Why the Evangelical Movement Is in ‘Disarray’ After Dobbs

With Roe now overturned, the evangelical movement has achieved one of its decades-old political priorities. But for many evangelicals, this isn’t the moment of celebration and unity it may have first appeared to be. In the wake of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Russell Moore — a former president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention — described the state of evangelicalism as one of “disarray.” He argues that surface-level political allegiances paint over much deeper divisions within what has become an increasingly polarized movement. Understanding those divisions and what they portend for evangelicalism is deeply important, in large part because of the movement’s immense power in American politics. Moore is the editor in chief of Christianity Today; the author of numerous books, including “Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel”; and one of the most visible leaders in the evangelical movement right now. But he has also voiced some of the most stinging criticism of the movement’s current direction. He believes that evangelicals’ embrace of Donald Trump was a mistake and that the way many evangelicals are approaching the culture wars — with what Moore calls a “siege mentality” — is toxic for the faith. He encourages his fellow evangelicals to embrace their role as a “moral minority” in America instead of desperately clinging to political and cultural power. “The shaking of American culture is no sign that God has given up on American Christianity,” he writes in “Onward.” “In fact, it may be a sign that God is rescuing American Christianity from itself.” So this is a conversation about how evangelicalism morphed into the political identity we know it as today, why so many evangelicals have come to embrace apocalyptic thinking about politics and where the movement goes next now that Roe has been overturned. Mentioned “The Supreme Court Needs to Be Less Central to American Public Life” by Russell Moore Book Recommendations The Weight of Glory by C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis The Resurrection of the Son of God by N. T. Wright The Gilead Novels by Marilynne Robinson This episode was hosted by Jane Coaston, the host of “The Argument.” Previously, she was the senior politics reporter at Vox, with a focus on conservatism and the G. O. P. Her work has appeared on MSNBC, CNN and NPR and in National Review, The Washington Post, The Ringer and ESPN Magazine, among others. Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. ​​“The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Sonia Herrero and Isaac Jones; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin and Kristina Samulewski.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is The Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:18Ezra Klein?

  Hey, it's Ezra. I am out this month, but I am thrilled that today behind the mic is my awesome colleague, Jane Costin. Jane hosts our sister podcast, The Argument. She writes for Opina. Jane and I have worked together for a long time, so I'm always thrilled to get to hear her on the show. Today, she's going to explore a theme we always want to do more of and that she is really, really good at: religion and its place in politics and American public life. So take it away, Jane.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  There was a brief period of my teenage years in which I wanted to be an evangelical Christian. I was raised Catholic, but for reasons, some mixture of intense self-loathing and a measure of fascination, I found the world of evangelical Christians, specifically the white evangelicals who made up the mega churches near where I grew up in Ohio, intriguing. But the evangelical world of the 1990s is a different one from that of 2022, and I'm a very different person than I was then. In the 1980s, some leaders within it called themselves the Moral Majority, based on their understanding that they weren't trying to make their views the majority opinion in America. They believe that they already were the majority opinion. But today, many evangelicals seem to view the future in increasingly

• 1:35Speaker 01

  apocalyptic terms, and some of them believe that Donald Trump was the only president who could save them from an imagined future of tyranny and oppression. Russell Moore has been part of the evangelical Christian community practically since birth. He previously served as the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which is the policy wing of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in America, and he's currently the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, arguably the most influential Christian publication in the US. In short, he was and is one of the most visible evangelical Christians in America. But he's also one of the most critical of the movement's current direction. Moore thinks that evangelicals' embrace of Trump was a mistake, and that the morphing of evangelicalism into a political identity

• 2:20Speaker 01

  is ultimately bad for Christianity. And he's trying to encourage Christians to take a different path. One in which they embrace their minority status instead of desperately clinging on to political power. So this is a conversation about what evangelicalism is, how it became such a bastion of support for the Republican Party, and where the movement goes next. One note before we begin. Evangelicalism and evangelical movement are loaded terms. The movement we're referring to mostly in this conversation is that of white evangelicals, the vast majority of whom voted for Donald Trump. As always, the show email is [email protected].

