TOKENS PODCAST: S5E1
“People are not so afraid of holding a wrong opinion, as they are of holding an opinion alone,” says public theologian Dr. Russell Moore, paraphrasing Soren Kierkegaard. In light of his recent book The Courage to Stand, we discussed the dangers of waging debate for the sake of hostility; the immense value found in cultivating the virtues of courage, prudence, and humility; and why he believes that “only the crucifiable self can find the courage to stand.” And these are not merely academic matters for Russell, having himself experienced trying times of intense public scrutiny from colleagues, friends, enemies, and Donald Trump.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
JOIN TOKENS ON SOCIALS:
YOUTUBE
FACEBOOK
INSTAGRAM
JOIN LEE C. CAMP ON SOCIALS:
FACEBOOK
INSTAGRAM
LEE C. CAMP WEBSITE
TRANSCRIPT
Lee: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Welcome back! This is episode one of season five. And one of my favorite topics discussed with a friend here in Nashville...
When the philosophers and theologians talk about "cardinal" virtues, they're not referring to catholic clergy garbed in red outfits. They mean practices that are central, that are -hinges- or key turning points, for living any sort of life worth living. One of the four classic cardinal virtues is courage.
Today's episode is, by and large, an episode on courage.
Russell: Courage comes down to what is the response to the fear.
Lee: That's Dr. Russell Moore, one of America's leading public theologians, and previously the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and is now the director of the Christianity Today Public Theology Project. In recent years he's had lots of opportunities to face varied fears and challenges, including insults from former President Donald Trump, and the very public decision Russell made to leave the Southern Baptist Convention.
He reports that from the time he was fifteen, he's wondered: is Christianity a fraud, a tool of social manipulation? Or do Christians and Christian churches, really believe the stuff they say they believe?
Russell: I was trained to deal with people who intellectually couldn't accept the supernatural or ethically couldn't accept a Christian morality. But most of what I deal with is not that, it's, it's people saying, I don't think you believe that.
Lee: A compelling, important interview with Russell Moore, coming right up.
INTERVIEW
Lee: Russell Moore, is a public theologian at Christianity Today and director of the Christianity TodayPublic Theology Project. He previously served as the President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, and also at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as dean of the school of theology and professor of theology and ethics.
Welcome Russell Moore.
Russell: Thank you. Good to be with you. I listened to the show and so I'm glad to be here.
Lee: It's great to have you here in the studio, in Nashville. We’re talking today about your most recent book entitled, The Courage to Stand: Facing Your Fear without Losing Your Soul. And it certainly raises one of my favorite topics, that of courage. And, I, years ago in teaching my ethics classes, at the end of the semester, it hit me that I could school my students with excellence to think through issues. But when push came to shove, if they didn't have any courage, my class really wouldn't make any difference in their lives. And so I appreciate that you're pointing us to the deep, moral necessity of courage. You began the book though, I think, in an unexpected place, when you say “what I almost was is a teenage suicide”.
Russell: I went through a really dark depression at about 15 years old. And it really was prompted by looking around in Bible belt Christianity and seeing some really scary things. And then wondering, well, is this a, just a way to sort of maintain Southern culture? My problem wasn't sort of intellectually being able to work through resurrection from the dead or those sorts of things. It was this sense of, wait a minute, am I, am I participating in a fraud? And if I'm participating in a fraud, it's not just that I could say, oh, well, okay, well then I'm moving on to something else. It's, that would mean that everything that I understood about the nature of the universe itself was wrong.
And so it just led to, it led to this, a deep struggle that I came out of and I'm glad that I went through because it, it almost was an inoculation against those sorts of things later on.
Lee: Yeah. You say that during that time you saw some things that were scary. What were some of those things?
Russell: Well, some of them were really almost pedestrian, but, voter guides that would be distributed in, in churches. And so it, it seemed to be that what really mattered was the politics of everything. And that Christianity was secondary to that in a way to support that.
But then some of it was seeing the kind of under the surface violence and racism and knowing when you would hear about situations of what now, we would know of as spiritual and sexual abuse probably, but just sort of whispers about, well, you know, so-and-so at such-and-such church has been involved in something and now he's called to full-time evangelism. And you see somebody just sort of moving on.
James Baldwin talks about in The Fire Next Time about being a teenage preacher and seeing the, the nature of the craft in terms of theater.
So he was talking about, he could, he could see how saying something a certain way is going to prompt an amen as opposed to saying something some other way. And he sorta could see behind the stage to such a degree that it led him to wonder if this all really just is a craft of, of theater.
Some of that was present for me as well, and seeing just some of the manipulative tactics and, and so forth, that could happen in, in church a lot.
