outrage. It’s an indictment of our culture-war mentality.

All these years, when we should have been encouraging Christians to love and serve their neighbors, instead we told them to prepare for battle.

When we should have been opening our doors to let outsiders in, instead we built walls to keep the world out.

Is it any wonder, then, that a man who promises to build an even bigger wall—the self-aggrandizing mogul who preys upon our fear and outrage—is the most popular candidate?

I can’t think of many good things that can come from Trump’s candidacy, no matter how long it lasts. Whether he makes it to the finish line or flames out tomorrow, his presence in the race hasn’t exactly elevated our political discourse, which was already hovering around junior-high-cafeteria levels.

But maybe there is one good thing about Trump’s popularity. Maybe it will prompt us to look in the mirror, to look at ourselves and how we treat others. Maybe seeing all this venom and bile spill from someone else’s lips will cause us to reconsider all the harsh and dehumanizing language that we use.

There is, after all, one thing worse than voting for Donald Trump. And that is being Donald Trump.

But we can renounce our addiction to outrage. We can jump off this train and stop demonizing those we disagree with—or those we just don’t understand. Instead of building bigger walls, we can welcome others into our communities—and maybe learn something from their perspectives and experiences. We can lay down our fear. We can listen to the apostle John for a change and drive out fear with love.

This won’t be easy. As Daniel Kirk recently observed, “The disease [fear] keeps us from the medicine [love].” But we can try all the same.

Love is the antidote to the Donald Trump in each of us.

Photo: Gage Skidmore on Flickr / CC BY 2.0

Why Russell Moore is right: racial injustice IS a gospel issue

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I worry a bit when we start labeling ever divisive matter a “gospel issue.” Surely not everything rises to this threshold. Surely if you play the “gospel” card too many times—if you argue that “the gospel is at stake” in practically every debate—pretty soon the word loses all meaning. It becomes little more than a rhetorical club for stifling debate, for insinuating that anyone who disagrees with you hates the baby Jesus.

Yet sometimes the gospel IS at stake. The other day, Russell Moore when he called racial injustice a “gospel issue.” And I think he was right.

That was the day we learned that Eric Garner’s killer would not face charges. One of the first responses I saw in my Twitter feed came from Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. It was a transcript of a radio show he recorded moments after the news broke.

His comments are well worth reading:

A government that can choke a man to death on video for selling cigarettes is not a government living up to a biblical definition of justice or any recognizable definition of justice.

What we need to do is to have churches that come together and know one another and are knitted together across these racial lines. I have gotten responses [to this]… that are right out of the White Citizen’s Council material from 1964 in my home state of Mississippi… people saying there is no gospel issue involved in racial reconciliation. Are you kidding me? There is nothing that is clearer in the New Testament [than] that the gospel breaks down the dividing walls that we have between one another.

If [this] is not a gospel issue, then I don’t know what is.

Russell Moore spoke not just for his tribe, but for the whole church. He spoke with prophetic urgency as he rightly declared that racial injustice is indeed a gospel issue.

It’s a gospel issue because the gospel Christ proclaimed is about more than just our personal relationship with God. It’s about our relationship with each other—and with all of creation, for that matter.

It’s the renewal of all things, the reconciliation of all things. The gospel destroys the dividing wall of hostility between people. It creates a new humanity; it knits together a new family where divisions based on ethnicity, caste, or gender are rendered not just obsolete but sinful.

This is what it means to be “in Christ.” You cannot embrace Christ without embracing his mission to remake the world, to destroy all the old barriers of sin and oppression and division.

Some theologians use the term “human flourishing” to describe this mission. Which to me is just another way of saying a world where everyone can breathe.

That’s what Christ’s mission is about. That’s why racial injustice is indeed a gospel issue. To swear allegiance to Christ is to commit yourself to this mission, period. To tolerate injustice, oppression, or exclusion—to turn a deaf ear on the cries emanating from marginalized communities—is to embrace an anti-gospel.

You cannot hate your neighbor and love God, as Dr. Moore eloquently reminded listeners in the wake of the Eric Garner non-indictment. And in case you’re thinking, I don’t hate my neighbor, remember this: the Bible equates apathy with hatred.

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Yet if this is true when Eric Garner has the life choked from his body by a prejudiced and unaccountable police force, it is also be true when a gay teenager is bullied into suicide, whatever our understanding of sexual ethics might be. It is also true when women are relegated to second-class status in our homes and churches. What was it Martin Luther King, Jr. said?

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

In other words, we don’t get to choose which marginalized communities we embrace and which we leave out in the cold. We don’t get to choose which “dividing walls of hostility” to tear down and which ones to leave standing.

Either it’s the reconciliation of all things or not.

Russell Moore is right Racial injustice is a gospel issue. But it’s not the only one we should be concerned about.

Photo by Geraint Rowland on Flickr (text added to original) / CC BY-NC 2.0

#ERLC2014 and the pursuit of truth

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Last week’s Southern Baptist conference on homosexuality did not include any pro-gay speakers.

There were some who identified as “ex-gay” or “celibate”—though it should be noted not all of them prefer this terminology. As for “Side A” Christians, Justin Lee was there. Matthew Vines was there. But neither were given stage time.

In some respects, this is not a big deal. The lack of gay-friendly at a Baptist conference on sexuality is about as surprising as a Baptist conference on sexuality. It’s their right to invite the speakers they want. But it reveals something interesting about conversations like these—on both sides:

They’re not always about finding the truth as much as they are an exercise in confirmation bias.