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Russell Moore, thank you so much for joining me. Welcome to the Ezra Klein Show.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Well, thanks for having me.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  So I want to talk a little bit about the history of the evangelical movement. But to start out, I think that in the wake of the Dobbs decision, I think many people who are outside of the world of evangelical Christianity, or whose perception of the world of evangelical Christianity in America is based largely on politics, they would think that the end of Roe versus Wade would be a moment of unity and celebration. But you recently referred to the state of evangelicalism as being in disarray. How so?

• 3:40Speaker 02

  I think this idea of evangelicalism as a monolithic sort of cultural and theological movement, that is what is in a kind of crisis right now. I'm not despondent about that because I think crises can often have very good results. But it clearly is the case. There's a great deal of tension across American church life right now and within evangelicalism.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Tell me more about that. What does this crisis actually look like within congregations?

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Well, the evangelical movement is, in some ways, experiencing what every other institutional relationship is experiencing. So it's very difficult to find somebody who wouldn't say, "I have friendships strained. I have families strained. We have this whole new awkwardness at Thanksgiving about we can't mention the name of Donald Trump because, one way or the other, that's going to be a conflict." That has happened church after church after church after church in ways that I don't think- Anyone would have predicted, I mean, I think if I went back in time and said to my

• 4:54Speaker 02

  younger self, there will be people who won't speak to you because of this character in Home Alone Two at the time, Donald Trump, I mean, it would have been incomprehensible. We never would have it. This would not happen. And yet, that's the case in church after church after church, and family after family after family. That's a really distressing sort of reality. Everything has been upended. And that's one of the reasons why I talk to pastors all day, every day, who often will, in private settings, say they're tempted to quit, they're exhausted, and a lot of that exhaustion comes from this sort of political

• 5:37Speaker 02

  polarization happening within their congregations. So that whatever the pastor stands up and says, "Let's pray for Joe Biden, as the Bible commands us to do, pray for those who are in positions of authority," then that becomes an argument over whether or not the election was legitimate. Or a pastor says, "Here are going to be the precautions we're going to take during COVID, and he's going to have one group of people upset because he's too strict and he's following Dr. Fauci and have all sorts of conspiracy theories about that. Another group of people are saying he's not strict enough and is going to kill

• 6:17Speaker 02

  us all." I mean, you just go through all of these ways. A pastor who, if he talks about our responsibility for racial reconciliation and justice from Book of Galatians or Book of Ephesians, is going to have someone saying, "You're a critical race theorist," much less if you preach from the prophets of the Old Testament. Those sorts of polarizing...

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Characteristics where people are finding an entire identity in these political sorts of tribes. That is something that is very different. But again, I think that the crisis can be a good thing. Because there was often this kind of lumping together of evangelicals with one another when we weren't all together, really. And I think that's one of the things that has happened over the past several years is many of us, whether you're talking about in political life or social life or in church life, who have said, sometimes some of the people that were right there with us,

• 7:25Speaker 02

  maybe we were getting there by very different ways. And we're realizing, well, we're not actually in agreement on those things. So that's happening. And I think that in some ways, that fragmentation is good because it's creating new coalitions, new alliances, new friendships, new energy. But there also is the lament for what's lost.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  When you're talking about evangelicals, who are you talking about? There are specific definitions of what it means to be evangelical, which obviously comes from the idea of evangelizing about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But this is a specific group of people, so who are they?

• 8:10Speaker 02

  Well, that's kind of disputed. I mean, one of the problems that we have right now is that most people who are evangelicals don't usually use the word evangelical in describing themselves, except to pollsters. In terms of, most people think of themselves as Christians or as Baptists or Methodists or what have you. But an evangelical is someone for whom the emphasis is on the authority of Scripture and on a personal relationship with Christ. So an inner, authentic transformation of life by a person who embraces the gospel. And so each person, our emphasis on the language of the Bible, you must be born again. That's the case for someone regardless of whether