Lee: Yeah. It wasn't about questioning the truth of basic Christian convictions as much as it was, if Christianity is getting used in this way and it's all a facade at the cultural level, then the crisis of courage would be how do I go forward in life beyond this point?
Russell: Yes. What does this mean? Or, or should I just avoid those questions and move forward?
And that was not an option for me, just the way I'm wired.
And so it was a sense of what are you, what do you do? And there weren't many people that I could talk to about this.
Lee: Yeah, yeah. Before we go into unpacking some of that, let me ask us to take just a moment to kind of describe courage at an abstract level. You kind of help us see, first of all, that it's unhelpful to think of courage as fearlessness generally, right? So tell us a bit more about that.
Russell: We often assume that courage is fearlessness and, and the images that come to mind are people who are standing up without any sort of hesitation and, doing the right thing. But I think courage most often shows up not like that. It shows up with a particular response to fear.
So if we look for instance at the, what we would call the Christmas narrative, and you see, you see the way that fear shows up there. I mean Linus in the Charlie Brown Christmas special reciting Luke 2 about the shepherds and the glory of the Lord shone round about them when they were so afraid. And the old king James, which is the best way, there’s just no other way to put Luke 2. And there there's a, a fear that is happening that really is necessary to the response. Whereas you have a fear also that comes in with Herod. When he hears about this, he's afraid of losing his throne and losing his, his status. And he responds to that with violence rather than with awe and with worship.
So I think courage comes down to what is the response to the fear.
How does one start to see oneself and one's responsibilities before God into one's community and, and in various ways, rather than this sense of bravado. But when in reality, a lot of times what we see is a lack of confidence and a, a gnawing fear that manifests itself as what seems to be certainty and lashing out at the other.
And that's really not courageous.
Lee: Yeah. I like the way, you know, Aristotle, when he talks about virtues always points to most, all of them, not all of them, but most all of them as a mean between two associated vices, right? So with courage it’s either a vice of deficiency or vice of excess or the vice of deficiency with regard to courage would be cowardice.
And the vice of excess would be fear of foolhardiness.
Courage is particularly concerned with fear. And as you said, it's the right response to fear in that context.
Russell: Yeah. And usually that comes down to understanding one's own point of vulnerability. So there are going to be people who have more of a tendency toward cowardice and withdrawal in the face of fear.
And there are other people who are going to have more of a temptation toward recklessness or, or combativeness. And so sometimes if we, don't really take the time to understand, well, how do I usually respond to this? Yeah. Then you can end up, then you can end up, in a place where you're you're cowardly and you don't know it because it doesn't look like the cowardice you've experienced somewhere else.
Lee: Right, right, right. Yeah. And I think once I started investigating this in my own self, I realized that there were certain areas of my life I could be cowardly and other areas of my life I could be foolhardy. And that, you know, I, I could, I would find myself sometimes with regard to personal conflict, being cowardly and with regard to professional conflict being combative or unnecessarily reckless in saying certain things in public.
Another thing I've done with my students in this sort of regard is I've really pushed them to try to take seriously the notion that courage. If you go back to Aquinas, you know, the four Cardinal virtues, courage, prudence, temperance, and justice, that those are the four that we can actually train ourselves.
So I tell them, you know, practice every day doing something hard because that is training in courage and, you know, to navigate facing something that prompts some sort of anxiety or fear in us.
Russell: Yeah.
Lee: Yep. Yep. Yeah and so that also points to, you have a fairly lengthy conversation about fight or flight and that, that sometimes you need to run. Sometimes you need to stay and face the conflict, but again, it, it depends upon the personality.
It depends upon the circumstances, which goes back to that reminded me of the Catholic philosopher, Joseph Pieper, who in his book, The Four Cardinal Virtues says there is no virtue apart from prudence. We always have to be figuring out the circumstances, the particularities, and navigate those. But how are ways that you've seen that to be true in navigating the prudence piece?
Russell: Well, one of the things I think that's difficult there is that some people some people want there to be an easy formula for prudence. So you can, you can walk through these steps and then know for certain whether withdrawal or engagement would be the right issue. And, and that's just not how it works.
So you learn prudence in, in a thousand small situations, and…
Lee: I think even Aquinas gives like eight different potential characteristics even of prudence, right?
Russell: Yeah. And then, and you're going to get it wrong. There are going to be many times when you're going to get that wrong and you learn from it and you recalibrate.
