Losing Our Religion would be more persuasive if—instead of affecting to be a simple piece of pastoral counseling—it straightforwardly acknowledged its own agenda. Moore has an argument to make, and he wants to advance his project and defeat his opponents. But his book frames the gospel as some pure, otherworldly abstraction that has little to do with power or politics. 

Southerners have a way of burying their actual thoughts under a welter of pleasantries. So it is perhaps worth asking what lies beneath this apparently straightforward morality tale by Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today. As Moore presents it, Losing Our Religion is a guidebook for Christians in troubled times. Drawing on his own disillusioning experience, Moore encourages his readers to put the gospel before the false pursuit of credibility, authority, identity, integrity, and stability. “This book will consider all the ways evangelical America has sought these things in the wrong way,” he writes. “Along the way, I will suggest little choices you can make, not just to survive this dispiriting time, but in order to envision a different future.” The chapters are structured with self-help-style subheadings such as “Prioritize Long-Term Integrity Over Short-Term Success” or “Pay Attention to Means, Not Just to Ends.”
There is much truth in what Moore says. I, too, worry about our overly partisan society and the loss of a vibrant center. I, too, see Christians becoming consumed with the burning issues of the day and losing sight of God’s grace and providence. I share Moore’s dismay at Pentecostal preachers and certain Christian leaders who misrepresent the faith or use it in a cynical fashion. But the book also contains a rather sharp-edged polemic. Moore castigates “culture warriors”; he contrasts Christians who follow the gospel with those who would tie the church “to forms of power.” And he portrays the evangelical church as under assault from all directions by wolves and “hucksters.”
The book therefore sits easily alongside the genre of anti–Christian nationalist, exvangelical memoir, which has arisen in the last couple of years (though Moore himself does not claim such a label). There are clearly many readers who wish to see the sins of evangelicals repeated over and over again. Whatever else these books do, they make Democrats feel better about their disdain for conservative Christians. Or, to put it more generously, they meet the need of liberals for interpreters of the scary world that exists outside of the coasts and major urban areas.
Moore presents himself as a prophetic outsider, but there is a paradox here. Anybody who remembers the evangelical politics of the pre-Trump era will recall that Moore was at the pinnacle of the movement. For many years he held a very influential position within the Southern Baptist Convention, as leader of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Moore wants his audience to denounce and reject the culture and group that he for so many years reigned over and shaped. We are not to think of Moore as the political Christian he has been the past couple of decades. We are not to think of Moore as an operator. No, those epithets are for all those Christian nationalists, theobros, cynical Baptist churchmen, pagans, Trumpists, fake Christians, and everyone else who would array themselves against Moore and the true Christians whom he claims to represent.
But Moore is inescapably political, not least because of the context that has shaped his career. Though I am not a Southern Baptist, nor a native Southerner, I currently live in the Baptist kingdom of the Southern United States. To those outside this world, the internal politics of the Southern Baptist Convention are hard to comprehend. Baptists need to air their grievances because corralling majority support on questions of doctrine and policy is necessary to the functioning of their church. This imperative, combined with a Southern penchant for high drama, gives Southern Baptist culture an energy that can appear distasteful and brutal to church denominations that keep their disagreements more private. Thus Southern Baptist ministers become very effective politicians. Moore rose to prominence in this world largely because of his political skill and his calm, confident style.
Given this background, Losing Our Religion would be more persuasive if—instead of affecting to be a simple piece of pastoral counseling—it straightforwardly acknowledged its own agenda. Moore has an argument to make, and he wants to advance his project and defeat his opponents. But his book frames the gospel as some pure, otherworldly abstraction that has little to do with power or politics. Moore calls on Christians to lose respectability and authority; this may seem a little strange from the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today and a former fellow of the prestigious Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago.
The leitmotif of the book is one of conversion: the altar call. Moore tells us evangelicals are in need of one. At root, the problem is that those who claim to believe the gospel actually don’t. “We see now young evangelicals walking away from evangelicalism not because they do not believe in what the church teaches, but because they believe the church itself does not believe what the church teaches.” Those who leave the church, in Moore’s view, do so because the church itself “would disapprove of Jesus” if he were among them. Many evangelicals are more concerned about the culture and power than about the gospel; they shout down faithful preachers and leaders. Their own leaders are “narcissists and psychopaths and Machiavellian power seekers,” to be contrasted with the real Christians, who exhibit “winsomeness,” “persuasion,” and “gentleness.”
