Nashville
From a corner office on the fifth floor of the Southern Baptist Convention’s headquarters in downtown Nashville, Russell Moore, president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), can look out of his large windows and watch the city’s skyline being remade every day. Like Austin, Texas, and Portland, Ore., before it, Nashville is in the midst of a renaissance. Daniel Patterson, Moore’s chief of staff, says it’s actually become difficult for the SBC to host events in town, because there aren’t enough hotel rooms to keep up with demand.
Nashville’s growth reflects the city’s burgeoning cultural and political significance. Music City has outgrown its strictly country roots to become a dominant force in the music industry. But the city also exerts considerable national influence as a result of SBC’s presence. The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in America as well as a lodestar for a much larger group of believers broadly defined as evangelical Christians. The SBC is arguably the most influential religious institution in America, aside from the Catholic church; Nashville is not quite Rome, but the city’s relationship to evangelicalism has prompted conflict with non-evangelicals.
Last year a number of prominent evangelical leaders, including Moore, Moore’s predecessor Richard Land, current SBC president Stephen Gaines, and theologian Albert Mohler, signed a letter known as the “Nashville Statement.” The statement reaffirmed their commitment to biblical sexual ethics, including implicit and explicit condemnations of premarital sex, pornography, gay marriage, transsexualism, and a bevy of other hot-button social issues. This prompted Nashville’s liberal Democratic mayor, Megan Barry, to publicly denounce the signatories, saying that the “so-called ‘Nashville statement’ is poorly named and does not represent the inclusive values of the city and people of Nashville.”
The civic skirmish might have ended there, but the night before I arrived to meet Moore, Mayor Barry held an awkward press conference to announce that she had been having an affair with the police sergeant in charge of her security detail. Worse, Barry had taken several trips alone with her lover on the taxpayer’s dime. That morning in the SBC’s offices, Moore’s capable lieutenants, many of whom are seminary graduates or pastors themselves, were openly wrestling with the sinful impulse to indulge in schadenfreude. Just a few months before, Barry had disparaged their faithful profession that “God has designed marriage to be a covenantal, sexual, procreative, lifelong union of one man and one woman, as husband and wife.” And now here she was, being brought low because she did not heed their admonition. As well, Barry had the audacity to declare that God would forgive her for her trespasses. “God will forgive me,” Barry said, “but the people of Nashville don’t have to. In the weeks and months to come, I will work hard to earn your forgiveness and earn back your trust.” Unfortunately for Barry, local prosecutors weren’t about to bestow grace. She resigned a little over a month later after pleading guilty to felony theft related to her misuse of state resources.
Barry’s scandal shouldn’t overshadow the fact that the Nashville Statement is, in some respects, a model for civic engagement by churches and an effective platform for a group of influential Christian leaders to publicly reaffirm their commitment to biblical values, untethered to any sort of legislative agenda. If you’ve been paying attention to national politics for the last few years, the idea that evangelical leaders are themselves in a position to offer such moral leadership might be in question. Even religious cynics have been shocked by the way so many evangelicals have lined up to prostrate themselves in the service of electing as president of the United States an exceptionally profane, likely unfaithful, thrice-married braggart who once publicly supported abortion and refers to holy communion as having “my little cracker.”
The notable exception among evangelical leaders is Russell Moore: As long ago as September 2015, when the prospect of a President Trump was still considered highly unlikely, Moore published an op-ed in the New York Times asking, “Have Evangelicals Who Support Trump Lost Their Values?” His answer was unequivocally yes, and Moore charged Trump with using evangelicals to further his ambitions. “We should not demand to see the long-form certificate for Mr. Trump’s second birth,” he wrote. “We should, though, ask about his personal character and fitness for office. His personal morality is clear, not because of tabloid exposés but because of his own boasts. His attitude toward women is that of a Bronze Age warlord.” Trump returned fire in May 2016, tweeting: “Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of Evangelicals and all of the good they stand for. A nasty guy with no heart!”
But Moore saved his most excoriating criticism for his fellow evangelicals, referring to them during the Republican primaries as being from the “Jimmy Swaggart wing” of the church. When Moore’s name wasn’t on a list of evangelicals meeting with Trump in May 2016, he tweeted that he couldn’t attend because of a “dietary restriction: I’m allergic to Kool-Aid.” It became increasingly obvious that Moore’s motivation was not merely to point out Trump’s moral failings, which are self-evident. It was to splash cold water on the faces of his religious peers, who ought to know better than to put their trust in princes.