But, but having the sense of, recognizing, paying attention, I think would be the most important, paying attention to what's the context, who am I, who are the people that I'm, I'm dealing with. And we all really have to do that. I have five sons I can think of two of them who have completely different sorts of personalities. One who's more prone toward worrying and who wants to see everything in kind of black and white categories and another who's very chill and who, just his strategies, everything will work out. If I treated them the same then I would end up, it would be, it would be a disaster. So you have to know who am I dealing with?
What's the, what are the set of contexts are around me? And then proceed.
Lee: Yeah, so going back to what you said a moment ago, about courage, it's not this kind of “triumphalistic” bravado, and then you have a chapter in which you explore particularly the way in which following a crucified Messiah has to inform courage. And you have this line only the “crucifiable” self, which I don't remember ever having heard the word crucifiable but I really, I will be, I'll be using that one.
That's very helpful. Only the crucifiable self can find the courage to stand. So unpack that for us.
Russell: Eugene Peterson, in one of his books, he talks about the exoskeleton and he says, look at a crab, for instance, that has the skeletal systems on the outside.
And there's a measure of protection that's there, but then you look at a higher mammal, a human being or any other higher mammal, the skeletal system is on the inside, which brings a unique form of vulnerability that doesn't exist with the crab, but also brings the possibility of a connection and relationship and development that wouldn't be possible there.
And so I think there's a, a way to try to build exoskeletons around ourselves to protect ourselves from getting hurt that can just end up Separating us out from love. So for instance, I've worked for years in areas of orphan care, and foster care and adoption. And one of the things that I would find is that sometimes people would move from prudence towards this sort of blueprint idea of, of getting rid of risk.
So someone would say, well, before we move forward with opening our home for foster care, for instance, we want to make sure that there's no risk involved here. And I mean, there's certainly a place for looking through and saying, let's, let's minimize risk. But what I would have to come in and say is when you're dealing with human relationships when you're dealing with love, there is no way to evacuate to risk.
If you, if you love you are by definition, opening yourself up to be vulnerable, to hurt. And sometimes it's easier to cultivate this sense of not caring of a kind of numbness in order to avoid being hurt.
Lee: You know, there's been lots of increasing conversation around Jesus as a practitioner of a certain wisdom.
And I do find a lot of that kind of construct pretty compelling. And I think, I think one reason I find it compelling is because it has a sort of way to cut through religious speak or pious speak and say, what you see here is someone who is deeply engaged in the question of how does one live well.
And, and in the context of this conversation, I was thinking about the passage out of Hebrews, where it says that through, through his crucifixion, he freed all those who, all their lives, were held in slavery to the fear of death. And that if we, if we take this Jesus story seriously, we see someone who had such immense courage that he was able to be crucifiable, right? And the sort of immense moral courage that can be in one, if we're willing to be crucified, right? Of course, there also can be the kind of unhelpful, deeply unhealthy martyrdom complex again, on the other side of that, right. The desire to be persecuted, that can be very, very ugly. But nonetheless, the sort of strength of character of saying, this could come to me too.
And then the sort of freedom in that.
Russell: Yeah. And you, you think about the contrast even at the crucifixion. Simon Peter acts in a way that culturally would seem to be courageous. Taking up the sword, attacking, but that's, that's actually a manifestation of cowardice. And then Peter does, does both the fight and the flight. He fights, and then he, and then he runs away.
That's not what, that's not what courage is. That courage is actually this sort of combination of anguish and tranquility in, in the life of Jesus. You have someone who's not numb to the realities. He's, he's crying out in Gethsemane. And someone who has such a sense of himself and such a sense of his trust in God that he's able to with a, a tranquility to stand before Pilate.
I mean, the, those two things, they seem contradictory, but they're, they're integrated in the life of Jesus in a way, that's that's striking.
Lee: Opposite sides of the same coin there. It seems that a lot of your book is an acknowledgement at some place short of crucifixion, we might say, and that is that, for a lot of us, being middle-aged past my midlife crisis some years ago, I'm kind of at the place these days I think where sometimes I'll say to my friends, I think in, in good faith, the fear of death is not the thing that necessarily worries me these days. But what you point to is an acknowledgement that we're grappling very often with the fear of disapproval in this life. Right? And you say early in the book, I want to be the kind of Christian who can stand without the fear of being out of step with whatever group of people I'm looking to for approval. And that reminded me of, one of my, one of my favorite authors Dag Hammarskjöld in his book Markings where he has this line, where he says, maturity among other things, a new lack of self-consciousness, the kind you can only attain when you have become entirely indifferent to yourself through an absolute assent to your fate. He who has placed himself in God's hand, stands free vis-a-vis men. He is entirely at his ease with them because he has granted them the right to judge. And so I heard a, heard a resonance between, you know, that quote I carry around from Dag Hammarskjöld and what you're pointing to, but, but unpack this sort of dealing with the fear of disapproval.