This would all be more plausible were Moore not so one-sided in his treatment of his opponents. At one point, he holds up for our disapproval a supposed “fundamentalist Calvinist,” who appears to be the theology professor James Wood. In 2022 Wood, of course, wrote a thoughtful article for First Things praising Tim Keller, while also gently criticizing the limitations of Keller’s ministry, its “winsomeness” and emphasis on “public witness.” In Wood’s words: “‘Public witness’ most often translates into appeasing those to one’s left, and distancing oneself from the deplorables. I didn’t like what this was doing to my heart and felt that it was clouding my political judgment.” Moreover, Wood wrote, “If we assume that winsomeness will gain a favorable hearing, when Christians consistently receive heated pushback, we will be tempted to think our convictions are the problem.”
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Written by R.C. Sproul |
Friday, May 20, 2022
The union of believers is grounded in the mystical union of Christ and His Church. The Bible speaks of a twoway transaction that occurs when a person is regenerated. Every converted person becomes “in Christ” at the same time Christ enters into the believer. If I am in Christ and you are in Christ, and if He is in us, then we experience a profound unity in Christ.

“One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty . . .” We say it. We argue about it (especially the “under God” part). But is it true? In reality, how united is the United States? The “more perfect union” sought by Lincoln is hardly perfect in terms of harmony. We are a nation—morally, philosophically, and religiously—deeply divided. Yet there remains the outward shell of formal and organizational unity. We have union without unity.
As it is with the “United” States, so it is with the unity of the Christian church. The “oneness” of the church is one of the classic four descriptive terms to define the church. According to the council at Nicaea (325 AD), the Church is one, holy, catholic, and Apostolic.
Few church bodies today give much regard to being Apostolic. Fewer still seem concerned with the dimension of the holy. When these two qualities become irrelevant to the minds of church people, it is a mere chimera to speak of catholicity and unity.
The church, organizationally, is hopelessly fragmented. Since the birth of the “Ecumenical Movement,” the church has seen more splits than mergers. The crisis of disunity is on the front pages following the Episcopal Church’s decision to consecrate a practicing, impenitent homosexual to the role of bishop.
Is unity a false hope? Is it, in its historic expressions, merely an illusion?
To answer these questions we must consider the nature of the unity of the church.
In the first instance, the deepest and most significant unity of the Church is its spiritual unity. Though we can never separate the formal from the material with respect to the Church’s unity, we can and must distinguish them.
It was Augustine who taught most deeply about the distinction between the visible church and the invisible Church. With this classic distinction Augustine did not envision two separate ecclesiastical bodies, one apparent to the naked eye and another beyond the scope of visual perception. Now, did he envision one church that is “underground” and another one above ground, in full view?
No, he was describing a church within a church. Augustine took his cue from our Lord’s teaching that until He purifies His Church in glory, it will continue in this world as a body that will include “tares” along with the “wheat.” The tares are weeds that grow along with the flowers in Christ’s garden.
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The problem gets worse. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a form of political Oneism, because it denies individual distinction. The concept of individual rights is a political form of Twoism, that is, it affirms that every individual, made in the image of God with rights from the Creator, is different and distinct and deserves the right of free speech. Since there is no longer common civic ground, various forms of Twoism must simply be annihilated. CRT will make it happen.

We rarely pay attention to one of the most shocking warnings Jesus ever gave: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea (Mark 9:14). This is the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, speaking to everyone, addressing everyone as whoever.
One of the great signs of degradation in our present culture is the attack progressivism has made and is making on our children. The Puritans in Massachusetts in 1647 “ordered that every township in this jurisdiction after the Lord hath increased them to fifty households shall forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read. . . .” via the teaching of the Bible.[1] Our Puritan forebears doubtless sought to put into practice the biblical exhortation: “These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up” (Deuteronomy 6:6–7).
Three hundred years later, John Dewey (1859–1952), the leading force in public education in the early twentieth century, rejected his Puritan Christian up-bringing, converted to atheism and proposed for education a philosophy of human-centered progressivism and socialism.[2] This man, who made American secular education what it is today, signed on to the 1933 Humanist Manifesto, which, in its very first point, states: “Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.”[3] A century later, this affirmation—“self-existing and not created”— lies at the very heart of what is now taught to our children in the public schools. It defines what is socially and morally acceptable, namely the denial and rejection of God the Creator, which leads, in turn, to unbridled adultery, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, trans-sexualism and the loss of individual identity, human worth, and civil rights.