• 8:55Speaker 02

  that person grew up in a Christian home or whether that person belongs to a Christian church. There has to be a personal repentance of sin and faith in Christ, a transformation of the heart that comes through new birth.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  I want to discuss some of the tensions within evangelicalism that you mentioned earlier. I've heard you talk about a pretty serious generational divide within the evangelical movement, between older evangelicals who grew up in the 1980s with the idea that they were part of a moral majority, and younger evangelicals who didn't grow up with that idea. Can you talk about that division?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Well, this is an idea that persists in some sectors of American life, which is to say there's a real America. The majority of people have the same values and the same understanding of what morality is, but this is being derailed by certain elites. That was the mentality that often came along with the idea of a moral majority. And so there are many people who thought, "Most Americans might not necessarily agree with us on all of our doctrines, but they would agree with us on what it means to live the good life. And so what we need to do is to mobilize them, and if the will of the people is done, then we will have the sort of America that we want." I think there's an entirely different generation of evangelicals who have never grown up

• 10:14Speaker 02

  in a world like that. They've never grown up in a world where they expected most people to share their common cultural assumptions. They have to explain them. They have to work through them. And so they just live in a very different sort of metaphor when it comes to what America is. There's not a sense of disappointment of a golden age that has to be reclaimed. Instead, it's much more similar to the kind of Christianity that we would have seen in the very beginning, at least in terms of self-understanding, which is a minority that is speaking into a world that might not understand what we're talking

• 10:57Speaker 02

  about. And it's the strangeness of that gospel message that is, in fact, the power. And that's far more often what you see with younger evangelicals, which is why sometimes you see a great deal of tension happening. Sometimes I will be speaking to a group of older evangelicals and then to a group of younger evangelicals, and I have to give an almost opposite message in order to get them to the same place. So with the older evangelicals, I have to talk about the Kingdom of God is not the United States of America. What we're looking for is not Mayberry. What we're looking for is New Jerusalem. Don't be afraid. Gospel is powerful. Let's be confident and kind to those who disagree

• 11:37Speaker 02

  with us. And then with the younger evangelicals, often what I'm having to say is, don't overreact to what you see as the last bad thing, which is a total disengagement sometimes from any of these questions of civic life. But it's just because they have two very different frameworks and different experiences of America.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Do they have different experiences of the church as well? I'm reminded of a lot of the writing that you've done on the sexual abuse crisis within the Southern Baptist Church. And I keep thinking about how, as someone who was raised Catholic, the number of people, prominent conservative writers like Rod Dreher and others that I just know, who left the church not because of the world, but because of the actions of the church itself. Are there ways in which the church itself has, you've seen people within the church looking at the church and thinking, we are supposed to be, you know, the city on the hill, but we can't even keep our own act together?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Well, yes. I mean, and that's the thing that disturbs me the most right now, is that the conversations often that I'm having with younger evangelicals, when someone says to me, I'm thinking about walking away, it's usually a very different conversation than I would have had 10 years ago. Ten years ago, it would have been with a younger person saying, "I just can't believe the supernatural stuff that we believe anymore." Or, "I really think the moral ideas of the church are too strict and too judgmental, and I want to walk away." Now, it's almost, it's almost the reverse, almost directly the reverse. It's people who are saying, "I don't think the church believes what it says it believes and what it's taught me, or at least I fear that it doesn't."

• 13:24Speaker 02

  And I understand that. I went through the same sort of crisis as a 15-year-old with wondering, "Is this all just politics, or social control, or something else?" And had to work through that sort of crisis. There are many of these younger evangelicals who come through that stronger, because even when they're disappointed in the church, they're not disappointed in Jesus. There are others who don't. But that's the primary thing that I'm concerned about, is the fact that you have, you have people who are seeing sometimes their understanding of Jesus and their experience with the church being completely opposite from one another. And, and they can't make sense of that.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  And that's easy to understand when you look at not just the abuse crisis that you mentioned, but also very high-profile scandals that have happened one right after the other. You look at an American life where every institution almost is at a point of crisis, and the church does not seem to be an exception to that. And that can lead to a kind of crisis, not for the people who are on the periphery, which would have been the case before, but for the people who are the most committed to the way of Jesus. That's what worries me.

• 14:48Speaker 01

  It seems like at least part of this crisis has been caused by the way that evangelicalism has shifted from a primarily religious identity to a political identity. I think it's really interesting that increasing numbers of white Trump supporters started identifying as evangelicals during his presidency, even though many of them didn't actually attend church. So how and when did that shift happen, in your view?