Russell: Well, I think that most of, most of what we grapple with when it comes to fear comes to that, to the question of. Kierkegaard said, people don't fear holding a wrong opinion. They fear holding opinion and opinion alone. And that's certainly true. And there are good reasons for that. We, we want to be protected by the, the herd and by the people.
Lee: And evolutionary instinct to be a part of the crowd, to be a part of the…
Russell: Well, yes. And Jaron Lanier, the, the tech writer in his little book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.
One of the things that he talks about is the lone wolf switch and the pack switch. And he says both of those are necessary because there are times when you have, you cannot be thinking, you're in a war or, you're in the middle of a fire. Everyone has to just sort of merge into one high of mind at that moment.
Problem is that there are so many pressures to turn that switch all the time, which actually leads to it leads to the degradation of the hive or of the pack, however you want to, you want to talk about it. Now, Wendell Berry talks about wisdom being found on the margins. And he talks about it in a way that I think is compelling because it's not about individualism. It’s not about well you can't judge me. I'm off on my own. It's this sense that the person has to go out into the desert in order to figure out what's real and what's not, to be able then to return the, the rest of the community in order to serve. And I think that that just manifests itself over and over and over again.
Where in scripture, for instance, you will have people who are profoundly lonely but the loneliness is not a negation of community. It is for the sake of a future community. So I think of, there was a friend of mine who was talking to me one time about his father who had been the pastor of a church in Mississippi, in the Jim Crow era, and he had integrated the church or tried to integrate the church. The deacons were not happy with this, the KU Klux Klan, these people were not happy with this.
And he ended up getting fired. And he had to move. His son was in high school. They had to move go somewhere else. He had to take work cleaning hospitals at night, so forth. So when the dad was dying, he said to his son, he said, you know, I just kept sort of going through all his regrets. And he said, I'm really sorry that I had to just disrupt your life senior year in high school, and you lost all your friends because I was fired. And the son said, dad, you, you gained your son in that moment because I was able to realize this isn't a job for him. This is, this is something else. He said, it completely changed my life. Well, that was an experience of great loneliness. It would have been easier just to adapt to Jim Crow ecosystem for him.
But in order to do that, he would have cut himself off from multiple communities, the community of those who didn't have power in that moment. And then also his own son. I think that shows up in many of our lives often.
Lee: Yeah. That's really helpful. That we go through these periods of loneliness, potential isolation for future community, or maybe in, in worst case scenarios for the individual, it may be for a future community that they don't even get to enjoy themselves.
You have a section where you talk about gatekeepers, those who are determining who's in and who's out, and it does strike me that people like you and people like me we have this sort of professional danger because we, I mean, we kind of are the scribes and the Pharisees, right? We get a salary check for that. And, and yet at the same time in the kind of work we do, you're also having to deal with other sorts of gatekeepers who they're getting their checks for doing their, their, their stuff. And so how do you think about navigating that sort of, in your life? You're both pushing against certain gatekeepers and also represent being a particular kind of gatekeeper?
Russell: Well, I think that a certain kind of gatekeeping is of course necessary. I mean, without it what one ends up with is a situation where, where we say, you know doesn't matter whether somebody is practicing domestic violence or practicing love, it's all just a version of the same thing. No, you have to say,
Lee: Yeah. That the gate is an element of the claim that every community requires boundaries.
Russell: Yes. Every Community requires boundaries. The question though is what those boundaries are for. And when the boundary itself becomes the goal. That then becomes a very dangerous place to be. And that can show up in almost any community.
I've, I've seen that in my own life in terms of a kind of hyper fundamentalism, within the church, but it can show up in, in any community, in any place on the religious or not religious or ideological sorts of spectrums. John Stott, the Anglican pastor from London, used to talk about how in biology and the same thing is true in history that you have lumpers and splitters.
So the, the lumpers are those who say, here's, here's the commonalities between these different groups of, of creatures and then the splitters. Here's how you differentiate between these, these different creatures. Both of those things are necessary, but that within a religious context, if you go too far toward the lumpers, then what you're really saying is that there's, there's nothing really real here that holds us in common.
We're just sort of describing the fact that we're all here and then you end up with a loss of identity, but if you have too much of the splitting, then you end up with an ever narrowing that as he puts it, can narrow the elect down to be small enough to fit on Huckleberry Finn's raft.
And that is, that is certainly the case. And, some of, often, I think where that comes from is sort of along the lines. I'm on university campuses all the time. And I'm talking to atheist students all the time. Usually those atheist students are civil and genuinely curious. Sometimes you will have an angry atheist who's really, red faced and upset. I have never seen one of those situations yet where that was not someone who was coming out of a religious context.
