A couple of years ago, Russell Moore made a name for himself as the earnest leader of the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). Eventually, his fellow SBC leaders got sick of him taking his job seriously and drove him out of not just the job, but the entire denomination.
He found a soft landing, though. And now he’s written an opinion piece for The Atlantic about how evangelicals can totally reverse their ongoing decline. Let’s review that advice—and see why it won’t work in the increasingly toxic and dysfunctional culture of evangelicalism.
Russell Moore: A Southern Baptist without a denominational country
The ERLC is an interesting office. The SBC’s Cooperative Program finances it with a budget set by the top-ranked Executive Committee. It or something like it has existed in the SBC for over a century, but a huge reorganization in 1997 gave it its current name and mission:
The ERLC is dedicated to engaging the culture with the gospel of Jesus Christ and speaking to issues in the public square for the protection of religious liberty and human flourishing.
“About the ERLC,” ERLC.com
In practical terms, the ERLC encourages evangelicals to vote (Republican), wages the evangelical culture wars in the media, and convinces evangelicals to toe the party line on those culture wars. In essence, the ERLC is supposed to help evangelicals regain their lost dominance over America—and other Americans’ lives.
From 1988-2013, Richard Land led the ERLC. He turned out to be quite a handful. After saying some shockingly racist things about the Trayvon Martin case, the SBC allowed him to quit-before-he-was-fired. Now, Land had been a quintessential SBC good ol’ boy—plugged into their crony network at the hip. He’d understood what his position required and involved. Under him, the ERLC operated as a freewheeling, rollicking display of casual dominance.
But the SBC needed to make a major statement about Land’s gaffes. They chose to make it by hiring Russell Moore as his replacement.
Out of every other officer the SBC has ever had in the past 20 years, Moore might just be one of the only ones who really wanted to do the actual job he’d accepted. By that, I don’t mean he’s a wonderful—or even good—person. But he always demonstrated a certain charming sincerity about the ERLC.
It’s quite clear that the very last thing the SBC’s top leaders wanted was someone who genuinely wanted to help evangelicals win their war for lost dominance. But that is precisely what they got.
After years of outraging Southern Baptists with his suggestions, it was inevitable that they’d drive him out eventually.
Nowadays, he works as the Editor in Chief for Christianity Today. And he writes opinion posts like this one in The Atlantic.
Russell Moore declares that ‘there is only one way out’ for American evangelicals
On July 25, Russell Moore penned quite a dramatic post for The Atlantic. Its title and subtitle say it all:
The American Evangelical Church Is in Crisis. There’s Only One Way Out.
The Atlantic
Evangelicals can have revival or nostalgia—but not both.
Indeed, The Atlantic has provided a home for posts just like this for years now. From almost the start of Russell Moore’s time at the ERLC, The Atlantic liked the cut of his jib. In 2015, a writer for the site praised his attempts to end Southern Baptist structural racism. In 2019, another praised his opposition to Donald Trump as a political candidate. Evangelicals might be a noxious bunch, but Moore at least seemed to want to steer them in a slightly more wholesome direction.
And now, he wants to try to do that again. His post concerns evangelicals’ ongoing decline. It is, as Moore puts it, a “crisis.” He perceives only one way to reverse that decline and end that crisis:
Evangelicals must step up their Jesusing.
In other words, they must stop pining for their glory days, whatever that phrase might mean to them. Instead, they must seek revival. And not just any kind of revival, but the real-deal revival.
Revivals are very important to evangelicals
Evangelicals love the idea of revival. Revival is a Christianese word. It means a period of great zeal and rowdiness that leads to tons of new conversions and generally increased piety for years to come. Often, lots of miracle claims multiply during the initial outbreak of revival.
In evangelical reckoning, their god personally sends revivals to his followers—after, of course, they demonstrate their worthiness for it. They love to claim that revivals couldn’t possibly happen on their own.
Many evangelicals pray at least sometimes for small-scale revivals in their churches—and larger-scale ones across their countries. Earlier this year, they hoped that that recent shindig in Kentucky would become such a large-scale revival, but it petered out before it could get that far. It also sparked vanishingly few new converts, which is a requirement for the label of revival.
(That’s why the Toronto Blessing is called a blessing and not a revival. As spectacularly important as it was for evangelicals, most normies at the time barely even knew it was happening.)
So when evangelicals talk about revivals, they’re talking about an unmistakable show of power from their god. And that show of power always leads directly to them gaining both lots of new converts and more cultural power.
What a real-deal revival means to Russell Moore
In his post, Russell Moore also wants a large-scale revival. But he frets that evangelicals might be yearning for the wrong kind of revival.
If you’re wondering what that even looks like, you’re in luck:
The Christian Church still needs an organic movement of people reminding the rest of us that there’s hope for personal transformation, for the kind of crisis that leads to grace. [. . .]
Churches must stop the frantic rhetoric and desperate lack of confidence that seek to hold on to the Bible Belt of the past. Instead, those worthy of the word evangelical should nurture the joyous and tranquil fullness of faith that prays for something new, rooted in something very old—namely a commitment to personal faith and to the authority of the Bible.