• 15:13Speaker 02

  I think that what has happened is that we've had a morphing of cultural Christianity. There's always been a kind of nominal cultural Christianity, including within evangelicalism, because it was strange, in many places in the Bible Belt, to not belong to a church. It was a very unusual person who would say, "I'm an atheist," or "I'm an agnostic," or "I'm no religious affiliation." Someone had to really walk outside of the stream of the culture to do that. And I've talked about, in the book you mentioned, talking to a friend in college who was saying to me, after we'd been arguing about the existence of God over and over and over again. And he just says, one day over coffee,

• 15:58Speaker 02

  "Can you recommend a good Southern Baptist church for me to join, but one that's not too, you know, Southern Baptist-y?" And I stopped and said, "Well, when did you become a Christian?" And he said, "Oh, I don't believe any of that stuff, but I want to run for office." And I can't run for office if I'm not a part of a church, and there are more Southern Baptists in my area than anything else, so help me find one to join. That was kind of especially self-consciously transactional, but the idea behind it is not altogether unusual. That was the kind of nominal Christianity we had before. Now, we have a kind of nominal cultural Christianity that often does not, a person is not a part of a church community at all.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  It's someone who simply says, "I identify with this group of people, often defined culturally or politically." And so I can see people on Facebook who haven't been to church since the first Bush administration, but who are posting Bible verses. And what they mean by that is, "I'm standing against the bad people as they define it, and that must mean that I'm an evangelical Christian." So that's, in my view, a very lamentable state of affairs. But you're right, it certainly has been, because there was a time when the frustration for me was with secular people on the outside mostly defining evangelical Christianity in political terms.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  I would have political journalists and others where I would have to say, "You know, evangelical Christians aren't like cicadas that just emerge at Iowa caucus time. There really is much more to this group of people than their voting patterns." But as time has gone on, there is a significant group of evangelicals who themselves are embracing an identity that is like that, cultural and political, rather than theological or even congregational. That's a change.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  But I think for many people, the theological is political. I mean, I don't really have a religious perspective on earned carried interest, but I do know that my religious beliefs lead me to oppose the death penalty, for example, or to be very concerned about the issues impacting children. Now, hopefully, I would feel that way even if I hadn't been raised in a Christian environment. Where does that separate? Obviously, your work is, in many ways, political. You are talking about politics all the time. So what's the right way for that separation to work? And what's the wrong way?

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Bueno, creo que las implicaciones políticas son un segundo paso en su mayor medida. Estas cosas son las implicaciones de una consciencia que se motiva por las cuestiones primarias, las primeras cuestiones de lo que significa seguir a Cristo, lo que significa creer en la Biblia. El problema es que cuando las ideas políticas, o aún peor, las afiliaciones políticas y esos tipos de identidades tribales, eso se convierte en primaria. Y así la religión entonces se convierte en un medio para un fin. Ese fue uno de los problemas realmente difíciles con los que tuve que lidiar como adolescente, fue ver guías de votación que decían, aquí está la posición cristiana sobre veto de línea,

• 19:18Speaker 02

  enmienda de presupuesto equilibrado, esos tipos de cosas. Y darse cuenta, ¿hay una posición cristiana sobre la iniciativa de defensa estratégica y cuánto financiamos que debería recibir? Estas fueron las preguntas donde me pareció que las posiciones políticas eran primarias y la cristianidad era un medio para un fin. Y creo que esa es una de las razones por las que enfrentamos un gran número de cínicisme, es que hay gente que pensaría, bueno, realmente se trata solo de la identidad tribal y luego ajustas las convicciones religiosas para que se ajusten. Especialmente cuando son tan inconsistentes internamente.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Creo que sorprendería a muchas personas a descubrir que la Iglesia de los Baptistas del Sur, pero también el movimiento evangélico, eran mucho más heterogéneos en el pasado. Jimmy Carter era un Baptista del Sur, Bill Moyers era un pastor Baptista del Sur. Así que creo que la pregunta para muchas personas sería, ¿qué pasó? ¿Cómo se convirtió un movimiento políticamente heterogéneo, tal como existía, en un bloque de votación uniforme para los republicanos? Y creo que mi segunda pregunta sería, ¿es eso reflejado en los pueblos?