And so they weren't really talking to me. They really weren't talking to Christianity. What they're talking to is a mom or a dad or an aunt or a pastor or someone who had harmed them. And and they're, they're saying I want to get completely away from that.
And it works the other way as well. So you can have people who, you see this a lot in churches, for instance, that have split over some sort of, theological or at least sometimes allegedly theological sort of issue. What they're constantly ending up doing, I think, sometimes, even when the splits legitimate, there's a sense of the fight as a demonstration of conviction. And then once those issues are resolved in order to feel as though one really believes something, one has to constantly be fighting. And so it's an ever narrowing down of who the people are who are to be fought. And that, that becomes self-destructive.
Lee: This reminded me of an allusion Russell made in his book to Walker Percy's book The Moviegoer. The main character Binx Bolling speaks of going to the library, reading all the political rags. He says: "Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upside down: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive."
Russell: And that's what I think is at the root of most of, the, the sort of hatred and division that, that we see, is that there's a, there's a numbness in people. And a sense of wanting to feel alive that can show up with an activated limbic system.
Lee: You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We’re most grateful to have you joining us.
This is our interview with Dr. Russell Moore. Lot's more coming up in part two on politics, fear, and faith: including getting tweeted about by Donald Trump, and a decision to leave the Southern Baptist Convention.
HALFWAY POINT
Lee: Welcome back to Tokens and our interview with Dr. Russell Moore on his book The Courage to Stand.
A lot of the material in your book is, you know, I, I know you just well enough to know, and we've had just enough conversations to know that there's, there's lots of stuff that I could read between the linesin your book, right? And so for example, in a letter that was leaked, that you had written to some of your board members at a previous organization, you said that you had faced constant threats from white nationalists and white supremacists, including within the convention of your denomination. So what does that look like? What, what did, what did that, those particular experiences look like? And both not just in the level of particularities about how a threat came, but how did you end up processing that sort of threat?
Russell: Well, the more extreme cases were the easier because when you have someone saying, you know, something along the lines of, if we don't do something to put black people in their place, they're going to burn all our cities down.
I mean, you can recognize that immediately for what it is. But it's, it's different when you have sort of the, the charge that says, why are you talking about these things? That's divisive. Often what people would do is to say here's the cause, whatever the cause is. And if you, if you talk about these things, you're sacrificing the cost.
So for instance I was at one point talking about the grief being experienced by black and brown evangelical Christians, as a result of the way that the concerns that many of them were raising about the rhetoric of Donald Trump were simply waved away by white evangelicals of that doesn't matter when people would say, well, yes, but if you talk about that, then what you're doing is you are sacrificing the lives of unborn children because our side quote, unquote is not going to win.
And then that's going to have these, these consequences. Or, if you talk about these issues of race, and often it would come to race. What you're going to do is to create division that then will end up with missionaries, unable to go out onto the field. Even though the missionaries were the very ones who were more concerned about these issues than anyone else, because they're seeing the way it shows up and the way that what's happening in the United States, and then is exported around the world. But those sorts of things, there's a way where I thought about this. When I was talking to someone not long ago, who had served in a completely different context and didn’t have anything to do with the church.
And she was talking about being in these meetings in a really toxic sort of corporate culture, where she would look around the room and, and say, does anyone else realize how crazy this is? What we're talking about? She said and everyone would just seem so calm and she would think I must be the crazy one.
And then afterwards she would talk to a colleague and say, now, wait a minute. I'm just checking myself. That meeting was insane, right? Oh yeah, totally.
But you, you do get to the point where you start you start asking. I mean, gaslighting is a real thing. It really does happen. And you get to the point where you start to, to constantly question yourself, even though, you're not the one who's changed in that, in that respect.
Lee: Yeah. In 2015, when Donald Trump begins to gain some traction in his campaigning, you began to be increasingly noted as one of the few prominent evangelicals in the country to raise questions about Donald Trump. I think at one point you, you spoke of the dangers of following an arrogant huckster like Donald Trump. In response to which Trump tweeted Russell Moore is truly a terrible representative of evangelicals and all of the good they stand for, a nasty guy with no heart.
Russell: I have that tweet framed on my wall. I really do.
Lee: So what was that like when that first starts happening, in which you become aware of the fact that you're becoming one of the few evangelicals who speaking up and saying, I'm pretty concerned about this?
Russell: Well, at the beginning I, I was one of the few speaking up about it, but I wasn't, but there weren't very many people who disagreed with me, at least in terms of the way that they were speaking behind closed doors.