That starts not with manifestos and strategic road maps, but with small-scale decisions to reawaken the awe of the God evangelicals proclaim. We must refocus our attention on conversion rather than culture wars and actually read the Bible rather than mine it for passages to win arguments.
The Atlantic
Still confused? I wouldn’t blame you if you were.
Yes yes, but what did that even mean?
Evangelicals have this maddening habit of writing tons of words, words, words that don’t mean much in concrete terms. When they’re done, we don’t know what they actually mean, or what their suggestions look like in the real world, or how we’d know if someone were enacting their suggestions correctly or incorrectly. I’ve even caught evangelical ministers lamenting this unfortunate tendency. So I will translate:
Russell Moore thinks many evangelicals want a huge revival, but they want the wrong kind of revival. They want a revival that will result in them returning to their former dominance over America. For some evangelicals, that means a return to 2015:
Many mainstream evangelicals assumed that we were all just waiting out a moment of disorder: If we can just get through the 2016 presidential election, the pandemic, the racial-reckoning protests and backlashes, the 2020 presidential election, and the seemingly constant evangelical-leadership sex-and-abuse scandals, we’ll end up safely back in 2015. That’s clearly not happening.
The Atlantic
That date is specific and very important. You see, 2015 was the last year evangelicals could still delude themselves into thinking that they were not, in fact, years into an unending decline of members and cultural power. That was the year that Pew Research released their 2015 Religious Landscape Study. This study revealed what some observers had been saying for years: People were leaving Christian churches by the truckload, and they were not coming back.
Other evangelicals, Moore asserts, want a revival will land them back in the 1950s:
Some evangelical Christians have confused “revival” with a return to a mythical golden age. A generation ago, one evangelical leader said that the goal of the religious right should be 1950s America, just without the sexism and racism.
The Atlantic
I couldn’t figure out which evangelical leader he means in that quote, but it doesn’t surprise me. Even when I was Pentecostal in the 1980s-1990s, everyone I knew idolized that decade as the last great period of evangelical dominance. Looking back, it was like they all wanted to LARP a Jesus-themed Mad Men TV show.
But those are the wrong kind of revivals
However, the 1950s were far from the gauzy idealized decade that evangelicals crave. Sure, evangelicals got in bed with Republicans around then. That strategic alliance gave them a huge amount of cultural power—which they immediately began using to the hilt. For years, it was unsafe to vocally oppose evangelicals’ control-grabs or to express a lack of belief in their god. In some areas of America still dominated by evangelicals, it still is.
However, Christian leaders in the 1950s sure didn’t feel that way about their time. They lamented what they saw as a rising tide of secularism and disobedience to Christian demands. Back then, those leaders wanted a revival that would get them back to the Victorian Age. They were certain that Victorian-era evangelicals knew exactly how to Jesus correctly, and that nobody had dared refuse them anything they wanted. And as with the 1950s, the Victorian Age was far from that ideal as well.
No, Moore tells us, evangelicals should not crave a revival that ends with a return to dominance:
The idea of revival as a return to some real or imagined moment of greatness is not just illusory but dangerous. In the supposedly idyllic Christian America of the post–World War II era, the evangelical preacher A. W. Tozer wrote: “It is my considered opinion that under the present circumstances we do not want revival at all. A widespread revival of the kind of Christianity we know today in America might prove to be a moral tragedy from which we would not recover in a hundred years.” Tozer knew that the confusion of revival with nostalgia could amount to exactly what contemporary psychologists tell us about trauma: What is not repaired is repeated.
The Atlantic
Instead, Moore wants a revival that ends with evangelicals Jesusing like they’ve never Jesused before.
Russell Moore wants the right kind of revival here
Here’s what the right kind of revival looks like, according to Russell Moore:
The answer to the crisis of credibility facing evangelical America is not fighting a battle for the “soul of evangelicalism,” with one group winning and exiling the losers. [. . .]
The answer is instead what it has always been: Those who wish to hold on to the Old Time Religion must recognize that God is doing something new. The old alliances and coalitions are shaking apart. And the sense of disorientation, disillusionment, and political and religious “homelessness” that many Christians feel is not a problem to be overcome but a key part of the process. [. . .]
The Christian Church still needs an organic movement of people reminding the rest of us that there’s hope for personal transformation, for the kind of crisis that leads to grace.
The Atlantic
Oh, okay. So evangelicals need “an organic movement” that focuses on “personal transformation.” That will, in turn, result in showers of divine grace upon them and the entire nation.
And how, you might be wondering now, shall evangelicals do that?
Out with the old, in with the new (again), sort of
To accomplish this miraculous change of priorities, evangelicals must stop doing all the stuff that Russell Moore doesn’t like and start doing the stuff he prefers. He doesn’t like social media fights, so evangelicals must stop doing that. Nor does he like “manifestos and strategic road maps,” so those must stop as well. Instead, evangelicals must talk up how awe-inspiring their god is, which will inevitably lead to conversions and increased piety.