When it’s truth we’re after, we’re called to seek out voices that don’t necessarily align with ours. We shouldn’t just listen to those who regurgitate what we already believe. Conservatives shouldn’t just watch Fox News, and liberals shouldn’t just watch MSNBC. We should gather information from a variety of sources and perspectives. We should listen to all sides. We should guard against an attitude that says, “We already have the truth.” We should remember that all of us get it wrong at least some of the time.

And if we want to understand an issue that affects one group in particular? We should listen to that group.

If you want to know what it’s like to be black in America, listen to black voices.

If you want to know about gender disparity in the workplace, listen to your female colleagues.

If you want to know what it’s like to be a gay person of faith (celibate or otherwise)—if you want to understand what gay Christians experience when they set foot in a church—listen to their voices. Listening does not necessitate agreement, but it does require a posture of humility, a desire to understand.

Of course, this runs both ways. Earlier this year, Patheos hosted an online chat discussing Matthew Vines’ book God and the Gay Christian. They didn’t include anyone representing the traditional perspective. Why not invite someone like Preston Sprinkle, who has shown a willingness to engage in debate without delegitimizing the faith of those he disagrees with? (To be fair, it’s possible some were invited but declined.)

Patheos and the ERLC have every right to invite who they want to their conversations on sexuality. Not every event has to give equal time to contrarian viewpoints.

But we all know this is part of a larger trend in how we consume information that ends up shaping our worldviews.

Most of us listen predominantly (or exclusively) to voices that tell us what we already want to hear—voices that soothe our nagging doubts, voices that whisper away any notion that we might be wrong or might not have all the facts, voices that reassure us we don’t have to go in search of the truth because we already have the truth. We’re so afraid that if we listen to other voices, someone will ask a question we can’t answer. 

Much of the current debate boils down to who we think is on the “right side of history.” My question is, how will  we even know if we’re on the side of history—or the right side of truth—if we never even listen to someone with a different view of it?

Photo credit: Eric Teetsel on Twitter

Not your grandfather’s patriarchy

In addition to arguing that patriarchy is more faithful to the Bible, modern-day complementarians claim the mantle of historic Christian orthodoxy. “What we believe is what the church has always believed,” they argue.

But it’s not.

There’s a big difference between modern-day complementarianism and traditional patriarchy.

Most complementarian marriages today are more or less egalitarian. That is, most husbands rarely (if ever) exert authority over their wives, except maybe when a “tie-breaker” is needed.

For example, earlier this week I partially quoted Tim Keller, a moderate complementarian, speaking about the husband’s headship. Here’s the rest of his quote:

But there can’t be a misuse [of the husband’s authority], where it’s done so ‘I can get my way.’ The only time a husband can use his authority to overrule is… in order to serve and to take care of his wife and his family.

Or take Russell Moore. Even though he doesn’t like the fact that most complementarian marriages are “functionally egalitarian,” he nevertheless warns men against abusing their authority:

[There are people who] think they are complementarian and what they mean by that is ‘Woman, get me my chips.’ Male headship [asks], ‘What is in the best interest of my bride and my children?’

Yet when you start reading the church fathers, what you find is precisely a “Woman, get me my chips” attitude.

And worse, in some cases.

Tertullian (155-235 AD), for example, would’ve had a fit over modern-day complementarianism, because it teaches that both women and men are made in God’s image. Not only did Tertullian reject this; he laid full blame for the fall at the feet of women everywhere:

You are the devil’s gateway. You are the unsealer of that forbidden tree. You are the first deserter of the divine law. You are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man.

Or how about Clement of Alexandria (150-215 AD)? He seemed to think women were only useful for “spinning wool and weaving, and helping with the baking of bread… also fetch[ing] from the pantry the things we need.”

Woman, fetch me my chips!

Perhaps things like… chips?

Or how about Augustine, who apparently felt that women were good for little apart from procreation? (And even that was sinful, as far as Augustine was concerned.)

Or Basil the Great (329-379 AD). His advice to women whose husbands beat them was essentially, “Sit there and take it.” In a homily on 1 Corinthians, he wrote:

However hard, however fierce a husband may be, the wife ought to bear with him, and not wish to find any pretext for breaking the union. He strikes you, but he is your husband… he is henceforth one of your members, and the most precious of all.

Complementarianism claims to be in lockstep with the historic church, but the truth is: they, like their egalitarian brothers and sisters, have dramatically softened the patriarchal worldview of the Bible and the church fathers. The main difference between complementarians and egalitarians is one of degree.

We all find it necessary to adapt parts of our faith and practice to the world in which we live. The question is whether we’re honest about it.

The divinely inspired books and letters that we call Scripture were written to people living in a much different world. Their problems and cultural hang-ups were not our problems and hang-ups (and vice versa). That’s why it’s not always a simple matter of just “doing what the Bible says.”

It’s no use claiming one side is faithful to the whole Bible while the other side “picks and chooses.” We ALL pick and choose.

The real question is, what assumptions, values, and presuppositions drive our choices?

How about “love your neighbor as yourself,” which Paul said was the fulfillment of everything else in the Bible? How about a commitment to the fundamental equality and dignity of every human being — which demands (among other things) the full participation of women in the church?

These values are rooted in the creation narrative, where every single person, male and female, is said to bear God’s image. They’re rooted in the cross — the ultimate expression of love, which leveled the playing field for humanity. They are the foundational values of the church, a renewed community of faith where distinctions like “Jew and Greek,” “slave and free,” or “male and female” are rendered irrelevant.

If we’re going to “pick and choose” — as we all do — then let’s choose the path that best reflects these values.