Moore’s prescient 2015 book, Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel, had perceptively summed up the Faustian bargain many of his fellow evangelicals would soon strike. “The church of Jesus Christ ought to be the last people to fall for hucksters and demagogues. After all, the church bears the Spirit of God, who gifts the Body with discernment and wisdom,” he writes. “But too often we do. We receive celebrities simply because they are ‘conservative,’ without asking what they are conserving. If you are angry with the same people we are, you must be one of us. But it would be a tragedy to get the right president, the right Congress, and the wrong Christ.”
To be sure, the temptation to be drawn into political battles is understandable. Lest anyone forget, the last presidential administration sued nuns over birth control, and “religious liberty” has acquired such a narrow definition in some civic arenas that the Christian owner of a literal printing press is in court right now trying to defend his right not to print gay pride T-shirts. But Moore sees his job as warning evangelical leaders not to lose sight of where the call to salvation ends and politics begins. He is credible in such efforts precisely because he doesn’t see his job as maximizing political influence, but rather as pursuing the prophetic tradition of helping believers see the way forward for themselves.
“We [at the ERLC] have two assignments from the SBC. One is to equip churches and Christians to think through moral issues across the spectrum. The other is to speak to the outside world, in government, media, and culture. I’m always trying to have both of those conversations at the same time,” he tells The Weekly Standard. “If I’m talking about a moral issue, gambling for instance, I want to also be talking to people in churches about why gambling isn’t just a personal issue—it has social implications as well. When I’m speaking in terms of public policy dealing with abortion, I’m wanting to teach people why we care about abortion, and to constantly have the gospel explicitly woven into that appeal.”
The frustration for Moore is that many Christians can’t or won’t think through the moral issues for themselves, apart from political appeals. “The biggest problem is not that we lost the culture war; it’s that we never really had one. . . . The heated and outraged rhetoric of evangelicals in the political and media spheres is often directly related to the ineffectuality of Christian distinctiveness in our living rooms and pews,” he writes in Onward. “If the Bible Belt had held to a truly ‘radical’ sort of religious vitality, we ought to see regions with higher church attendance strikingly out-of-step with the rest of the country when it comes to marital harmony, divorce rates, sexual mores, domestic violence, and so on. We’re not the culture warriors we think we are, unless we’re fighting for the other side.”
As for what Moore thinks of the state of American evangelicalism, he couldn’t have been clearer in Onward: “The Bible Belt is teetering toward collapse, and I say let it fall.”
In order to understand why Moore has different answers to key political questions from many of his evangelical peers, it helps to understand what an “evangelical” really is—a question that has bedeviled American Christians since Robert Baird used the term as a catch-all for Protestants in his seminal 1844 book, Religion in America. In a literal sense, all Christians are called to be evangelists—those who proclaim and spread the good news of salvation. But the term is rarely used in this generic way. And in contemporary parlance, the religious connotations of the term are almost incidental to its political ones. “When I’m dealing with a very secular journalist, that’s usually the assumption that I most quickly have to address, because they seem to assume that evangelicals are like cicadas that go into dormancy between Iowa caucuses and that evangelicalism is just all about who’s up and who’s down and what the legislative agenda ought to be,” says Moore.
The theological specifics of American evangelicalism are a lot harder to pin down. H. K. Carroll, author of the first volume of the 1893 study Religious Forces of the United States, observed, “The evangelical Christianity of today is not polemic. It is intensely practical. It emphasizes more than it used to the importance of Christian character and of Christian work. It is less theological in its preaching, making more, indeed, of biblical exposition, but less of doctrinal forms and definitions. . . . It is the gospel it declares and is trying to work out in a practical way.”
The emphasis on practicality made evangelicalism appealing, if difficult to define when it came to specific beliefs. “The religious historian George Marsden once quipped that in the 1950s and 1960s an evangelical Christian was ‘anyone who likes Billy Graham,’ ” writer Jonathan Merritt, the son of a former SBC president, noted in an Atlantic essay. But in 1987, journalism professor and religion reporter Terry Mattingly had the bright idea of asking Graham himself what the term meant, and it turns out that the country’s most famous evangelical and Southern Baptist couldn’t define it either. “Actually, that’s a question I’d like to ask somebody, too. . . . You go all the way from the extreme fundamentalists to the extreme liberals and, somewhere in between, there are the evangelicals,” Graham said.
Graham was perceptive in observing that evangelicalism was increasingly defined by what it was not. “Evangelical” is a useful term for the millions of American Christians who exist outside of the historical mainline Protestant churches, but it fails to acknowledge the transformation of those churches. Political conservatives bemoan the post-1960s liberal institutional takeover of academia and the media, but they often fail to reckon with a similar liberal march through the mainline denominations. Among the major Protestant denominations, only two confronted and quashed their liberal insurgencies, surviving with their church bodies largely intact and in control of their seminaries. The two denominations are the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (which, owing to a historically German-American identity and a stubborn streak of confessional orthodoxy, doesn’t neatly fit into the American evangelical tradition) and the much larger Southern Baptist Convention. If the nearly 16-million-member SBC (and millions of other evangelicals) are often accused of fighting culture wars, it’s worth remembering that they were not the aggressors.
