On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed to his father: ‘I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.’ Precisely what it means be in the world, but not of it, is a topic that has sparked more than a few discussions, debates, and ideas as Christians think through the implications of living as loyal citizens of the kingdom of heaven while living as honorable citizens in the kingdom of humanity. Editor-in-chief Michael Horton recently chatted with Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, to discuss the ideas in Moore’s recent book, Onward: Engaging the Culture without Losing the Gospel (B&H Books, 2015).
Horton: Onward is eye-opening and engaging from start to finish. Isn’t ‘engaging the culture without losing the gospel’ one of the great challenges of the hour?
Moore: It really is. It’s a difficult balance for us to face; there are many temptations for Christians (myself included!) to veer off into extremes on either side.
One thing I’ve appreciated about your work is that you don’t throw rocks at people engaged in the ‘culture wars.’ You engage with the powers that be and make important cases for the value of life and defense of liberty, but you’re also critical of some of the ways in which Christians have conducted these operations. What do you think has changed in the status of Christianity in America?
What I see going on right now in American Christianity is a kind of panic that results in fear rooted in a lack of confidence, which runs contrary to a biblical vision of God’s sovereignty and the power of the gospel. I also think it’s built upon a faulty notion of the past. For a long time, Americans operated under the assumption that we were a majority in American life’whether we’re talking about the ‘silent majority’ language of the late 1960s that’s being brought back now by the Donald Trump campaign, or later on, with the ‘Moral Majority,’ with the rise of the Religious Right. They might not agree with us theologically, but they agree with us on values. I think this led to a kind of Christianity that privileged values over gospel, which really skewed priorities in some ways, and which we’re still paying for now.
One of the biggest challenges I face is engaging a younger generation of conservative evangelicals. They’re so put off by the faults of the last generation’whether that’s the exuberance of the possibility of politics, or the anger that sometimes came through’they simply want to move to the other side. You and I both know that whenever you meet an antinomian, it’s usually someone coming out of a legalist background, and vice versa. So we have a tendency to move to the opposite ditch in order to avoid the one we just got out of, and I think that’s something we have to be mindful of.
You write that we should see ourselves as a prophetic minority, that the church of Jesus Christ is never a majority in any fallen culture, even if we happen to outnumber everyone else around us. What do you mean by that?
I mean that the mind-set of the people of God is an ‘otherworldly’ mind-set. It’s a challenge to the way things are in a fallen universe. If we have minds patterned according to the gospel and not conformed to the world, then we are going to have a different way of viewing things. One of the mistaken assumptions we made when we started engaging in the political process’which I think is the right thing to do as citizens’was that we needed to play by the same sorts of rules: specifically, the rule that you need to be able to boast of your large numbers. We see that going on in elections right now. There’s a widely held assumption that the alleged 54 million evangelicals who didn’t come out to vote last time will vote this time if there’s the right candidate, so you need to engage and cater to them. It’s counterintuitive to say that most Americans actually don’t aspire to exactly the same things we aspire to and that we’re not as many as some of our leaders have boasted. But that doesn’t mean we’re powerless in the way Scripture defines power.
So when the media talks about the evangelical vote, it’s somewhat misleading.
It can be. Journalists tend to think of evangelicals in exclusively political terms, and they’re often not able to differentiate between the sorts of tribes we have in evangelicalism. They’re not really cognizant of the huge differences between a Kenneth Copeland type so-called evangelical and a Billy Graham evangelical or a Tim Keller evangelical, and so forth. If your only interaction with evangelicals is at the level of people who are caucusing in Iowa, that can result in a skewed understanding.
You write that Christian witness in Christian America is respectable because it upholds morality and success, not because it preaches the gospel of crucifixion and resurrection:
Jesus could have remained beloved in Nazareth by healing some people and levitating some chairs and keeping quiet about how different his kingdom is. But Jesus persistently has to wreck everything, and the illusions of Christian America are no more immune than the illusions of Israelite Galilee. If we see the universe as the Bible sees it, we will not try to reclaim some lost golden age. We will see an invisible conflict of the kingdoms, a satanic horror show being invaded by the reign of Christ.’¦If the kingdom is where Christ is, then we dare not assume the power of the state for the purposes of the church, and we dare not subordinate the ministries of the church to the authority of the state. The kingdom is defined by the gospel, and the gospel is defined by the kingdom. (55)
Are you suggesting that it’s precisely because Christianity holds the kingdom of heaven as the ultimate kingdom that it can have a different witness, even by simply saying that what happens in the caucuses and elections is not the ultimate reality?