He even, shockingly, appears to suggest that evangelicals exit the culture wars to focus like lasers on recruitment instead. Here it is again:
We must refocus our attention on conversion rather than culture wars and actually read the Bible rather than mine it for passages to win arguments.
The Atlantic
Oh, that was such a sly, devious little bit. Bravo, Russell Moore!
The first time I read his post, I completely missed it. A friend had linked it to me and mentioned the culture wars line specifically, and I seriously thought they’d linked the wrong URL. What culture wars? He didn’t talk about culture wars. When I reread it (since that person’s not prone to such mistakes), I finally caught it. It’s just buried in there.
What the culture wars encompasses and what its warriors want
Right now, evangelicals fight culture wars on three main fronts:
- Anti-trans legislation
- Anti-LGBT efforts, generally
- Complete opposition to elective abortion
But those aren’t their only culture wars. Here are some others:
- Blocking gun control efforts
- Sneaking indoctrination in front of non-evangelical children without their parents’ knowledge or approval
- Destroying the social safety net
- Enshrining Christian—particularly extremist evangelical—privilege into law at all levels of government and throughout its three branches
- Rejecting climate change efforts and denying the science behind those efforts
(Related: The 2008 documentary that mostly-correctly predicted events in a world one degree warmer.)
As well as these culture wars, evangelicals also have begun to perceive some looming schisms over racism, sex abuse, and women pastors.
None of this stuff is coincidental, either. For the most part, all of their wars and schisms boil down to sheer, blithering authoritarian panic over lost power. And they’re losing that power thanks to increasing regard for and awareness of human rights and civil liberties. Abortion care, in particular, draws upon an impressive number of recognized human rights. When it is restricted and criminalized, human rights in that society erode for everyone who isn’t in power, not just women. It cannot be restricted or criminalized without jeopardizing human rights generally.
Their other culture wars run along similar lines. They all attack human rights and civil liberties at some level. These attacks seek to weaken America’s dedication to protecting both. After all, a society that robustly protects rights and liberties certainly won’t allow evangelicals to graciously appoint themselves everyone’s Designated Adult and start unilaterally making big sweeping personal decisions for others.
And authoritarian evangelicals fall apart if they stop feeling like they own everything around themselves—or are at least in the process of seizing that ownership.
Did Russell Moore seriously suggest that evangelicals stop fighting their culture wars?
I shall not be breaking Betteridge’s Law of Headlines today: No, he did not. The guy who once led the ERLC with rock-solid conviction is not about to drop evangelicals’ ongoing war for dominion over America.
He just wants it done more nicely.
If evangelicals stop pursuing the culture wars, they will implode on themselves like a star collapsing into a black hole. The entire thrust of their end of Christianity is like America’s so-called Manifest Destiny: A sense of permission to take control of something that did not actually belong to them. As it was then, their permission slip happens to be totally signed by Jesus himself.
That’s why evangelicals keep coalescing into totalitarian, theocratic political-takeover movements. From Biblical Patriarchy to Christian Reconstructionism to Dominionism to the John Birch Society and all the way to the Seven Mountains Mandate currently festering in Republican hearts, evangelicals just can’t stop sprouting these groups. As one right-wing evangelical site admits:
The church is an environment of extremes. The trouble with extremes is that they always contain a seed of truth, making them look and sound plausible to the careless bystander. By virtue of this fact, the church is also often full of susceptible bystanders ready to lap-up the latest and greatest fad.
Reformation 21
It’s always nice to hear evangelicals concede that as a group, they have absolutely no way to discern dangerous lies from divine demands.
As outraged authoritarians suffering a group-wide narcissistic injury, evangelicals can no more abandon the culture wars than they could stop breathing.
The only moral culture wars are Russell Moore’s culture wars
Russell Moore has always wanted authoritarian evangelicalism, just without the sexism and racism. In his post, he may gently criticize an unnamed previous evangelical leader for using that exact phrase, but it’s his own heart’s desire as well. It always has been.
He thinks he can have dysfunctional authoritarian evangelicalism, but somehow strip away all the bad stuff that always happens with systems like this. That never works. Dysfunctional authoritarian systems absolutely depend on everyone in power acting only in good faith. But groups created under these systems have absolutely no way to ensure that—much less to prevent bad-faith actors from achieving power, much less to remove such bad-faith actors when they become aware of ’em.
So Moore’s always been perfectly happy to wade into the culture wars himself. He still is. In just the past year or so, he’s written a slew of anti-abortion articles for Christianity Today alone. In fact, at no point have I seen him suggesting that evangelicals should back off from their attempts to restrict and criminalize this care.
Instead, he just wants evangelicals to adopt a more simpering paternalistic tone while they trample human rights in America. You know, explain things to death. That way, women in evangelical-controlled states will completely understand why they no longer have access to the same human rights that men enjoy without even thinking about it. That’s always worked before.
Though Russell Moore also wants a strengthening of the social safety net, this is pure wishful thinking. Evangelicals despise helping the poor and disadvantaged, and always have. Worse, that desire takes second place to maintaining abortion as a heavily-restricted, criminalized form of health care. It’d be nice if the social safety net thing happens, he implies, but that legal stuff is staying regardless. That legal stuff is mandatory. The rest is just him begging evangelicals to at least pretend that they care about something besides power, dominance, and control of others’ lives. And they won’t, because nobody is making them.