• 20:57Speaker 02

  Well, I think that if you look at the pews of a white evangelical church and a black evangelical church, you would see differences when it comes to political partisan identity, typical voting patterns. But yes, I think it would be safe to say that most white evangelicals in the South and in the Midwest are much more conservative, have tended to vote Republican quite a bit in recent years. That's clearly the case. Why is that the case? Well, I think there are, part of that has to do with just people as people where they're living. I mean, we've seen shifts and sorting of political identity really across the board.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  I was just happening to, you mentioned Jimmy Carter, I don't know why, but looking at the electoral map of the 1976 presidential election, and it almost looks like the reverse, a mirror image of what we are typically accustomed to seeing now with red and blue, where Gerald Ford is winning California and Oregon and Washington, and Jimmy Carter's winning Mississippi and across the South. That has changed just generally in American life. But it also is true that many of the debates that we're having are much different. And the stakes for evangelical Christians seem much higher when it comes to their own practice of our faith. And that has changed as well. I mean, you just look at the, look

• 22:26Speaker 02

  at the sorting on the abortion issue in terms of partisan identity. In 1976, one would have had to have asked a Republican, are you pro-life or pro-choice? And ask a Democrat the same question, because you wouldn't just assume it. The Carter and Ford positions on abortion weren't that different from one another. That has changed dramatically, and so the stakes of the debate have too.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Something that really interests me is the idea of, I think, the simultaneous idea of the moral majority coupled with an idea of a minority under siege, that everyone already agrees with us, but we are under siege from an overwhelming power. And I think that for many people, the idea of Christians becoming a minority in America seems unbelievable when most Americans are Christian-adjacent or Christian. And even that type of secular Christianity you mentioned earlier, like, it's the same reason why people think that the war on Christmas stuff is ridiculous, because if it's a war,

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Christmas is winning.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  So, I see this as the rise of evangelical identity as a political identity, but the decline of evangelical identity as a religious identity. What do you think?

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Well, as with so many other things, there's a core of this that is reflective of reality, which is with secularization of North America, the way that we're seeing it, there often is a disconnect from even understanding what religious church-going people are like. And so, sometimes you will see ideas of, I mean, for instance, the Hosanna Tabor Supreme Court case, where the federal government is arguing that they ought to be able to tell a religious institution who they can hire. That was rejected unanimously by the Supreme Court, but the fact that that would be a

• 24:36Speaker 02

  debate is really disturbing in those sorts of questions to church-going people in the United States of America. So, there is that reality that is there. But you're right, there is often a kind of siege mentality. In some sectors of evangelicalism that does have those two almost contradictory ideas together. Most of America is with us, we're the real America, and we're under siege and under threat. What most people who hold that view would say is that that's because American culture is being driven by the most secular people, even if they don't reflect the views of most people in the country.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Now, I've been a critic of that in order to say authentic gospel Christianity, as I understand it, has always been a minority in American life and in every other culture since the resurrection of Jesus. "The way is narrow," Jesus told us, "and the broad way is the one that leads to destruction."

• 25:40Speaker 01

  And also, he was murdered by the state.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. And so, we're not looking for some Christian America in the past because in order to do that, we would have to redefine what we mean by Christian.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:55Speaker 02

  In all sorts of ways that I think are harmful.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  What do you think drives the siege mentality? You've described evangelical support for Donald Trump as being driven by that idea, which then justifies whatever it takes approach to politics. You know, people start comparing Trump to whether King David or King Cyrus. What is that siege mentality? Because I think for many listeners, it would be strange to, again, you know, think of evangelical Christians as being a marginalized group. But clearly, there are people who see that. So where is that coming from? And I think my other thought is that, is that coming from the church itself?