That’s right. This doesn’t mean that caucuses and elections aren’t important; it means that they’re not ultimate. This is not only something that saves our souls by centering us in the gospel of Christ and the knowledge of what is really ultimately significant, but it’s what enables us to serve as citizens. One of the primary needs we have as Americans is the ability to know that neither the state nor the culture is ultimate. I think people who understand that make the best citizens. The best Americans are those who aren’t ‘Americans’ first’that is, when we maintain a certain distance from our American identity, we’re free to be good citizens. We’re able to pledge allegiance to our country while recognizing the limit of that allegiance.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the ‘Benedict Option’ that has been put out there. Could you explain it and then discuss the success you think this model is having?
The ‘Benedict Option’ is a term coined by Rod Dreher from the 1980s book by Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, who said we need a conservation of the Christian traditions, which means we need new monastic communities’not necessarily monasteries, but communities that are, in certain ways, walled off from the outside community in order to keep the light burning for a future generation. In a sense, I think he’s right. I think it’s important that we create these alternative institutions’chief among them, of course, being the institution we don’t create at all, which is the church. We need a church that understands where it comes from and where it’s going, that spends time educating the next generation in what it means to call ourselves Christians. When we think of ‘the church,’ we don’t primarily think in terms of our generational demographic or our national identity, but we think of ‘the church’ in terms of the global body of Christ, spanning space and time. Having this sort of ‘community’ is critical, and the ‘Benedict Option’ is right to articulate our need for it.
Where I think it goes wrong is in its particular gloominess about American culture. I really don’t think we’re entering into a new Dark Ages’not in any way essentially different from what the church has encountered in past ages. We’re not confronting anything we haven’t confronted before, and I don’t think we’re in a persistently downward regress any more than we’re in an infinitely upward progress. I don’t think that’s an evangelical view of history.
You mentioned antinomianism and legalism as being two poles that we swing back and forth between. Can you say the same thing about cultural transformation on one hand and this kind of handwringing on the other? Does the ‘gloomy outlook’ on our role in culture stem from an overconfidence in our abilities to make the culture Christian in the first place?
It really does. That’s why we see the sort of panic we have right now, because there’s a narrative of loss. There are always things that are culturally lost, always moments in time when we can look around and say, ‘We’re losing something culturally significant.’ But when we spiritualize that to the point where we think we’re experiencing the sort of sorrow the Israelites would have felt at the loss of the Ark of the Covenant, then we’re moving into a different evaluation of what’s happening. When we start with this sense that we’re the ‘real America’ and a majority in this country, and then see that all of our efforts haven’t panned out the way we thought they would, this leads to a sort of siege mentality. That’s one part of it.
The other part of it is this: If we have an evangelical Christianity with a leadership disconnected from church life, then we typically end up with a Christianity driven by donor bases and fundraising. This results in a culture war industrial complex, in which in order to motivate people (just like the rest of the world) we have to convince them that this point in time is worse than any other in the history of the world, and the way that they can act is by filling out this card and sending this check to this ministry or nonprofit organization. I think those two things work together to create a constant anxiety in the minds of Christians.
You advocate what you call ‘engaged alienation.’ What do you mean by that, and what does that look like in local congregations?
I think we become overly concerned about those aspects of the Christian gospel that will seem bizarre to people. One hundred years ago, people were saying, ‘Well, modern people are not going to be able to be Christians if they have to accept virgin births and empty tombs. So let’s just give them Golden Rule ethics and those sorts of things, and strip all that supernatural stuff away.’ The churches that went that route are withering and dying today.
Today, people are saying the same thing, just in a different form: ‘If you’re going to reach Millennials, you have to do away with the Christian understanding of sexuality.’ Both ignore the fact that a Christian view of the miraculous and a Christian sexual ethic were always offensive and ridiculous to the people who heard them. That’s why, when Mary tells Joseph that she’s pregnant, his response is not, ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.’ His response is, ‘Well, you must have been involved with some other man.’ He knows how babies are conceived. A Christian sexual ethic has always been controversial. It’s part of the taking up of one’s cross and following Christ.
In more conservative circles, there’s more frequent discussion about values first, and using those values as the bridge by which we reach people with Jesus. We see that in the ways in which churches have talked about marriage and family, saying that we can reach non-Christian people by talking about how to have healthy marriages, because we know they aspire to the same sort of vision of marriage. So we say, ‘Here’s how you communicate; here’s how you have a healthy parenting relationship; here’s how you have a date night’and Jesus helps you have all of those things and make all those things work.’
The New Testament model, on the other hand, doesn’t run away from the strangeness of the gospel, which is Christ and him crucified for sinners. One of the things that strikes me whenever I’m reading through the Gospels or the book of Acts is that whenever Jesus and the apostles get the impression that they’re making sense to the crowds around them, they always assume that the crowds aren’t getting the thrust of the gospel. ‘Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you.’ There’s a continual emphasis on that message until people see that this is a strikingly different statement. This is not just adding Jesus to my already existing life plan: this is Jesus upending my life plan. I think we have to be more willing to do that in the age to come.
