The Evangelical Critics of the Evangelical Majority: On Russell Moore’s “Losing Our Religion”
There is a new divide among evangelicals; rather than between progressives and conservatives, it is among conservative evangelicals. The evangelical majority does well to heed its evangelical critics.
There is a new divide among evangelicals.
Over the course of the 2010s, a new division arose over matters, not of theology, but of culture, morality, and politics.
A major inflection point for that divide was the 2016 presidential election. The majority of evangelical Christians continued to vote Republican in that election, in spite of the Republican candidate’s low moral character and nativist political resonances. Many evangelical leaders even leaped to the candidate’s defense in ways that are, to say the least, distasteful.
While there has long been an evangelical left, a new group of evangelical leaders have joined in critiquing the evangelical majority for its support of Donald Trump. Like the “Never Trump” conservatives (and in David French’s case, being one of those), they did not break with the evangelical majority because of political progressivism but political and theological principle.
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The New Evangelical Divide Is Cultural, Not Just Political
But the divide within evangelicalism was not solely or primarily about presidential politics. It coincides with several ecclesiastical and cultural divides, on which people often accept a whole set of views on one side or the other.
For example, another divide concerns the role of women in the church and in marriage. While evangelical complementarianism, of the kind associated with The Gospel Coalition, had always distinguished itself from traditionalist patriarchy, a new round of evangelical egalitarians began to arise out of the ranks of these complementarians and criticize them as, in principle, the same. Aimee Byrd is an example, with her Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. Rick Warren is another example, though not quite of the Gospel Coalition variety. Russell Moore is another. (Evangelical Twitter - I mean, “X” - is also full of these.)1
Given people’s views on one or both of these two matters, it is often possible to predict their views on each of the following matters:
1) Abuse in the Church: Is the commission and cover-up of sexual abuse the most common problem, or are false accusations against men also a concern?
2) Race, Critical Race Theory, and Wokeness: Is the contemporary discourse on race reflective of progressive politics infiltrating institutions including the church, or are white evangelicals complicit with institutional racism?
3) Homosexuality: Is the “LGBTQ+ movement” coming for us, even under the guise of Revoice and Side B, or has the church indeed failed to serve Christians who are gay, failing to distinguish its adherence to a biblical ethic from homophobia?
4) Purity Culture: Has the church enforced an unhealthy legalism surrounding modesty and sexual purity, or are morays just continuing to unravel around us, and we are due for a new round of purity culture?
A good locus of this new evangelical-critical perspective is the podcast, “The Holy Post,” of Phil Vischer, Bob the Tomato himself. “The Holy Post” is a valuable example because, if there is one person who is unavoidably an evangelical, it is the founder and creator of VeggieTales. Nevertheless, as a creator of pop Christian culture for the evangelical majority, Vischer has had an evolution toward an evangelical-critical perspective.
The Evangelical Majority and Its Evangelical Critics
While, thanks to our politically partisan culture, this divide often tracks politics, it is not best conceived as between progressive and conservative evangelicals. In important part, it is between conservative evangelicals, with a faction of conservative evangelicals taking a line of critique that has historically been associated with the political left, both evangelical and non-evangelical.
The divide has to do with the alignment in the U.S. between evangelicals and cultural and political conservatism. The majority position in evangelicalism favors this alignment, while this new faction is critical of the alignment. For this reason, I dub the two camps “majority evangelicals” and “critical evangelicals.”
Currently, in evangelical public discourse, I primarily see critical and majority evangelicals engaging in the following ways. The critical evangelicals accuse the evangelical majority and its intellectual leaders and defenders for being morally judgmental and beholden to power, thereby compromising the church’s witness. On the other hand, defenders of the evangelical majority attack the critical evangelicals for throwing the majority under the bus and behaving in ways indistinguishable from the non-Christian critics of American evangelicals.
Neither of these positions seems completely compelling to me.
The best posture, it seems to me, would be one that accepted and learned from the critique of the critical evangelicals, modifying without abandoning the evangelical majority and its basic moral compass. Frankly, this will be unsatisfying to the intelligentsia on both sides. The critical evangelicals question whether the evangelical majority any longer has a moral compass.2 The majority evangelicals question whether the critical evangelicals are even evangelicals anymore (and not incipient “ex-vangelicals”).3 Both of these perspectives are one-sided.