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Because often, I'm not hearing a lot of self-confidence or confidence in the future from Christians or from Christian organizations.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  The siege mentality, I mean, again, part of it comes from factors about which I've been very critical internally, but it only works because there is a part of it that is indeed true. I mean, there are evangelical Christians who recognize that an evangelical Christian in many sectors of cultural power would be seen as an oddity at best and as perhaps a hostile threat at worst. And so it doesn't really matter what the demographics of the country are for people who are seeing the cultural levers of power moving all in one direction.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  So now I think there's a different response called for for that, but for many people when they see that, that means that the stakes are very high and we have to do whatever we can do to reverse that.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  You've argued that the evangelical approach to the culture war has been driven primarily by a fear of humiliation, and I was so interested by that. I remembered there was this Focus in the Family letter from 2012 in Obama's America that came out in 2008, and it was a host, you know, this idea that if Obama became president in 2008, a host of awful things would happen to Christians and it would be terrible and everyone would be gay, which I'm summarizing. But I'm struck by the fear is not just of persecution, but of humiliation. What does that humiliation look like and what drives that fear?

• 28:23Speaker 02

  That's one of the things that I think you can see with, for instance, you mentioned the war on Christmas. And there are, there are multiple different iterations of that.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:36Speaker 02

  Where I often have to say, people making fun of you is not persecuting you, or people who even are embarrassing you or humiliating you or thinking you're crazy, that's not persecution. We know what persecution is and that's not it. I think there is a fear of humiliation. I mean, often I will hear supposedly Christian leaders saying something along the lines of, "We've got to stop this weak lack of fighting. We can't turn the other cheek." And you step back and you say, turn the other cheek. That's a direct quote from Jesus Christ. And I've had pastors tell me that they have just sort of parenthetically mentioned

• 29:20Speaker 02

  the Sermon on the Mount and have had church members saying, where did you get those liberal talking points? And I'm just quoting Jesus Christ. And often, they will say that the response is, well, that was fine and good in other times, but not in times like these, this sort of an emergency. This is said in times of Roman occupation by an empire that would ultimately crucify Jesus and behead a lot of his followers. This was not happening at some placid time of agreement. And so that kind of reaction, even among people who kind of, at a surface level, hold

• 30:02Speaker 02

  on to the idea of Christianity, is just not what Christianity is. And there's a kind of cruelty that often comes with it and a kind of authoritarianism that comes with it. This is not going to be good for anyone.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  But I think that the response that you might get from a lot of Christians, perhaps to the right of me, or even you, is that, isn't that tantamount to just giving up? That if they don't fight back at all costs, liberals are going to use the power of the state, or even just the power of culture, to destroy religion and the family from the inside. You've written a lot about pornography and the availability of pornography. I think that you made the point in your book that no one would have thought that porn not being available in gas stations wouldn't be an issue, because you could get pornography literally anywhere else. So how do you respond to that concern?

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think we do have to fight, but we have to fight the way that Jesus told us to fight. And we have to fight with the tools that he has given us. And so the apostle Paul talks about in a letter he wrote to his protege Timothy, he said, "Show kindness and gentleness to all people." And that's precisely because what you're in the midst of is more than just a political battle. You're in the midst of something that really is... Something that's rooted in the conscience and that has to be spoken to not not just with what Jesus told us to say, but the way he told us to say it.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  And so when you when you look at the life of Jesus, you see someone who is in no place panicked. And you have someone who is surprisingly tranquil and calm through every sort of tumult up to and including his own arrest and crucifixion. And that's what I think the Spirit replicates in the life of a believer. So a fearful anxiety about the future, much less a rage at the people that we are to see as our neighbors and as our mission field, and to seek to persuade those people of what we think to be true, rather than simply to lash out against them, I think is the way of Christ.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  As you mentioned, Christianity began as a minority religion, and it's a minority religion that survived. And you actually mentioned Emperor Constantine in your book. And I'm curious as to how do you think American Christianity has shifted and changed and how Christianity itself has shifted and changed as was what was once a minority, a minority that endured great suffering. I think Catholicism, one of the reasons why I still love Catholicism is that, one, there's lots of pageantry, and I love pageantry, but also the stories of the martyrs, where it's like Saint Stephen was stoned to death, Saint Lawrence was fried to death. There are various saints that you can think of where basically every terrible thing you