Moore sees the fight within the churches as far more important than the culture wars outside them. “Frankly, we should be more concerned about the loss of a Christian majority in the Protestant churches than about the loss of a Protestant majority in the United States,” he writes in Questions and Ethics: Applying the Gospel to Tough Situations (2014). “Most of the old-line Protestant denominations are held captive to every theological fad that has blown through their divinity schools in the past thirty years—from crypto-Marxist liberation ideologies, to sexual identity politics, to a neo-pagan vision of God—complete with gender neutralized liturgies.”
This isn’t hyperbole. In 2013, the Episcopal church’s then-presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori was widely criticized for delivering a sermon in which she turned a passage from the book of Acts about the apostle Paul exorcising a demon from a slave girl into a story of how Paul oppressed the girl by “depriving her of her gift of spiritual awareness. Paul can’t abide something he won’t see as beautiful or holy, so he tries to destroy it.” While such an interpretation makes for a trendy parable about, say, gender equality, as biblical exegesis it is creative to the point of indefensibility and a good illustration of how the once-quintessential WASP denomination became a laughingstock among serious believers. Liberal theologies haven’t helped mainline Protestant church membership either, which has cratered since such views took hold. A Washington Post report last year noted, “the trend lines are showing a trajectory toward zero in both those who attend a mainline church regularly and those who identify with a mainline denomination 23 years from now.”
And yet non-evangelicals still frequently compare evangelicals to their liberal mainline peers and find them wanting—not for their theological views, but for the fact that they have not embraced progressive politics. “Journalists and sociologists tend to see evangelical Christianity in terms of ‘advance’ or ‘retreat.’ For them, if Christianity doesn’t operate in precisely the same patterns of partisan voter-bloc organizing, then such constitutes a ‘pullback’ from politics,” Moore writes in Onward. “And if Christians emphasize the public nature of the gospel message, the call to work for justice and righteousness, this represents a threat to American ideals of separation of church and state.”
Still, Moore doesn’t feel put upon or resentful about the thankless task of being one of evangelical America’s most prominent spokesmen on political issues. When it comes to dealing with the secular world, he’s fearless and upbeat. “I have almost never had a bad experience with media. Even when they completely disagree with me, I’m usually treated fairly. That’s probably the least stressful part of my job.”
Other aspects of the job are more challenging. “The church is far more complex than dealing with media is,” he says. Moore wants to make sure that the SBC and other evangelicals don’t come to define themselves as simply a subculture that is “angry with the same people.”
“In most evangelical Christians’ lives they’re concerned about many much more important things,” Moore says. “That’s very difficult to explain to someone who is constantly thinking about politics and only politics.”
Nevertheless, politics makes itself felt in Moore’s work. Moore got his start in politics working for Mississippi congressman Gene Taylor, a Democrat. Taylor was not especially liberal, and it’s easy to forget that it was not that long ago that social conservatives from the South felt most at home in the Democratic party. As Moore notes, times have radically changed. In a little more than 20 years, the Mississippi Democratic party went from being on the record as pro-life to hosting fundraisers with the nation’s most prominent socialist. “Bernie Sanders!” Moore says. “That would have been absolutely inconceivable.”
But Moore’s past is also a reminder that there’s a lot more political diversity around the margins of evangelicalism than many observers acknowledge. The Bible has a lot to say about foundational issues such as marriage and sexual morality, and comparatively little to say about the appropriate level of redistribution in welfare policies. As head of the ERLC, Moore has staked out more liberal positions on issues than some in the SBC would like. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on the need to combat global warming alongside the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in America, the head of the Evangelical Environmental Network, and other leaders of more liberal groups.
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In March 2017, Moore found his job as head of the ERLC in jeopardy when 100 churches (out of more than 46,000) threatened to stop sending money to the SBC’s umbrella fund in part because of their displeasure with Moore’s outspokenness. This came on the heels of a torrent of criticism from Southern Baptist pastors and church leaders displeased with his rhetoric. “How condescending can you be and not expect some kickback from the people who provide the monies for you to occupy the office you are misusing?” wrote William F. Harrell, a Georgia pastor who spent 16 years on the SBC’s executive committee, on the website SBC Today.
Frank Page, president of the SBC’s executive committee, called for a meeting with Moore and bluntly told the press, “If the meeting doesn’t go well, I’m fully prepared to ask him for a change in his status.” But shortly after the meeting, Page and Moore issued a statement of mutual support, and Page expressed frustration in the Baptist Press with how his comment about asking for Moore’s resignation had been reported in the Washington Post, emphasizing that he never had any direct authority to ask Moore to resign.