Through public education, Christians are deeply influenced by secular culture. To be sure, home-schooling and Christian day schools play a role in protecting our believing children, but not all Christian parents can afford such schooling. Ninety percent of Americans who consider themselves Christians send their children to public schools.[4] The results are inevitable. Sixty percent of twenty-somethings who were churched as teens are now disengaged from the church,[5] doubtless the result of the secularism taught in public schools. In a certain sense, with the invasive power of the internet and social media, there is no sure way to keep young children from hearing and being influenced by the ideology of contemporary progressivism. As Christian parents and grandparents, we must at least try to protect and educate our progeny by facing and discussing these issues head on with our children and grandchildren.
Our children are caused to sin in three areas today: in theology, sexuality, and sociology.
Theology 
Our schools deny God as Creator not just by outright affirmations of secularism, but also by the “scientific” worship of matter as self-creating, eternal and evolving. Dewey, an evolutionist, is celebrated in today’s public-school science classrooms. In the case Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005), the U.S. courts barred intelligent design from the nation’s classrooms, declaring it to be unconstitutional. If God is just an ancient myth and science is an infallible source for understanding the universe, then little wonder our children, as they mature, find the Christian faith unbelievable. Those who lead them deliberately down that path are certainly “without excuse” (Rom 1:20). But we and our children must also resist unbelief and take seriously, both at home and at church, the responsibility to instruct our children carefully and thoroughly in God’s Word and to set an example of purity, love, faith, and Holy-Spirit power as we live with and pray for them until they move into full adulthood. Part of our responsibility is to help them analyze and answer the propositions they receive from outside sources.
Our Christian children (perhaps especially those in public schools) need to be taught some of the latest discoveries in science. Though secular sources are never ultimate, it can be helpful for our children to realize that certain leaders of scientific naturalism are now convinced by the powerful logic of theism and intelligent design. “The heavens declare the glory of God, day after day they pour forth speech” (Ps 19). The work of Stephen C. Meyer needs to be made known more widely. I recommend his book Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe (Harper Row, 2021) and his lecture on You Tube, “God and the Origin of the Universe.”
Unlike the Creator, matter is not eternal because the natural universe has a beginning. Erwin Hubble’s discovery of an expanding universe via the red shift from a single beginning, shows this. Hubble’s findings convinced even Albert Einstein. Darwin did not explain how life originated but tried to imagine how new forms of life evolved from previous forms of life. But if the universe and matter have a beginning, then the real mystery of life—the origin of the universe—is not solved by evolution.
What has caused the undermining of naturalism in our time? The discovery in the 50s of the information-bearing properties of the genetic code expressed in DNA, is a mystery the materialist understanding of life cannot explain. Stephen Meyer states: “Just as the Rosetta Stone points to the activity of an ancient scribe, and the software in a computer program points to a programmer, so the digital code within the DNA molecule suggests the activity of a designing mind in the origin of life.”[6] The origin is an intelligent personal mind.
One non-Christian Yale micro-biologist, Professor David Gelerntner, faced with the sophistication and complexity of DNA, wrestled with Stephen Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt, which holds that “Our uniform experience of cause and effect shows that intelligent design is the only known cause of the origin of large amounts of functionally specified digital information.”[7] Though Gelerntner does not accept Meyer’s conclusions that the only “feasible [explanation] is intelligent design,” he does recognize that specific “digital information,” such as DNA codes that are intended for one purpose only might indeed lead one to consider not only intelligent design but even an “intelligent designer.” After reading Stephen Meyer’s book, Darwin’s Doubt (2013), this leading scientist states: “Stephen Meyer’s thoughtful and meticulous Darwin’s Doubt convinced me that Darwin has failed.”[8] The ongoing discussion among current scientists is encouraging. Over a thousand PhD scientists declare themselves publicly as “evolution skeptics.”[9] This may lead some to seek the real intelligent designer, our infinite yet personal God, who created the universe and humans, male and female, in his image.
Our children need to know that Psalm 33:6,9 was right all the time: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made and all the hosts of them by the breath of his power…for he spoke, and it came to be, he commanded and it stood firm.” What some have recently learned in reflection on science begins to fit the biblical doctrine of creation. We need to encourage our junior high and high school students to become familiar enough with such debates that they can speak up confidently in their classrooms.
Sexuality
“‘Drag Queen Story Hours’ Expose Pre-Schoolers to What Some Parents Call ‘Gender Insanity.’” This article’s title suggests that the insanity probably lies more with parents who think the experience of adult drag is broadening to their children’s little minds and so happily bring them along to the local public library. They believe the event “captures the imagination and play of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive and diverse role models.”[10] The library “system’s youth and family services manager” justifies the event in a similar way: “We wanted to make sure we cover a wide variety of interests and speak to all members of our community.”