• 33:05Speaker 01

  can imagine happened to them.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  But in America, we see a majority religion, and I think for some people listening, it's like, you know, two men got married to each other, and people respond to that as like, oh, my God, they're burning down our homes, or something like that. So it seems to me that like, becoming a powerful majority was good for Christian politics, but bad for Christianity.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  In many ways. I mean, I think if you look at the power of the early church, why was Christianity able to spread the way that it was? I mean, ultimately, I think it's because of the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of the gospel, but it's in human terms because there was a kind of peace, joy, love, conviction, that really did transform these communities, binding them together and sending them out on mission in a way that was distinctive from the rest of the world. There was a very strange and odd message that was appealing to people in need of forgiveness, in need of reconciliation with God, in need of cleansing of conscience and of binding to one another.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  And I think that's still where the power is. Now, every time that I say that I have to say, there are very legitimate worries. I mean, there are constantly conversations happening about whether religious communities should be able to live their lives out according to their own consciences as it applies to their institutions and so forth. There are very real threats to those things, and those threats have to be addressed. So when the outside secular world says, "Oh, it's all just paranoia from evangelism." No, it's not. And yet, there also is a situation where there sometimes is this sense of a constant state of emergency, and everything is at stake right now

• 35:00Speaker 02

  and will be gone soon, that ultimately, I think, leads to cynicism. In the same way that in the 70s and 80s, there was a lot of prophecy speculation, and there, one easy way to draw a crowd would be to say, "I can show you from the Book of Revelation who the Antichrist is and what's going to..." The problem is, when those things are said, and they don't come to pass, and the people saying them just move from one thing to the next, what you end up with is a burned-over, cynical group of people. Rather than authentically putting forward, "What is the Christian vision of reality?"

• 35:44Speaker 02

  It's very different from the way we're supposed to think in American life right now, regardless of whether one is on the right or left. You're looking to see, are you winning or are you losing? The Book of Revelation, instead, says you have people who are losing and winning. And as St. Augustine said in City of God, with the collapse of the Roman Empire, a true catastrophe of global proportions, saying, "The city of God transcends what is happening with the city of man around us right now." That's just a very different way of seeing the world around us that says every moment

• 36:25Speaker 02

  in culture has both great darkness and light. And they may look different from time to time, but it's always there. So that the fundamental problem is always a separation from God and a love of self. And the answer is always the good news of the gospel. And so there's a kind of sobriety that ought to be there. We can never say, this side of the end, "We're winning," or "We've won." We always have a sobriety, but we also have the sense of being, as the Bible puts it, "more than conquerors," meaning, everything that you need, you have in Christ.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  And so you ought not to be the people who are panicked and paranoid and angry.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  But I think for some people, the idea that Donald Trump's election, it meant the appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe versus Wade, that would not have happened if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  And if you believe that abortion is murder, which many people do, then, under that logic, it seems as if it worked. That, you know, you've made the point, I think, and others have, that the end of Roe versus Wade is just the beginning of a potentially pro-life America, but Trump was essential to that happening. So hasn't that "whatever it takes" approach kind of worked? And even then, what does it mean for that to have worked?

• 37:56Speaker 02

  If you look at the Roe decision, this was what a lot of evangelicals were thinking as they were making this decision. It wasn't the calculation that I made, or make, or would make, but it's a calculation that many did, and it's a reasonable calculation, which is to say, there are going to be a Supreme Court appointments about very, very high-stakes issues. There are going to be other appointments as well that are going to be very significant in terms of high-stakes issues, and so I'm going to consider the lesser of two evils in order to get there. There are people who made that determination. It's reasonable,

• 38:37Speaker 02

  even though I disagree with it. I think that, long-term, the question is not just, what kinds of immediate policy goals do you achieve, but, long-term, what happens to you? And what happens to the witness of the church? That's my primary concern, and that's one of the reasons why I don't make that calculation. I think that, I think we can say, it might be, I'm pro-life, I'm glad that Roe versus Wade is gone, and I think that it would be much better to have Roe versus Wade gone, and a healthy, vibrant credibility for the Christian church in ways that just aren't the case right now, for all sorts of reasons.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Is part of that how Christians are seen, where if you are seen supporting someone who, to people who aren't Christians, seems like a big jerk, and you are supporting a big jerk in the pursuit of what they view as a political goal, one that doesn't line up with a host of, you know, it's kind of, what's the saying of, you know, you will know them by their fruits. Well, if you do, then, is that part of the concern?