Moore survived the threat to his job for two reasons. First, he has done impressive work on racial reconciliation within a denomination that has a history of institutional racism. “The fallout [from forcing Moore out] will be the denomination signaling to African American and other ethnic groups that they’re tone deaf and disinterested in that membership,” Thabiti Anyabwile, a pastor of Anacostia River Church, a Southern Baptist congregation, told the Washington Post. In recent decades, the SBC has made sincere strides in racial integration—the SBC elected its first black president, Louisiana pastor Fred Luter, in 2012—and ejecting Moore, who has been a leader on racial issues in the SBC, including expressing vehement opposition to displays of the Confederate flag, would have been a PR nightmare for the church.
Second, setting aside Moore’s political rhetoric, there’s little doubt that he not only shares the theological priorities of the SBC but also articulates them as well as or better than anyone else, even in a denomination known for producing charismatic preachers. A few hours before our interview, Moore breezed through a remote TV interview with a foreign journalist on the treatment of women in U.S. prisons. He challenged religious conservatives to consider whether chaining female convicts to their beds as they give birth and denying them access to their children was compatible with a pro-life philosophy. Then, without skipping a beat, he strolled across the foyer to the podcast studio, where he plopped down a legal pad with a few handwritten notes and delivered a beautifully formed, mostly extemporaneous sermon that would soon be available for download.
It helps that the 46-year-old Moore, a former professor of Christian theology and ethics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is seen by many as one of the leading lights of the generation tutored by the venerated Albert Mohler. Mohler took over the seminary in 1993 and drove out the remaining liberal elements at the school. His subsequent insistence on teaching orthodoxy and fealty to the broader teachings of the SBC is seen as pivotal for the ongoing success of the Southern Baptists’ conservative resurgence. (Notably, Mohler was also a Trump skeptic during the 2016 election.)
But Trump skepticism exacts a cost. Moore is supposed to be the Southern Baptists’ emissary to Washington, and the Trump administration, notorious for blackballing those it deemed insufficiently supportive during the campaign, has not issued the same invitations to Moore that it has to other Southern Baptist leaders, such as Jack Graham, Ronnie Floyd, Robert Jeffress, and Richard Land.
Of course, a year into Trump’s presidency, the ongoing revelations about the president’s personal life have created challenges for the Christian leaders who do support the president. The Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins recently made headlines for his response to the all-but-proven allegations that Trump had an affair with a porn actress, telling Politico, “We kind of gave him—‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here.’ ” But the broader context of Perkins’s remarks was telling. Gone are the days of comparing Trump to flawed biblical leaders such as Cyrus and King David. There seems to be a more candid and worldly conception of what he can do for his Christian backers.
“He’s a very transactional president. Trust is important to him. Loyalty is important to him, and I think in this transaction, he realizes, ‘Hey, these are people I can count on, because they don’t blow with the political winds,’ ” Perkins told Politico. “It’s a developing relationship, but I’ll have to say this: From a policy standpoint, he has delivered more than any other president in my lifetime.”
Although he is quick to praise Russell Moore, best-selling evangelical author and radio host Eric Metaxas also views the 2016 election as a moment when church leaders had to choose sides. “We had to be grownups and make an unpleasant choice between someone who in many ways we might not have liked or preferred, but who was the only possible choice if you didn’t want Hillary Clinton to be president,” Metaxas tells The Weekly Standard. “The idea that we can continue to pretend that a Hillary Clinton presidency would have been less awful for the country or for the Republican party or for the conservative movement or for the evangelical movement than Donald Trump, I find odd in the extreme.”
Moore is not immune to such observations. In December 2016, he issued a statement acknowledging the “pastors and friends who told me when they read my comments they thought I was criticizing anyone who voted for Donald Trump. I told them then, and I would tell anyone now: if that’s what you heard me say, that was not at all my intention, and I apologize.” But as part of his apology, he also made it clear his criticisms were properly directed at “a handful of Christian political operatives excusing immorality and confusing the definition of the gospel.”
Even if you concede that voting for Trump was in the best interest of evangelicals, Moore’s larger warning still holds true: Politics won’t fix a church that in the long term needs to be rebuilt from within. “I agree with C. S. Lewis when he said in Mere Christianity that the devil never sends temptations one by one,” says Moore. “He always sends them two by two so that we can spend most of our time arguing about which of them is worse rather than seeing what the path is toward righteousness.”
Update: The article has been updated to add detail about Moore’s March 2017 meeting with the SBC executive committee.
Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