The National Sexuality Education Standards, according to the Centers of Disease Control, propose to mid-grade school children, in vivid and often pornographic forms, that all sex acts are valid except vaginal intercourse (which produces pregnancy). For the sake of decorum I will simply cite an article that readers can peruse as factual proof.[11]
Here are some of the sexually explicit books (for toddlers to teens) that appear on school reading lists on the subject of homosexuality and transgenderism:

Gender Queer, an illustrated memoir, contains explicit illustrations of oral sex and masturbation.
The novel Lawn Boycontains graphic descriptions of sex between men and children.
George contains explicit illustrations of men engaging in homosexual acts.
A further category is transgender booksfor children of all ages, including Neither, describing to infants a land of “this and that,” of “neither,” and of “both.”
Another book’s title declares that It Feels Good to Be Yourself, no matter what your gender identity is.

Written about the educational situation in the UK, the following quote is also what many US schools promote:
Much of culture nowadays assumes sex is just for play. Porn is sold as something that is light-hearted and fun; teenagers are encouraged to “experiment” as long as it’s “with consent”; schools are now teaching explicit sex education, including programmes such as “All About Me,” which discusses self-stimulation from age 6. Some 99% of 12–15 year-olds are online in the UK. A recent survey found that 94% of children had been exposed to porn by the age of 14. And yet 75% of parents believe their children are not viewing pornography online.[12]
Such deliberate attempts to cause “little ones to sin” by proposing at tender ages immoral sexual thoughts and actions will doubtless produce generations of hardened adults for whom sexual purity is meaningless. Our children need to know, understand, and believe the serious theological analysis of God as the unique image by which we understand our sexuality. The difference between the sexes is reflective of the essence of the gospel, of God as Trinity, and of Christ’s love for the Church. Only by the gospel can we hope to save our rising generations from utter moral degradation. We must not allow our children to be exposed to such poisonous material.
Sociology and Critical Race Theory 
Something is happening in the classroom that has never happened before. Another tenet of the Humanist Manifesto to which Dewey signed his name was a socialized and cooperative economic order. Dewey was a great admirer of Soviet communism and atheism. He was happy to endorse radical socialism. Bringing about this social revolution in our day is the teaching of Critical Race Theory, by which people are being indoctrinated across the land—in government, business, the military and higher education, but also in grade schools and kindergartens. One Tennessee mom recently warned Williamson County parents that her seven-year-old daughter came home from school saying, “I’m ashamed that I’m White.” Her daughter asked, “Is there something wrong with me? Why am I hated so much?” The mother is considering putting her seven-year-old in therapy.[13] The child is being encouraged by her teachers to be ashamed of the color of her skin.[14] One private school parent, born in a Communist nation, states: “I came to this country escaping the very same fear of retaliation that now my own child feels.”[15] This is a sin, the sin of the use and mistreatment for political ends of vulnerable children. When a government sets its sights on corrupting children’s souls, it no longer has any legitimacy. Children can be taken from their parents and their gender forcefully reassigned.[16] Radical theories of racism and politically motivated propaganda have no place in the classroom. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona recently declared that parents should not be the “primary stakeholder” in their children’s education.[17] This repeats BLM’s Marxist website which declared: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another.”[18] Vladimir Lenin, a precursor of progressivism, is reputed to have said: “Give me four years to teach children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”[19] According to Don Feder, “For Marxists, killing the family is the key to everything. The war on the family isn’t peripheral; it’s central to the revolution.”[20] But Scripture teaches that children are born into families, not into governments. This notion of the powerful state is converting our schools into centers of ideological and political indoctrination contrary to the norms of the Constitution and the Judeo-Christian way of life.
The problem gets worse. Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a form of political Oneism, because it denies individual distinction. The concept of individual rights is a political form of Twoism, that is, it affirms that every individual, made in the image of God with rights from the Creator, is different and distinct and deserves the right of free speech. Since there is no longer common civic ground, various forms of Twoism must simply be annihilated. CRT will make it happen.