Dude’s as much a culture warrior as the evangelicals he’s begging to leave the culture wars behind. It sounds a lot like he just wants the faction warfare to die down. And that ain’t gonna happen for the exact same reasons that evangelicals will continue to refuse to strengthen the social safety net.
He just wants other evangelicals to adopt his priorities instead of caring about their own.
Why Russell Moore’s suggestions will not become the new face of evangelicalism
I’ve mentioned already that I had to reread the post to find his buried reference to ending the culture wars (that he doesn’t like). Well, I also had to double-check the date of the post because this exact suggestion crops up constantly in evangelical writing. I’ve double-double-checked it a couple of times already because I keep thinking I might have misread the date and it really came out in 2021 or something.
Here’s how perennial this advice is:
- Joe Battaglia recommended Jesusing harder to fix America itself.
- Jesusing harder will totally fix dying churches, too, did you know?
- It’ll also fix racism.
- Jesusing harder also substitutes for real self-improvement.
- But it’ll totally fix membership declines.
- And every other thing evangelicals are doing wrong.
- It’ll impress churchless believers so much that they’ll return to church!
- It’ll also keep evangelicals from “transactional” faith and behavior!
- Even more progressive Christians think Jesusing harder will satisfy every human yearning and need.
- Jesusing harder will especially make evangelicals less gullible and prone to conspiracy theorizing.
Evangelicals constantly exhort each other to Jesus harder as a way to fix any problem they perceive anywhere. This advice has been a constant since well before I began writing. When Ronald Sider published his famous book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience in 2005, he suggested that Jesusing harder would make evangelicals finally stop being such hypocrites. Since then, any number of evangelicals have made this exact same suggestion.
But they didn’t take this advice then, and they’re not about to start now for Russell Moore.
The sad truth about Jesusing harder
Anyone loudly involved in right-wing evangelicalism right now is there because they like how things work right now. They’re not there to Jesus harder. They’re there to climb the power ladder of a dysfunctional authoritarian political movement that claims to derive its mandate to rule from nothing less than the god of the entire universe.
This exact combination of factors makes evangelicalism extremely dangerous to the rest of us. Jesusing harder should theoretically keep evangelicals so busy they wouldn’t possibly have time to grab for temporal power. But evangelicals imagine that it would do the opposite by bestowing upon them all the power in the world. And since Russell Moore has a demonstrated affection for C.S. Lewis, let me offer a word of advice from the man himself about what would happen then:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C.S. Lewis
If they were thinking straight about this thing, even evangelicals would not want a world where super-hard-Jesusing evangelicals rule over everyone.
But we’re all in luck, because it won’t ever happen. If some evangelical leader ever somehow did manage to force this fractious, restive tribe to Jesus harder, they’d leave immediately to remake this current version of evangelicalism elsewhere. This is the only version that suits their needs and seems likely to fulfill their dreams of rulership.
And since it requires only lip service to Jesusing harder, then that is all they shall give it.
57 Comments
Chris Peterson · 07/29/2023 at 10:56 AM
“[T]he Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC).” Hmm. Can anyone spell oxymoron?
My historical observation is that the country, broadly, has gone through a handful of “genuine” religious revivals over its quarter millennium existence, each heralding subsequent periods of social, political, and moral decline (much of which still sticks to us).
Ubi Dubium · 07/29/2023 at 12:22 PM
As soon as I saw the title of this piece, before I read a word of the text, I knew that the answer would be “Jesus harder”. The evangelical answer is always “Jesus harder”. These guys are so predictable!
Chris Peterson · 07/29/2023 at 12:40 PM
Jesus Harder. A great porn star name!
Robert C · 07/29/2023 at 1:37 PM
Harder! Faster! Oh, Jesus!
Anri · 07/29/2023 at 1:48 PM
Speaking personally, I’ve never really understood the appeal of a faith that essnetialy teaches that god is upset with you because you’re just as pathetic as he made you to be. And that knowing that is joyous.
Bwuh?
Chris Peterson · 07/29/2023 at 1:54 PM
That’s because you are the sort of person that seeks to understand. Childhood indoctrination in any dogmatic belief system is an effective way of killing that way of thinking.
That said, Christianity is clearly designed to appeal to the seriously downtrodden. It’s no coincidence that it dies out when a society finds ways to give its citizens good, happy, prosperous lives. (And the current decline of our societies is the biggest hope that Christianity has of reversing its losses.)
LynnV · 07/31/2023 at 9:47 AM
Which is why they labor mightily to destroy any and all social safety nets.
WisdomJusticeLove · 07/31/2023 at 5:03 PM
Monotheism loves the impoverished. You need to be sufficiently desperate with few resources outside a religious group.
Kevin R. Cross · 07/30/2023 at 2:11 AM
Yes indeed. From the very first instant I saw the headline. They just don’t have anything else in their quiver, do they?
