Written by Anthony J. DeBlasi |
Friday, September 3, 2021
What surprise can there be that churches have been shut down, burned, their icons wrecked, their congregants scattered, demonized, and persecuted, their leaders pressured to turn against their own religion and their own church? Could it possibly be that Christ and His church still, after 2000 years, are mortal enemies not of the state but of malfeasance at top levels of society and government? Is it why they were never excluded from public affairs by the founders of the United States of America?

Whenever false liberals and allied progressives were cornered with the facts about their de facto subversion of Christianity (this was before “woke times”) they countered with egalitarian clichés like “who is to say” and “opinions are equal.” The Christians-in-Name-Only (CINOs) among them agreed. Now, from the ramparts of the wall they erected between church and state, “liberals,” “progressives,” and the fully brainwashed shoot down everyone who dares challenge their rant against Judeo-Christian teaching.
Christ spoke and the church was formed; so much for “who is to say” regarding Christianity. It was He and His apostles who had the say, meaning that whoever would be Christian either follow or not follow Christ and His church and accept the consequences of that choice. The teachings of Christ and His church are the backbones of Christianity, hence a firm Gospel for true Christians.
As for the notion that opinions are all equal, it must be pointed out that if all opinions were equal, no opinion would be worth taking seriously. Comparing the opinion of one who is addicted to drugs to the opinion of one who is unaddicted or comparing the opinion of a mentally ill person to that of a mentally well person indicates the flaw in the alleged equation. “Equality of opinions” is a fallacious notion. I touched on extreme cases to suggest the immense range of inequalities in judgment among people, including professionals and experts in their respective fields.
Big deal? In a democracy, where issues are settled by a vote of the majority, this is a huge deal. Cutting to the quick: Can a majority of voters be wrong? The honest answer, yes, resonates with Christians, remembering that a majority voted to crucify Christ.
The tendency of majoritarian rule toward mob rule by vote alerted America’s founders to configure a system of government that would make it hard for any faction to dominate and take control. The prerequisite for prior open and rigorous debate, followed by responsible action, was taken as self-evident. The “checks-and-balances” system of government crafted by the architects of the American government is intended to maximize cooperation and minimize selfish interests in the governance of the nation.
In a chronically wicked world, as proven over and over again in history, wisdom is not a luxury but a necessity. That is why morality must inform the conduct of government and why the founders of this nation did not exclude Providential wisdom from the conduct of government.
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Losing Our Religion is a complicated book, and readers will find much to agree and disagree with, as I did. It offers a fascinating, personal, raw, and at times puzzling look into our recent and ongoing struggles with faith, politics, culture, and loving—or at least co-existing with—our neighbors.

Around twenty years ago as a graduate student, I attended a gathering in Princeton organized to kick off a campaign for a federal marriage amendment. That gathering included a Who’s Who of socially conservative academics, pastors, and activists. I had just settled down in my seat at a table near the back of the conference room when I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder. I looked up to see Princeton University’s Robert P. George, who whispered to me with a sly grin—channeling Jesus in Mark 14—“Friend, come up to the higher table.”
I followed Professor George to a table near the front of the conference room and sat down only to look around and see that on my right was Charles Colson and on my left was James Dobson. I don’t really remember much about the conversation, but for a starstruck young evangelical raised in the ’70s and ’80s by parents who had Dare to Discipline and Born Again on their bookshelves, this was like sitting next to evangelical royalty.
Much has changed in twenty years. Colson passed away in 2012. Dobson is still active in many ways but has understandably slowed down in his 80s, and is perhaps most known in recent years for characterizing Donald Trump as a “baby Christian” in 2016. The evangelicalism that they did so much to define in the last fifty years, following figures like Billy Graham and many others, is embattled, lively, marginalized, shrinking, or unrecognizable, depending on whom you ask.
I begin this book review in such a personal fashion in part because Russell Moore’s Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America is a very personal book. I also begin this way because if you were to ask me before 2016 who would most likely be the next Charles Colson for politically conscious and devout evangelicals, I would have said Russell Moore.
As I noted, much has changed.
Russell Moore currently serves as the editor-in-chief of the evangelical mainstay magazine Christianity Today, originally founded through the efforts of Billy Graham and Carl F. H. Henry. He hails from the Southern Baptist (SBC) stream of evangelicalism, having served in senior posts at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and as the president of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC). He is a gifted preacher and an incisive and insightful academic.
At my first tenure-track job working among many SBC friends and colleagues at Union University, we hosted Moore twice, once to mark an anniversary of George’s Making Men Moral, and the other to speak on marriage at a conference honoring Colson after he passed. If you follow those links to the audio and video of those remarks respectively, you’ll better understand how remarkable a speaker and thinker Moore is, and how close the family resemblance is to his elder brother in the evangelical faith, Chuck Colson. While Moore was at the time a big fish in the Southern Baptist pond, he transcended those boundaries, working with Christians in other traditions and crossing over into secular venues as well.
Today, Moore is no longer part of the SBC, and Southern Baptist views on him range from mildly sympathetic to hostile to vitriolic. Losing Our Religion is in part an account of this falling out. It aligns with much of our national narrative of the epistemic and cultural fracturing that may not have started with Trump’s election in 2016, but was certainly exacerbated by it, followed by the summer of George Floyd, and the compounding stress of the Covid-19 pandemic and our governments’ (federal/state/local) medico-political responses. Add to this tumultuous mix the scandalous sexual abuse epidemic rampant in so much of evangelicalism (and elsewhere), and one has the proverbial perfect storm. Moore’s writing here then is something of a memoir and a testimony, in good evangelical fashion, taking us back to the heartfelt and fervent faith of his youth and through what can only be described as a painful and poignant break-up with the religious tradition that nurtured and raised him. Moore only occasionally names names (Jerry Falwell, Jr., for example), and often cites anonymous comments shared with him by his fellow churchgoers. But SBC insiders will recognize the specific scenes and acts—and actors—in the last few years of SBC drama.
There has been something of a cottage industry of publications on the status of evangelicalism. Some are defiant and fiery defenses of what has become the status quo. Others are more sociological or historical accounts that treat evangelicalism not as a spiritually inspired and genuine (if imperfect) movement, but a political, cultural, or even racist and sexist ideology masquerading as religious. And then there are the “ex-vangelical” accounts of many who were raised in evangelical homes, but have come to leave either that version of Christianity or Christianity itself. Fortunately, Moore’s book fits none of these categories.
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When reading Scripture, if we do not see Jesus, then we are reading incorrectly. The religious leaders of Jesus’ day diligently studied Scripture yet did not recognize the embodied Word that spoke to them. They searched for God in His Word, yet God stood right before them unrecognized.

You search the Scripturesbecause you think that in them you have eternal life;and it is they that bear witness about me,yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life.
John 5:39-40 ESV

The Pharisees of Jesus’ day held the Scriptures in high esteem. They believed them to be the actual Word of God, spoken into our dark and sinful world. They read the Bible, studied it, applied it, and obeyed it. Everything seemed correct.
Then came Jesus.
Jesus spoke into the world of these studious Jews and shook them to the core. In the midst of their in-depth studying, they missed the forest for the trees. They passionately searched the Bible because they thought that it would lead them to eternal life, to salvation. However, Jesus makes a bold claim. He says that all of Scripture is about Him; therefore, they should come to Him for eternal life.
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