As a matter of fact, there are very few exceptions, if we look at the people who are on television defending President Trump, who haven't said the exact same thing that I was saying behind closed doors, and who had the exact same concerns. I've even been on, a television programs, debating this issue. And during the commercial break, whoever I'm talking dialoguing with is commiserating about how awful and how, and then as soon as the lights go back on, you know, right back to defending this.
So it, at the, at the beginning, it wasn't, it wasn't what it ended up being, which was more and more people who were saying, we, we have to adapt to this. And one of the things that was concerning to me, I think it may have even been on your, your podcast that Kristin Du Mez, was saying something along the lines of, you can see Russell Moore going through the stages of grief in 2016, which, starts with, well, evangelicals aren't supporting Donald Trump. At the time that was true. And then, well, church-going evangelicals, aren't supporting Donald Trump. At the time that was true. And then while there are evangelical supporting Donald Trump, I don't agree with that, but they're, they're not approving of this. They're making a lesser of two evils, a sort of argument. At the time that was true. And then eventually gets to, okay, here we are. But I think what worried me is that I knew all along, just on the basis of the way that political culture works in the United States, across the ideological spectrum, that the people who were saying, well, I don't approve of this and this and this, but I think this is better than the alternative. And let's, let's go with this and then let's hold him accountable. I knew that was not likely to happen because, there's just so much pressure in this sort of political environment to find an avatar and then to adapt to that avatar.
So there, there were very, very few people, who would say I'm kind of for Donald Trump, I voted for him, but I'm going to be the one standing up and saying, this is wrong. It just didn't didn't happen very much. And that's what, that's what worried me. And especially because this wasn't a figure that was unknown to us. This is someone we all had, experienced, over the years. I remember sort of a key moment for me was in 2014, I think it was, during the Ebola scare, when he had said that, missionaries, overseas who had been working with Ebola patients, shouldn't be allowed back into the country for treatment and said something along the lines of, they knew what they were doing when they went and they should bear the consequences, which was in my mind, deeply evil.
And then there would be moments such as, I mean, the access Hollywood tapes. Should have been no surprise to anybody paying attention to who had listened to the Howard Stern show. But I thought at the time, okay, well now people are able to see and they'll at least understand what the problem is here. And what happened was that people went quiet for a few days and sort of watched how things shook out and then simply adapted back as though nothing ever happened.
That's, that's life in the United States right now.
Lee: So how do you make sense of that progression? How do you frame or understand the ways in which it seems as if so much of evangelicalism has capitulated in this cultural moment?
Russell: Well, I think there are different factors that are coming together.
And, and one of those factors is. I remember when I, I first was elected president of the ERLC. I said to my wife, if you ever hear me say the words, this is the most important presidential election in our lifetimes, tell somebody to come take the keys away, because I have heard that every four years of my life. So there's a sense of existential threat where what has to happen is, and elections are framed this way, where it's either exuberant triumph, we win and we permanently win, or it's, it's complete annihilation and we have lost and we have permanently lost. That's not the way elections actually work, but it's, it's the way that it seems to people. And part of that is because in order to mobilize people and especially in a social media age, the way that you have to do that, you can't do that with a sense of, look, let's talk honestly about where the real concerns are and where they're, where they're not.
Instead you have to come in to say someone is after you and they are going to destroy you, or we're on the cusp of of total victory, come in and get involved in it. That just becomes part of the culture of the country. And so then when you add to it, this sense of fear, of. You know, I, I've had people, there are legitimate, many legitimate religious liberty concerns in the country, but I've had Christians talk about being on the cusp of being put into re-education camps, evangelical Christians. And, I mean, that's, that's not going to happen, but if you say, well, wait a minute, that's not going to happen.
The response is, oh, you must not be concerned about what's happened. Well, you can be concerned and to say, that's not that's not a realistic, a realistic prospect. So it's just, it's culturally where things have gone. And then you add to it, you add to it an evangelical culture that has, has focused more and more on what seems immediately real. And what you see, what seems immediately real to people is whatever the current culture war or, or political conflict is that seems more present than the communion of saints and being United to Christ. I mean, that, that just, it it's more immediate.
You know, in all of the conflicts that go on in churches almost never is there a conflict over the Trinity or over the deity of Christ?
It's, it's usually over some question of political identity or cultural identity, because that's what, that's what American life is like right now.
Lee: Right. Yeah.
So going back to, to earlier parts of conversation, most, most proximate, your observation about the mechanisms of marketing and social media that are kind of precipitating the fight or flight response in us.
And then going back to the notion of courage that it may be that what courage requires of us at the kind of time we find ourselves in is a simple, quiet capacity to engage people in honest conversation, across divides and differences.