Robert C · 07/29/2023 at 1:34 PM
“…actually read the Bible”
Yes, please. More of that. Rather than read the Bible very occasionally and superficially as a spiritual exercise akin to rattling off the Lord’s Prayer, sit down with it and actually read this horror. Every atheist I know would approve of evangelicals actually reading the Bible. Read documents written by men (it’s always men) who literally could not imagine a society in which chattel slavery did not exist. Ponder Jesus’ admonitions to hate yourself and your family members, including your precious children, and if you could “make room for it” cut off your balls. Cook on Paul’s advice to married people to live as if celibate “because the time is short.” (That was over 19 centuries ago.) If you’re one of those Jericho Marchers, think about what the Bible says happened after the walls of Jericho fell. (The Israelites murdered every man, woman and child in the city.) BTW, dear Believer, you’re supposed to be able to move mountains even if your faith is the size of a tiny mustard seed. How’s that working out fer ya?
Houndentenor · 07/29/2023 at 6:00 PM
Back when I was a Southern Baptist I was encouraged to read the entire Bible. They even made bookmarks with a plan to read the whole Bible in one year. I did it. I was shocked by what I found there. It didn’t immediately turn me into an atheist, but it did lead me away from the literalist tradition in which I had been raised. The atheism came later. (I’m not proud of how long that took, but it was what it was.)
WisdomJusticeLove · 07/31/2023 at 3:54 PM
I think it’s highly improbably to completely read the Bible and think it’s true. Mark 13:30. One doesn’t need faith to doubt those words. All over had to do is look in the sky at night and they will have proof/evidence that the stars haven’t fallen from the sky and the moon still gives light.
The problem is Christians don’t care about sincerity, they care about loyalty and obedience. So it’s acceptable to say things your really don’t believe: the Christian knows the difference between:
“I have a relationship with Santa Claus.”
And
“I have a relationship with other humans that believe in Santa Claus.”
Certainly a mature, sincere Christians knows the difference between those two statements.
Chris Peterson · 07/29/2023 at 6:20 PM
There’s a reason that so many Christian sects throughout history have discouraged (or even punished) reading the bible.
WisdomJusticeLove · 07/31/2023 at 3:43 PM
Yup. One might get arrested for *checks notes* printing the Bible in an “unapproved” language. There is no Martin Luther or John Calvin without the printing press.
That’s one of the things that makes the 20th-century Christian bizarre: you can read and own the literature, yet you still don’t read it for yourself, opting to have it read to you, while pretending you’ve read it for yourself, like 86 times. That’s one of the worst traits of many Christians; claiming to have read the Bible (multiple times) and aren’t familiar with basic facts:
“I’ve read the Bible 97 times. Who are the Pharisees? I’ve never heard of them.”
Traveller · 07/31/2023 at 6:03 PM
The Fundies I know of claim either the Bible reads you, not you’re one reading it, or that you must read it with the heart and not the mind, and similar statements about how bad is attempting to use reason when reading it. Go figure.
Captain Cassidy · 07/31/2023 at 6:07 PM
That’s how I deconverted. I actually read it. It wasn’t the horror that got me; I still had Jesus Goggles on. It just described a world that doesn’t exist in the real reality. Later — much later — I saw the horror and was shocked I hadn’t seen it before.
BensNewLogIn · 08/01/2023 at 4:01 PM
I like mustard. Especially with sausage.
Gwen the Devout, patron saint of atheism · 08/02/2023 at 11:30 AM
I would like them to read Exodus 21:22-25, which makes it clear that abortion is *not* murder. They generally claim to have read the Bible straight through many times, but somehow they managed to gloss over this bit.
Anri · 07/29/2023 at 1:45 PM
So he’s exhorting people to make a specific directed effort towards creating an organic movement?
Maybe it’s me or maybe it’s him, but someone here is confused about labels.
Chris Peterson · 07/29/2023 at 1:55 PM
Or is smart enough to misuse them to achieve his ends. There’s a lot of that going around these days.
WisdomJusticeLove · 07/31/2023 at 4:03 PM
If I have to tell you to start an organic movement, that movement isn’t organic as it isn’t starting of its own volition.
This is about giving (indirect/inadvertent) commands. One can’t be obedient (and loyal) if there are no commands to obey.
Captain Cassidy · 07/31/2023 at 6:08 PM
It’s not you 😉
Houndentenor · 07/29/2023 at 5:57 PM
While I don’t see this big revival happening, I doubt anyone saw the Great Awakening in advance either. So maybe he is right and they can make that happen. But they aren’t going to get there by being openly bigoted against people’s friends, neighbors and relatives. In the 90s the religious right soft-pedaled their bigotry? With Trump they took off the mask and the gloves and the hate has been out in the open. Everyone can see it, and what’s more, the crowd that chastises everyone about personal morality lined up to support about the most immoral person in public life.
If there is some big revival happening, it won’t be from the usual suspects. There are some interesting trends among younger Evangelicals if polls are accurate and some less judgmental and more socially aware churches. Will that take off? I have no clue. Yes, church attendance has been in decline for some time but we have know way of knowing if or when that trend will level off (or accelerate or reverse). I do know that there are few in the religious right who see anything wrong with what they are doing (we hear about the exceptions and they are rare) and what they are doing now is exactly why people are leaving.
smrnda · 07/30/2023 at 10:57 PM
They also aren’t thinking that revival might come from other religious organizations. What about Hasidim? Pagans? You could argue some level of revival from both within recent history.