The Psychology of the Other Side: Aaron Renn versus Russell Moore
Both sides of the evangelical divide have a mistaken psychology of the other side. The critical evangelicals accuse the majority evangelicals of having entirely ideologically capitulated to existing power structures and right-wing ideology. This capitulation is, in turn, controlled by bad motives, like a lack of concern for the oppressed and the desire for power and sexual control of women. The majority evangelicals, especially the majority evangelical intellectuals, accuse critical evangelicals of having ideologically capitulated to existing power structures and left-wing ideology. They also allege that this capitulation is controlled by bad motives, namely, lack of concern for and loyalty to the majority of evangelicals, desire for status, and conformity to the world.
As we will see, it is entirely possible that there are some on both sides of whom these descriptions are accurate. (In fact, there are such people on both sides.) But I warrant that the main defenders of each side are not those people. Among the intelligent and conscientious defenders of each view, the predominant source of their beliefs and commitments are experience and Christian teaching. In particular, on the points that differentiate each side from the other, it is experience that is the dominant distinguishing factor.
Russell Moore, for example, in his latest book, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, details his experience of being encouraged to assist in covering up sexual abuse within the Southern Baptist Convention. The same crop of leaders that were interested to cover up such abuse and maintain power were vocal defenders of Donald Trump, in spite of his moral failings. Accordingly, when Moore says that the evangelical defense of Donald Trump is morally compromised and arises from bad motives, he indeed has reason to think that that is the case. He is not making it up. We can question whether the mixed motives of these compromised leaders characterize the majority of evangelicals, or even just those evangelical intellectuals sympathetic to the political right. But Moore cannot be accused of being entirely wrong or of being motivated only by irrational partisanship.
Aaron Renn has recently critiqued Moore’s stance in Losing Our Religion. Renn writes:
The book is a fundamentalist style denunciation of his evangelical opponents along with a victimology about the way Moore says he was mistreated by them.
Somewhat unusually for a Christian book, Moore spends time describing the way he believes he was mistreated by others, as well as the shocking behavior he says he witnessed while in the SBC.
While I have appreciated Renn’s analysis of evangelicalism, including of the new divide within it, I find this critique disappointing, as several of his phrases discount Moore’s experiences.
The accusation that Moore’s account is a “victimology” discounts its accuracy. But the qualifications that Moore “says he was mistreated,” or “believes” things about what he “says he witnessed” discount what Moore experienced. While Renn goes on to admit that some (but not all) of what Moore says about conservative evangelicals is true, there is no need to qualify the stories Moore relates. It is not plausible that Moore made this up, which I do not think Renn would allege.
I agree with Renn that Moore’s conclusions on the basis of his experience are not entirely accurate. And I do not think that Moore came to these imperfect conclusions about the evangelical majority on account of false memories. Instead, Moore is guilty of generalizing from a certain segment of Republican-aligned evangelical leadership to the evangelical majority en masse. If the subtitle of his book read, “An Altar Call for a Plurality of Southern Baptist Leadership and the Laity who Trust Them,” it might be more accurate. I don’t mean that the error Moore diagnoses is limited to the SBC. But when generalized to all American evangelicals who have continued to vote Republican on the presidential ticket since 2016, it is inaccurate.
A Better Understanding of Our Fellow Evangelicals
Currently, the theory of how the other side gets things wrong is something like, they misunderstand their own experiences and compromise with biblical truth for embrace of an ideology. I think what happens much more often is that people base generalizations (ideology is a kind of generalization) on limited experience.
For example, I know many evangelicals who voted for Trump. Almost none of those I know did so without misgivings; some did not want to speak about whom they voted for. At the time, I was at the relatively apolitical, but theologically conservative Westminster Seminary. While almost no one expressed support for Trump, many were relieved after he had won.
Now, I think it would be unwarranted to generalize from my experience that all evangelicals who remained sympathetic to the Republican party or voted for Trump did so with the same misgivings, for purely prudential reasons, and with good consciences. But at least, I know from this experience that a generalization that casts all such evangelicals in a negative light would be unwarranted. The whole truth would require bringing together the experiences of Russell Moore and many like him with my experiences and many like mine in a systematic way.