Russell: Yeah.
And that's very, very difficult to do because the incentive structures are all in the other direction because what's happened is, I told someone a couple years ago, working in Washington and working relating to government and then relating to the church. I said, you know, the most important thing I ever did was serve early on in youth ministry because that's what everything is. If you know how to get a group of teenagers on a church van and get them to summer youth camp, that is it because it all is the same reality.
Of who doesn't want to be seen sitting next to whom and who really wants to be seen sitting next to whom. And who's mad at somebody because they're envious of them and above all it's the same middle school dynamic.
Lee: There’s Washington DC.
Russell: It goes, it’s Washington, DC, it's the First Baptist Church, it’s the First Christian Church. I mean it's, it's all of that, manifested itself in that way. So it's really hard when what you're wanting to do is to not so much talk to this person and get to know this person, but asking, what is it saying about me that I'm talking to this person. It seems to me that is one of the most of many, but one of the most striking things about Jesus is he has absolutely no concern for the way that his his speaking to and engaging with a person would reduce his social status or his, his place in the tribe. That is completely absent from the motivation there.
And that's why I think it's, it's very difficult, but that's exactly what, what has to happen. Because, I mean, we, we have maybe more ability to debate than at any time in human history. And there is no debating going on.
Whether it's online or on cable news or in, maybe in a school board meeting, nobody's talking to the other person, right?
They're not really trying to persuade that person. As a matter of fact, in many cases, they wouldn't know what to do. If the person said, hmm, you have a good point. Instead, they're looking behind them at the tribe back there to say, you know, what do you think? I'm showing you that I belong to you because I'm saying these things and that that starts a cycle that becomes very difficult.
Lee: Obviously it's been quite public that in the last year you've made the decision to leave the Southern Baptist Convention. How have these issues of courage, discernment, prudence played a part in that major decision for you?
Russell: Well, I think the way they played they played a part is the absence of those things, that the quest for those things.
Because, I spent the last five years, I was telling a journalist a few weeks ago who, because I was I was really worried about something that was, I don't even remember what it was, but something that was going on in the Southern Baptist Convention and I was hoping that they, would, they would do something healthy there.
And he said, why do you care? And I said, because I love those people. I mean, that's, I said, and, and the truth of it is as a 95% of them are fantastic people. The overwhelming majority of them really are good people. I learned how to love God and neighbor from them.
So I mean, my whole identity was from the very beginning. I've been in a Southern Baptist church nine months before I was born and ever since, and not just, not just in a Southern Baptist church, but in the, at least in the time when I was coming of age, that was a key part of your entire identity. With a lot of the you know, sort of triumphalistic bravado that comes along with that. That the greatest missionary force since the apostle Paul. And the the attitude was never that we were the only Christians, it was, there are many other Christians, but bless their hearts.
You know, if only they could, they would be one of us. So we should really take that, to have gratitude, and bear the noblesse so that, that you don't, you don't get out of that really easily. And part of what was going through my mind was a sense of, a sense of guilt, because I felt like if I were to even consider leaving that I would be abandoning some great people who have loved me. And a sense of shame of the need to walk away from it. And the loss of identity, all of those things. It was, it is a very difficult thing. And so I was almost for a while in a state of internally of paralysis where I'm thinking, I don't want to make the wrong decision here.
And the only way that I really came to make that decision is because at the, at the beginning I would listen to the counsel that I was giving to other people.
So for instance, one day when I was about to leave, a pastor had been one of my students called me and said, I'm thinking about leaving my church. And I said why?
And he started talking about these people who are really doing some awful things to him. And I said, well, how many people are we talking about? 10 people. And I said, okay, that's 10 people in a 400-member congregation. Why would you leave the 390 people because of these 10 people just to go somewhere else where there'll be another 10 people?
And so I would hear that and say, you know, don't, don't give up, you've got to persevere through this, until I eventually realized what's happening is that I'm going to end up not being able to carry out what I committed to do. When I walked down the aisle at my Southern Baptist Church and said the Lord's calling me to ministry, wouldn't be able to do that because, you know, with the sorts of psychological warfare that I was dealing with, again, with a tiny minority of people.
And every time that the big group, I mean, when the Southern Baptist Convention meeting would get together, they could not have affirmed or encouraged me more, never never did they do anything in those meetings that was anything less than totally encouraging, but then they would leave. And so then you would have what would happen in between meetings.
There would have been no way for me to say, hey everybody, let me tell you about what just happenedhere.