It’s also something that you get a number of Catholics imagining there’s going to be some new Catholic revival led by hipster Catholics or something.
Gwen the Devout, patron saint of atheism · 08/02/2023 at 11:43 AM
More to the point, they never think that the next big revival will from someone other than themselves and their group.
Don’t forget the Great Satanist Revival! For that matter while the “New Atheists” didn’t actually have anything really new to say, they were good enough at teaching people the old arguments and taking atheism out of the closet that they brough about a huge and still ongoing atheist revival.
WCB · 08/03/2023 at 1:43 AM
That is happening now. Pope Francis is that hipster Catholic in fact. And the old school, conservative Catholics rather dislike pope Francis and his liberal ways.
ericc · 07/30/2023 at 11:54 PM
It is somewhat ironic that the lips-to-butt closeness with the GOP that gave them the political power they’ve enjoyed, is probably what is killing their chances of revival. At least IMO. Previous ‘great awakenings’ were associated with women’s rights, abolition, temperance, and social cooperation (YMCAs, involvement in supporting families and folks who had less). Today’s evangelicals promote, instead, 1950s talking points and the same resistance to civil rights that people have heard from conservative politicians for the past 30 years. This might revive 80 year olds. Not 20-somethings. Revivals connected to the social currents of their day. But 2020s evangelicals are actively turning their backs on/resisting those currents.
Probably their best chance of reviving religion was to grab hold of gay rights in 2012. Steal the march from the Dems after Biden and Obama floated their trial balloon about gay rights. But that was, no doubt, unthinkable to them.
Gwen the Devout, patron saint of atheism · 08/02/2023 at 12:36 PM
The so-called “temperance” movement and Prohibition 1.0 were not such a pretty social movement — right down there with the War on Some Drugs (Prohibition 2.0).
The reproductive slavery movement among fundies is a present-day phenomenon, but definitely not “organic:” it was the result of a plan to get white racist Southerners to start voting Republican by having fundie pastors tell them abortion is murder, using it as a wedge issue.
Even in the 1980s, it seemed pretty obvious what they were up to – even for someone (like, say, me) who was just entering her teen years as that decade drew to a close. I hadn’t known about the suspiciously abrupt embrace by this supposedly loose, non-hierarchical movement of the anti-abortion position, but when my mother mentioned off-handedly at some point that fundamentalists hadn’t cared about abortion when _Roe_ was handed down (the only people to protest, she said, had been Catholics, and not even very many of them), it became crystal clear that it was basically a conspiracy, involving fundamentalist preachers and the Republican Party, to use religious authority to gain political power. Not the way I had thought Good Christians(TM) were supposed to behave.
WCB · 07/29/2023 at 7:30 PM
Recent polls show the toxic politics and toxic religion stil walk hand in hand. These people still support Trump and don’t care if the GOP rapes America’s saftey net. Political religious posturing still works for GOP extremists. There is nobody successfully leading Christians out of the darkness successfuly on a massive level. A few lonely voices speak but make little difference.
Ficino · 07/30/2023 at 1:01 AM
Wow, I am glad to see that OnlySky has a comment platform again.
In the spirit of the old days on the Captain’s blog, when we’d all post the stuff that moved us at the time …
One of the great songs of all time. The singer spoke out about truths that many refused to acknowledge until many years later. She suffered harsh pushback for telling the truth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-EF60neguk
Captain Cassidy · 07/31/2023 at 6:09 PM
Nothing compares 2 her.
Ficino · 07/30/2023 at 1:03 AM
This comment platform sucks. You have to click on subordinate comments on each comment. Why, oh why, can’t we just have something like disqus, where all the comments are laid out openly in sequence???
Chris Peterson · 07/30/2023 at 9:34 AM
It’s a slight improvement over the previous. We can use limited HTML, and if you click off a comment in progress you no longer lose your work. It’s a problem that you can’t see the comment count in the headlines. And that you can’t globally get notices of responses. And that you can’t simply expand an entire comment section.
Disqus is pretty awful. So it’s not a good sign that we see it as an improvement over this!
Ubi Dubium · 07/31/2023 at 7:36 AM
And where we can post images and videos. At the very least, I want a button that says “show all comments”.
Captain Cassidy · 07/31/2023 at 6:09 PM
Hang in there. Something’s going on behind the scenes still.
WCB · 07/31/2023 at 9:24 PM
There had better be. The fun quotient here is zero. I am about to give up here.
BensNewLogIn · 08/01/2023 at 4:05 PM
I certainly hope so. Because this commenting system seems to be a monument to Saint Sucky.
Kevin R. Cross · 08/03/2023 at 3:19 AM
Good. Because I’m not even getting notices when someone replies to my posts.
RainbowPhoenix · 07/30/2023 at 1:37 AM
I hope no one was expecting his suggestions to involve being kind to the outgroup.