The same can be said for each of the other matters that divide critical evangelicals from majority evangelicals. The scandal of sexual abuse of minors being covered up or even performed by church leaders has been tragic. No longer merely an issue of the Catholic priesthood, from Southern Baptist leaders to Bill Gothard to Ravi Zacharias, we can see a pattern of men in authority misusing that authority to do or hide evil.
However, it is possible for concern about abuse in the church to turn ideological - which is to say, the judgment that this terrible thing happened, or even happens a lot, becomes, “This is what happens.” Accordingly, accusations are taken as proof in themselves. I have known men who have been wrongly accused in these ways. That kind of story tends to be one heard on the political right and “manosphere” kinds of Internet spaces.
But rather than jump to partisan conclusions on either basis, it is better to say that both of these things happen in the world. The world is a complex place. Men in places of religious authority are well-positioned to abuse trust in disturbing ways, but women are also able to wield such accusations against men unfairly. The side of justice is not one of these two sides, but just and fair judgment on the basis of thorough investigation and knowledge.
I believe that the same can be done on each of the other issues that divide critical and majority evangelicals. The critiques of the critical evangelicals must be heard; majority evangelicals do not need to abandon their moral and political compass in order to hear these critiques, at least, not necessarily.
Finally, it is important to make friends and/or retain friends across this evangelical divide. I speak weekly with two friends. Over the course of the period in which this divide has arisen, our views have not varied in lockstep. Yet the bond of friendship and of shared Christian commitments has proven much stronger than our thoughts about political and ecclesial matters of the day.
I also had the joy of making several new friends, through writing on same-sex attraction and attending the Revoice conference this year. Their friendship persuaded me that the evangelical majority is simply wrong on at least one issue, their approach to homosexual desire. The evangelical church has placed “heavy burdens” on LGBTQ+ Christians, missing the mark in its counsel to seek orientation change (Side X), and now, to pretend not to be gay (by not “identifying as such”; Side Y). The spiritual care, rather than cure of gay Christians requires recognizing the reality of sexual orientation and encouraging all believers to bear the cross God has given them.
This experience, among others, has led me to be careful not to dismiss my fellow evangelical Christians and not to think that cultural or political affiliation is more significant than shared faith in Christ.
Questions for Discussion in the Comments:
How does the distinction between critical evangelicals and majority evangelicals map onto your experience?
What is one issue that you think the “other side” from you gets right?
Do you have friendships across the evangelical divide, and what experiences led the other person to the view he or she has?
What do you listen to or read that gives you access to the other side?
Renn detects a shift in the ideology of the critical evangelical leaders formerly associated with The Gospel Coalition (chiefly, Russell Moore and the late Tim Keller), removing complementarianism from the tenets of evangelical leadership.
Aaron Renn detects an accusation of lack of salvation from Russell Moore’s claim that “what we thought along was the Shire (evangelical Christianity), turned out to be Mordor.”
This has occurred in the last couple of weeks, for example, as Nate Fischer, CEO of New Founding, questioned Jake Meador’s salvation.
Love this assessment. Renn's blog is basically one ad hominem after another, implying people don't have "courage" if they don't agree with an old-school fundamentalist vision of evangelicalism. I once brought up to him that I'd actually been "cancelled" by evangelicals by having my funding withdrawn because I was perceived as "too progressive" on racial issues. I asked him why he thought a Josh Hawley type was "courageous" for supporting Trump, whereas I am "cowardly" for stating my convictions. He said my convictions sounded too similar to liberals, that's why.
Sheesh.
I think this framework maps pretty well. Though I think COVID was as big of a polarizing issue as Trump, and reveals another factor That I don't think you mentioned: trust in establishment narratives. Evangelical Critics are generally trusting of establishment narratives and sources of facts (CRT, Covid, climate change, and the Evangelical Majority are generally distrustful and look for dissident experts as their source for facts.
2020 was extremely polarizing in this regard. If you leaned towards trusting the establishment you probably think it's really super important to trust the establishment now since distrust of vaccines, masks, and lockdowns literally killed people. If you leaned towards distrust, then now you think it's critical that we never comply with the establishment ever again since blind trust in authority led to biomedical tyranny, deaths of despair, religious persecution, and widespread cases of "died suddenly."
So not only are the two camps divided culturally and politically, but they're also divided epistemologically to the point where they may as well be inhabiting two different worlds.