About the eight-hour heresy trial that I just had to go through. You can't do that without creating a problem for them in a way where. I eventually said, it's going to, it's starting to show up in my mind, where I'm saying, here are the things that I need to do. Do I have it in the bank, sort of emotionally, spiritually, to have six months of trench warfare over this or my team to have that? Sometimes it would. And sometimes I would say yes, it does. And sometimes, but, but the fact that I would have to sit and and go through that calculation. I mean, I remember one time saying, and in some context, somebody was asking about alcohol and I said, look, I'm not, I don't drink.
It's not, because I think that people who have a glass of wine are sinning. I just think this is a wisdom issue in this context. I ended up in a two-hour meeting with someone outraged, because I said that. That I wouldn't say if you have a glass of wine, you're sinning. Most people, you know, if I had come out and said to most people in the SBC, this is what my day is spent doing today.
They would not have agreed with that. They would not have wanted that to happen, but it would have, they would have now been their problem in a way where I said, you know, I need to, I need to really, in order to carry out the work that God's given me to do, including for them, I have to do it in a different place.
And that was, I sought a lot of counsel during this time. And one of the key moments, because Seth Godin is a figure who's not a Christian. He's meant a lot to me in terms of the leadership principles and cultural analysis that he does.
Lee: And you’ve quoted him several times in this book.
Russell: Yeah, and he talks about the depth, where he says, you know, there comes a point where in everything you, you come on this time of turbulence and hardship and people just quit when if they had just, if they just persevered through it. They would have come to the other end. Well, I, I didn't want to do that. And so I remember talking to someone and saying, I just, I don't want to regret making the wrong decision.
And he said, do you really think you're being rash? And he then said, let me say to you as somebody who, he's Presbyterian, he said, but let me say to you, there is no body in the world who, if you leave is going to say, well, why is he he being that impetuous, the question is going to be, why did you stay so long at that.
And, yeah. So, it, but it's when you're in it, I mean, it's, it's easier. It's much, much easier when I'm talking to someone and saying, here's how I see your situation. There's a lot of second guessing involved when it’s oneself.
Lee: Yeah. Yeah. So, so much of your story and stories that you shared with us do lead us back to where you were 15 year old, right?
That this fear of Christianity potentially being a tool of power or being used as a tool of power. And you say in the book, and I've heard you say in a number of interviews that these days, you're encountering young people who are not saying they don't believe what the church claims, but that they don't believe the church believes what the church claims.
And near the end of the book, you say, North American Christianity is sick and weak and doesn't even know it.
As a 15-year old boy, you know, you found ways to push on through, and yet, if anything, the anxiety or the fear that you had as a 15-year old are all the more acute today. And so how do you for yourself and how do you encourage others to say, this is, this is a fear that we're called to keep pushing through, and that we're called to keep going forward.
How do we go about doing that, you think in a constructive way, what would be some particulars? Kind of as a close here to think about, how do we keep doing this in a constructive, beautiful way that points to some sort of goodness and truth?
Russell: Well, I mean, I think about, and you're right, I'm acutely aware constantly of the 15-year old Russell Moore’s who are out there regardless of their ages or where they're coming from, but who are having that same, that same sense of crisis.
That's, you know, I've spent my whole life talking to those people and that's who I'm, that's who I want to give the rest of my life talking to. But I think about what it was that actually pulled me out of that. And some of it was very local and some of it was not local at all. So the, the local part of it was growing up in a context where I think probably more important than anything was liturgy.
But then also, what really pulled me out of this was, to realize all of the people who are overhearing conversations and, and what they're, what they're doing is they're not engaging in arguments at all.
They're just stepping back and watching. And, and I know that I was, I was watching people in my home congregation. And seeing the way that people would love a spouse through Alzheimer's or deal with a cancer diagnosis or help the family whose house burned down. And all of that is, is sort of going into the mind and the heart to say, here's a moment to see is this real?
Lee: I've been talking to Russell Moore, public theologian at Christianity Today. Director of the Christianity Today Public Theology Project. Thank you, Russell. And for your time today, but more for your, your work and your witness in the world. Thank you.
Russell: Well, likewise. Thanks for having me.
Lee Camp: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life.
If you would like to hear more conversations about the ways the American church has intersected with American politics, then check out our episode with Robert P. Jones, author of White Too Long; as well as season three's episode with Kristin Du Mez, which Russell cited in today's interview, on her best-selling book "Jesus and John Wayne."
Remember to subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your favorite podcasts. And if you've got feedback, email us at podcast@tokensshow.com.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Ashley Bayne, Tom Anderson, and Cariad Harmon. Music beds by Zach and Maggie White, and Blue Dot Sessions.
Thanks for listening.
The Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.