Kevin R. Cross · 07/30/2023 at 2:12 AM
That would be unthinkable.
WisdomJusticeLove · 07/31/2023 at 4:41 PM
Kindness === weakness
Every Christian knows God threatens people for praise (worship me or suffer) because that’s the most effective way of “earning” affection/recognition/anything you want. Notice I said “earn”. The all-powerful god has to resort to ad bacullum arguments. That’s how you know someone “deserves”/”earned” whatever it is they are threatening someone for.
smrnda · 07/30/2023 at 10:52 PM
On the whole ‘words words words’ that mean nothing concrete.
This makes me think of businesses. Some end up with very concrete ideas, like ‘sell cheaper streaming subscriptions with more ads’ or ‘serve breakfast all day’. Others are just streams of corporate buzzwords. this is that. they know that something should be done, but there is no clear action that anyone can do that looks right… so they go with the buzzwords.
Even words like ‘nostalgia’ and ‘revival’ are kind of vague. There’s the silly nostalgia of actually believing things used to be better, but there can be an actual meaningful nostalgia for things of the past. People like records, they like retro video gaming. “Revival” seems to refer mostly to a social phenom of Christians getting really excited about Christianity. I’d imagine that ‘revival’ there is a lot like ‘revival’ of various movie genres of franchises. It probably depended a lot on that particular movie. Talking about these 2 things is talking about 2 things that are fuzzy and ill defined to begin with.
ericc · 07/30/2023 at 11:35 PM
𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑆𝑜𝑢𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑛 𝐵𝑎𝑝𝑡𝑖𝑠𝑡 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛’𝑠 (𝑆𝐵𝐶) 𝐸𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑐𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑅𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝐿𝑖𝑏𝑒𝑟𝑡𝑦 𝐶𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑖𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 (𝐸𝑅𝐿𝐶). 𝐸𝑣𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑢𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦, ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑓𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑜𝑤 𝑆𝐵𝐶 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑔𝑜𝑡 𝑠𝑖𝑐𝑘 𝑜𝑓 ℎ𝑖𝑚 𝑡𝑎𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 ℎ𝑖𝑠 𝑗𝑜𝑏 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑙𝑦 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑑𝑟𝑜𝑣𝑒 ℎ𝑖𝑚 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑗𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑗𝑜𝑏, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑟𝑒 𝑑𝑒𝑛𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛.
Because he tried to promote ethics, or because he tried to promote religious liberty? /snark
Honestly it sounds like he’d be a (small) step in the left direction. And I also think that if they listened to him, it might help them. So good thing they won’t.
VelveteenLilith · 07/31/2023 at 3:08 PM
Hey, it’s been a while! Long-time reader, not so much commenter. When I saw the title, I wondered which of the usual suspects (prayer, Jesus harder, repent) it was going to be … ding ding ding, Jesus harder!
I did a double take when you pointed out that he said to stop culture-warrring, because in what world would that actually happen? It makes way more sense that he just wants everyone to do it the way he wants. That C.S. Lewis quote is PERFECT for this situation!
Also – your mention of schisms reminded me of a video series that a chart-making youtube channel made of the different christian groups (there’s even some charts that groups like the Landmark Baptists made!) https://youtu.be/uzuYZi749CM
Captain Cassidy · 07/31/2023 at 6:10 PM
<3 TY for this and glad you're aboard!
Traveller · 07/31/2023 at 5:56 PM
Jesusing harder to reinforce the membership to the group in other words, not to convert heathens, as usual.
Captain Cassidy · 07/31/2023 at 6:18 PM
Businesses can either focus on churn or capturing new customers. It’s exceedingly hard to prioritize both/neither. If they focus on churn, they lose money twice (on both capture and existing accounts, which are supposed to make up for the losses new customers entail) and new customers don’t see stunning new-customer offers so they don’t get captured. If they focus on capturing new customers, existing customers get peevish because they’re not getting anything close to the offers new ones get; they either artificially churn (by quitting their account and somehow starting a new one under another name) or go to a competitor, where they’ll stay until they get peevish at not getting new-customer deals.
Use Jesusy Christianese in place of the business terms, and this situation is exactly what is staring Russell Moore and countless other evangelical leaders in the face. Nobody joins evangelical Christian churches with the goal in mind of helping those leaders capture new customers, since that would mean forgoing the benefits of being an existing account.
In this case, reinforcing group membership is probably the best they can hope to accomplish. It’ll help with churn, at least. They still get new customers, but nowhere near enough to offset existing churn, and it’s a lower capture every year. Focusing like lasers on retention – even if they pretend to be utterly focused on recruitment, as Moore suggests in his Atlantic post – is the best option for them.
Traveller · 08/01/2023 at 3:28 AM
That happens elsewhere for what it seems. All those Jesusbots, as I call them, who are preaching in streets, giving out pamphlets, and repeating again and again the same nonsense -“Jesus loves you”, “this is not a religion”, etc-, act such way instead of helping others even if that seems to be secondary at best to keep themselves in.
I guess the salvation by faith excuses them of working to help others.