When you use that term ‘engaged alienation,’ it seems that you’re holding two things together: On one hand, our ‘strange’ distance from the culture and the idea that we can’t lose that strangeness without compromising the gospel; on the other hand, maintaining an engaged relationship with culture. It’s not the ‘Benedict Option,’ where we run from culture into our enclaves; it’s engaging with culture while holding true to our identities as disciples of Christ. How does our hope in Christ actually encourage us to engage, instead of running between the two extremes of being antagonistic or retreating?
If we have a truly evangelical view of conversion, and a Christian view of the image of God, then that’s going to change the way we see the people and culture around us. Rather than seeing the people who disagree with us as our ultimate enemies, we see them as potential brothers and sisters in Christ.
If you hold to a semi-Pelagian view of salvation, then this means that the people who almost agree with you’the sort of tradition-family-values people who just need that extra push’may be possible fellow saints. But if you hold to a biblical understanding of the gospel, then that means that every person outside of Christ is hiding from the voice of Christ, and that the Spirit of God speaking through the voice of Jesus in the gospel can transform any heart. Saul of Tarsus was not the sort of person who was likely to be won over by the Christian community. But God delights in taking someone like that and making him not only a member of the church, but a leader of the church.
When I encounter people who think they hate Christianity (but really hate the caricature of Christianity), it’s hard for me to resist the temptation to see those people as enemies to be vaporized with my arguments. That’s not unique to me; I think every Christian has that temptation in some way, whether it’s on Facebook or dealing with prodigal kids or college professors. But if you step back and say, ‘It may be that this person is my future brother or sister in Christ; this person may be someone that God uses to evangelize my children or grandchildren,’ this changes the way we see people, and it gives us the confidence we as the people of Christ ought to have. We have a promise from Jesus, which is that he will build his church and that the gates of hell will not prevail against it. If we really have confidence in this, then we can be kind toward the people around us and have patience as we press the truth-claims of Christ.
You define the church as an embassy of the future. If the church Christ is building is an embassy of the future, what does that look like?
There’s a strong emphasis today on contextualization, and that’s a good thing’you want to make sure that people understand what it is you’re saying. But I think we often contextualize the present when we should also contextualize the future. The church shouldn’t simply enable people to hear the gospel in their present context, but it should show people what the future in light of that gospel looks like, what the kingdom of God looks like. For instance, I think James is instructive when he chastises the church about honoring the one in fine clothing and telling the poor man to sit someplace else (James 2). The person in fine apparel is likely someone with cultural power; and if you want the gospel to go forward, you think you want to focus on reaching the culture-makers. It’s the same thing we see with our evangelical testimonies’you find the beauty queen or the corporate CEO whom everyone admires and who commands attention, and have that person talk about Christ, thinking that will get people’s attention.
But James drives home the point that God has chosen the poor, the powerless, to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom. He essentially says, ‘You think you’re playing church politics here, but you don’t have a long enough view of the future.’ That ought to be evident in our churches, where we really understand that the hotel maid who can barely speak English and who trusts in Jesus Christ may be powerless in her context right now, but is a future queen of the universe and is treated that way. I think there’s a great deal of unwitting theistic social Darwinism that seems to go on in church life that contradicts what we mean when we say that we’re marching to Zion, to the kingdom Jesus is establishing.
It sounds like you’re saying that you can’t have churches where the gospel isn’t really shaping the culture of that church and then go out into the political arena and expect to stop same-sex marriage. As I read your book, it seemed you were describing two different ideas of cultural engagement. There’s the congregation with people who identify themselves as homosexuals in a church that (on paper at least) believes the gospel but doesn’t practice discipline. They can come to the Lord’s Table and still be practicing homosexuals. Then there’s the congregation where homosexuals are constantly given the cold shoulder and treated as pariahs, where discipline is enforced but the winsome proclamation of the gospel is sidelined. It seems that you’re saying the church needs to become a place where, in this example, saying no to same-sex marriage has plausibility because of the way people live and are treated, and that life matters in this church because we actually care for orphans and widows and encourage adoption and all of the other things that make the story believable. Is that what you mean when you say that the church needs to be an embassy of the future?
Exactly. If we don’t do that, then I think we end up unwittingly repudiating the gospel. In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul says, ‘For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside.’ It’s easier to judge the people on the outside and not hold accountable the people on the inside’but that gives people a false understanding of what the kingdom of God is. For instance, if you’re not willing to guard the Lord’s Table from unrepentant sinners, then you’re saying to people that they surely will not die. That’s the message of the devil, not the voice of Christ. In contrast, if you rail against sinners without an understanding of the cross, and what it means to be both undergoing the justice of God and being freely justified by the blood of Christ in the cross, then you’re going to end up suggesting to people that the gospel is only for those who are sinners in some sort of way that really isn’t that bad. That’s also a repudiation of the gospel. I think that balance takes an entire congregation working itself out with embodying the principles of the kingdom of God, while bearing one another’s burdens and loving one another through the exercise of our gifts.