In a more overtly religious frame, the California Department of Education recently voted on a new statewide “ethnic studies” curriculum (inspired by CRT) that advocates for the “decolonization” [actually the dechristianization] of American society via the elevation and worship of the old Aztec gods of South America.Since the United States was founded on a “Eurocentric, white supremacist [racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous], capitalist [classist], patriarchal [sexist and misogynistic], heteropatriarchal [homophobic], and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe,” and since White Christians committed “theocide” against indigenous tribes, killing the Aztec and Mayan gods and replacing them with Christianity, now the God of Christianity must go—all in the service of a left-wing political ideology to be imposed upon California’s entire primary and secondary education system, which consists of 10,000 public schools serving a total of 6 million children.[21] The goal is for children to attain “critical consciousness” and, consequently, to develop the capacity to overthrow their oppressors. The ultimate goal is to “decolonize” American society, cancel white Christian culture, and bring about the “regeneration of indigenous spirituality.”[22] The curriculum suggests the chanting of prayers that invoke the deity Tezkatlipoka, an Aztec god that was honored with human sacrifices, “to be used as energizers to bring the class together, build unity around ethnic studies principles and values, and to reinvigorate the class.”[23]
The assault on children is also an assault on parents. A new memorandum issued by Attorney General Merrick Garland to the FBI and federal prosecutors across the country threatens concerned parents who have been showing up at school-board meetings to protest the teaching of CRT and pornographic sex. The memo condemns “threats of violence” but adds “other forms of intimidation and harassment,”[24] making heated opposition on the part of parents into a possibly punishable offence. This is pure political intimidation.[25] The irony is that their indoctrinated children are taught to believe that their parents are to blame for the state of social injustice.
We need to pray that the millions of brain-washed children, as they reach adulthood, will not do to their children and to their fellow citizens what the prophet Isaiah says of the ancient pagans: Their bows will slaughter the young men; they will have no mercy on the fruit of the womb; their eyes will not pity children(Isaiah13:18). In the light of what the pagan culture is doing to children, Jesus’ love for them must give to believers in these difficult days a firm resolve, whatever the cost, whatever the sacrifice, to protect their children from false ideology, to bring them up in the “nurture and admonition of the Lord,” and to faithfully proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in an apostate culture (Ephesians 6:4).
We leave to God’s wisdom the use of millstones.
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.

[1] https://parkviewchristianschool.org/2018/06/05/sending-christian-children-to-public-schools-what-the-results-show.
[2] https://www.pbs.org/onlyateacher/john.html.
[3] https://parkviewchristianschool.org/2018/06/05/sending-christian-children-to-public-schools-what-the-results-show.
[4] Art.cit.
[5] Art.cit.
[6] Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis, 6.
[7] Meyer, Darwin’s Doubt (pdf version, 343/568).
[8] https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/giving-up-darwin.
[9] https://www.discovery.org/a/number-one-of-our-stories-of-2019.
[10] https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2018/august/drag-queen-story-hours-expose-pre-schoolers-to-what-some-parents-call-gender-insanity.
[11] Nick Bell, “New Sex Ed ‘Common Core’ Would Force Explicit Images, Gender Mayhem, and Abortion on Kids,” The Federalist  (Oct 12, 2021).
[12] ”How to sex-proof your children,” https://christianconcern.com/resource/how-to-sex-proof-your-children.
[13] Christ Butler, “Williamson County Parents Warn Critical Race Theory Has Already Entered their Public School System.” https://tennesseestar.com/ April 22. 2021.
[14] https://www.blackburn.senate.gov/2021/7/why-is-critical-race-theory-dangerous-for-our-kids.
[15] Bari Weiss, “Woke Kids: The Miseducation of America’s Elite,” March 9, 20121 City Journal.
[16] Rich Sweir, “Shocking Video: Educators Push Racism and Extremist ‘White Privilege’ Propaganda on Children,” BARBWIRE (5 June, 2014): See http://barbwire.com/2014/06/05/shocking-video-educators-push-racism-extremist-white-privilege-propaganda-children/#Uqd0DHgOOdfFtKGq.99.
[17] https://www.wnd.com/2021/10/bidens-education-secretary-parents-not-primary-stakeholder-kids-education/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=wnd-breaking&utm_campaign=breaking&utm_content=breaking&ats_es=%5B-MD5-%5D.
[18] Though BLM took down its website in order to conceal its Marxist beliefs, others preserved it. See https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/left-locked-life-and-death-struggle-family-don-feder/.
[19] https://www.quora.com/How-relevant-do-you-think-these-words-are-Give-me-four-years-to-teach-the-children-and-the-seed-I-have-sown-will-never-be-uprooted-by-Vladimir-Lenin.
[20] https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/left-locked-life-and-death-struggle-family-don-feder/.
[21] https://www.city-journal.org/calif-ethnic-studies-curriculum-accuses-christianity-of-theocide.
[22] https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-students-pray-aztec-gods-school-lawsuit.
[23] Art.cit.
[24] https://www.justice.gov/ag/page/file/1438986/download.
[25] Gerard Baker, Merrick Garland Has a List, and You’re Probably on It (WSJ, Oct 11, 2021). See also Michael Cutler. “Targeting American Parents-Biden administration finds new ‘domestic terrorists,’” Frontpagemagazine (Oct 12, 2021).