OldManShadow · 08/01/2023 at 2:07 PM
It is, as Moore puts it, a “crisis.””
Psst. It’s not a crisis if people refuse to join an evil organization. It’s an awakening.
“The Christian Church still needs an organic movement of people reminding the rest of us that there’s hope for personal transformation…”
No. The Christian church needs angry prophets telling them to stop being evil and learn to do good, to care for the orphans and widows, to fight for justice for the poor and oppressed.
I don’t expect things to end well for those prophets, but such is the life of a prophet sent to proclaim gospel to angry, little fundamentalists.
“A generation ago, one evangelical leader said that the goal of the religious right should be 1950s America, just without the sexism and racism.”
But the sexism and racism are the primary appeal of the 50’s to white Evangelicals. It’s the entire point of the nostalgia trip.
BensNewLogIn · 08/01/2023 at 3:51 PM
Still confused? No, not confused at all. You nailed it earlier in the piece. Just Jesus harder. That’s all he says. Jesus harder.
Speaking of harder, it is very difficult to get this new commenting system to work properly with my iPad. I don’t have the patience protect that doesn’t work. As bad as a viafoura was, it worked, at least badly. This one works barely.
Gwen the Devout, patron saint of atheism · 08/02/2023 at 11:27 AM
I’m confused. I thought that the fundies didn’t get involved with the Republicans until the 1970s, after the Democrats finally decided that having a “big tent” party wasn’t worth being the party of Jim Crow. Nixon saw the political potential in their pathetic struggles to create a third party, and thus was born the Southern Strategy, which bore fruit in the hugely successful use of militarising the drug war, using “zero tolerance” and “three strikes” laws along with the privatisation of prisons (along with tactics like racial profiling) to produce mass incarceration and disenfranchisement of Black Americans (especially men), racist dogwhistles like “welfare queens” and “inner city” and the demonisation of crack while ignoring the powder cocaine that whites commonly used (with laws treating crack as 100 times worse than an equivalent amount of powder cocaine), politicisation of the courts, encouraging whites in their frustrations over the (really rather mild) inconveniences associated with desegregation, and doing all they could to eliminate the social safety net, to begin to undo the effects of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and thus win the undying love of racists and political control of the “solid South.” Am I missing something here that you say they were already in bed in the 1950s?
WCB · 08/03/2023 at 1:50 AM
Racism became part and parcel of GOP conservative politics in the 80’s.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.”
By 1968 you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”
– Lee Atwater
Alexander Lamis interview 1981
WCB · 08/03/2023 at 1:53 AM
And now, today, building on Atwater’s dog whistle racism.
Christopher F. Rufo
@realchrisrufo
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular
with Americans.
2:17 PM . March 17, 2021. Twitter
Captain Cassidy · 07/31/2023 at 6:11 PM
Brilliantly put.
ericc · 08/01/2023 at 7:44 AM
Re: resentment. Short term (days, weeks), you’re right. Long term (months, years), indoctrination often works. The kid made to go to church every Sunday may grow to hate it more and more. Or they may grow to like it and believe. Another mitigating factor is that Christianity often offers its followers a mix of desired and resented things, which makes long-term acceptance easier. Sure you’d prefer not to be *forced* to kiss Aunt Bunny. But if you get candy when you do it, maybe it’s not so bad.
Re: pretense. I’m not so sure. The human mind is a messed up thing. We can sincerely believe things despite all evidence. Sincerely believe things that make no sense. And often develop sincere, heartfelt beliefs (of both the unevidenced and nonsensical variety) in response to self-interest.Many televangelists are cons, no doubt. But I expect your run-of-the-mill evangelical does believe in their own righteousness despite obvious empirical points to the contrary. They do sincerely believe they are doing unto others… while they hate. They do sincerely believe they are pulling the plank out of their own eye as they constantly attack others. They do believe they are humble and following the bible as they demand public group prayer in schools. And they do sincerely believe God exists, there is a heaven, and they are going there (as long as they remain evangelical).
WisdomJusticeLove · 08/01/2023 at 11:41 AM
Agreed. There are people that sincerely believe Santa Claus exists. And i think it’s more carrot than stock. Kissing Aunt B to get candy (carrot) is different than kissing her to avoid a fresh one upside the head (stick). I think the true motivation is reward for loyalty and obedience, like a pet. People love their pets. People have “a Relationship” with their pets. Have a Christian Explain the nature of their relationship. Christians equate religious leaders’ praise to god’s praise. They envy the lap dog position.
Imagine a law school where all you had to do was hate actual competent lawyers and reputable law schools, mainly for having a standard you can’t meet. Imagine the people that couldn’t get into law school loving this law school, mainly because it was Easier (Jedi for more seductive) than the reputable law school. Anyone telling them the law school is of poor quality will be met with derision. What’s most important is that it’s Easy, like claiming to love and a desire to Follow Jesus or believe things. “You got a 35 on the test. You’re smart!!!”
Boring is life without challenge. It would agony existing as an all-powerful being where no task is challenging. Some think Heaven is a life/existence without challenge, where EVERYTHING one desires is handed to them, without work or effort, because god loves their dirty underwear.