So without disengaging from the culture, we need to see more and more churches become places where the words of truth are embodied in reasonably truthful living consistent with the gospel proclaimed?
Yes, that’s right, and also in modeling how to articulate a Christian gospel to those who don’t understand it. There are some churches that do this well, and there are many churches that do not because they are still operating in a Bible-Belt sort of mentality, which assumes that the people around you are asking, ‘How do I have a good marriage and go to heaven?’ Increasingly, that is not the sort of question on the minds of American people and certainly not in other places in the world. We can’t just deal with caricatures; we also have to confront those alternatives to a Christian way of living by acknowledging, teaching, and modeling how to have those conversations with those who disagree.
You argue that since our churches have always been in step with the broader culture, there never really was a culture war. That’s counterintuitive to a lot of people. Could you explain that a bit?
I’m not arguing that there’s not a culture war, just that the culture war isn’t as black and white as we might think. What has unfortunately happened’particularly in the American church’is that the church has accommodated itself to the outside culture. For instance, we see that with the divorce revolution: it’s not that churches gave up a biblical view of divorce and remarriage; it’s that divorce became normal to us. Very few churches articulated divorce as liberating and self-actualizing; but when it became normal, we began to talk about it in therapeutic terms. When we minister around divorce, we typically do that in terms of divorce recovery. There’s a reason for that, of course, but we don’t deal with divorce in terms of sin. Whatever one’s position is on divorce and remarriage and the exception clauses, many divorces and remarriages happening in our churches fall outside of the parameters established by Scripture. We don’t address it because it just seems normal to us, which means we actually leave people under accusation. They can’t come to the place of truly finding liberation and freedom from that in the gospel if it’s never spoken of in terms of sin.
What does social witness look like in actual practice? Is it the church? Is social witness just individuals living out their Christian faith? What should social witness mean in our context today?
We have to speak with a ‘Thus saith the Lord’ on those social issues where God has clearly spoken in Scripture. On issues that are on the principle level in Scripture, we shape and form the consciences of people in order to apply those principles. There are going to be other issues we don’t speak to at all because we don’t have a clear word from Scripture.
We know how to speak authoritatively, especially when it comes to personal ethics. When someone comes to me and says, ‘I’m just trying to think through God’s will for my life. Should I leave my wife for my secretary?’ the answer is ‘No, you shouldn’t do that.’ The word of God says no. But suppose someone comes to me and says, ‘I’m trying to think through whether or not my teenage daughter ought to have an iPhone.’ Well, I have some principles from Scripture I think can help that person to think through the issue, but I’m not going to discipline the parents if they make a different decision than I would. Then there are some questions that are Romans 14 issues of conscience that I’m not going to address at all.
I think the same thing happens in terms of our social witness. We have to be the people who say, as the people of God, ‘Enslaving human beings is wicked’ and ‘Aborting unborn children is wicked.’ We have to be the people who speak to that, especially since we, in an American republic, are in a situation different from the first disciples in the Roman Empire. In a democratic republic, the ultimate ground of authority is the people, which means that the Romans 13 accountability to wield the sword in our context doesn’t just apply to the president or members of Congress; it ultimately applies to the people who delegate that to them. So the responsibility of the church is to train people how to live out their lives as Christians, in all their different vocations, with one of those vocations being citizens of an earthly kingdom.
There are going to be some things to which we speak clearly and definitively, other things we speak to at the level of principle, and other things we don’t speak to at all. I don’t think there’s a Christian view on the balanced budget amendment or the line-item veto. I have a position on gun control, but my second amendment views are not rooted in my first or second commandment views, so I speak to that very differently. Now, if we’re speaking with someone who said, ‘Yes, I think everyone has the right to bear arms and to shoot innocent people,’ there’s a clear moral principle that applies to that statement, so I would respond with a resounding word from God. That’s not the conversation we’re having, though, when we’re discussing gun control; what we’re really talking about is how we can stop gun violence and the best measures to implement that.
And if we aren’t careful to make those distinctions, then the church loses its authority when it does speak from God on the basis on his word.
That’s exactly right. I remember being a teenager in my home church, and someone had put out one of these Christian voting guides that were popular at the time. It had a Christian view on abortion’and I do think there’s a Christian view on abortion and several other issues’as well as a Christian view on foreign aid and a line-item veto. Even as a teenager, I was able to recognize that this was just someone’s political agenda they had supported with Bible verses. That sort of witness is not only inconsistent with the Bible, but it is also ultimately self-defeating because it breeds cynicism.