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, that's what was the biggest concern that I had in 2015 and 2016, and that concern has not been alleviated. If anything, it's only grown. Is in 2015, 2016, there would be a lot of people who would say to me, "We think that many things about Donald Trump are reprehensible. We don't like this aspect of his character. We don't like the way that he speaks about women. We don't like the way that he speaks about immigrants and refugees." That people could go through a whole list of things and say, "But I'm supporting him so that we will have this and the other."

• 40:35Speaker 02

  That's, again, a reasonable position, but I was afraid that there isn't the culture right now in American life for people who are saying, "I'm kind of with you, and yet I'm going to oppose you where I think you're wrong." Instead, it becomes this totalizing identity, which is indeed what usually happened. You have people who line up behind their partisan leaders and then ultimately become like them and find ways to wave away any of the very, very serious character and democratic order questions because this is our guy. That's what I worried about then and I worry about now.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  You wrote in your book about what an alternative to kind of Christian nationalism or the siege mentality would look like. And you use the term engaged alienation. What does that look like?

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Well, we have to be the people who recognize that Christianity is strange.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  It is.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Often, it is strange. And that's the beauty of it, the glory of it, in my view.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  A carpenter was murdered, and then, three days later, he arose from the dead.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  Yes. One of the things that you see happening in the New Testament is not an embarrassment or a shying away from that strangeness, but an embracing of it. The way of Christ is different. And so, there ought to be a difference in the lives of his followers. But there also is a connection to the people around us. So you have Jesus, who is very happily with people who would be shocking to religious communities, tax collectors and sinners, as they can do. And we talk about tax collectors, we're not talking about IRS agents, we're talking about people who are collaborators with the Roman Empire in a really awful occupation.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  And so they were despised, and yet he's there with them. And so we have to have an evangelical Christianity that understands even the people who might completely disagree with us, made in the image of God, loved by God, and may well be our future brothers and sisters in Christ. And that applies even to the people who are the most hostile to us right now. That has happened again and again and again throughout the history of the world and throughout the history of the Christian faith. So that ought to lead to not a stance of combat, I want to win, win over you and dominate

• 43:18Speaker 02

  you, own the libs or whoever in the language that we use now, but instead to seek to speak to you, to love you, to serve you, and to persuade you. That's, I think, the way of Christ.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Does it tie to politics? Or does it mean disengaging, especially as the Republican Party becomes more Trumpy and the Democratic Party becomes increasingly more anti-Republican? What does that mean for politics moving forward?

• 43:47Speaker 02

  Well, I think that one of the things that we've learned over the past few years is that there really is no predicting where the political divisions and systems are going to be. I think it would be very hard, even in 2012, to imagine the sort of world that we're living in in 2022 politically. So I'm not sure that we can map all of that out and see all of that. But when I'm asked by, I'll often be asked by young evangelicals who will say, I think maybe I ought to be in political life. Should I do that or not?

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Usually, the first thing I say is, are you the kind of person who was high school class president? Are you the kind of person for whom politics is your passion? You're going to wake up in the morning and check 5:38? You're going to look at, you're going to be constantly consuming political news and polling data and so forth. If that's you, don't go into politics. Because what that will usually mean is that your entire life is staked on succeeding in politics and losing an election is going to feel like an existential threat for you. Those are not the kinds of people that we need to be in politics right now.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  Instead, we need the kind of people who want to serve, believe in the democratic order, and are willing to lose. They have lives after that in a way that everything does not hang on whether or not I get through the next election, which is part of the problem. And everything doesn't hang on whether or not I'm received by the tribe of whatever political party I belong to. That's what becomes really dangerous. Now, what I've noticed is, when I'm on secular university campuses and I'm talking to evangelical Christians, five years ago, 10 years ago, there would have been a lot of them who were

• 45:53Speaker 02

  planning lives in running for office and serving in various political capacities. There are a lot fewer of them who say that now. You'll have a lot of people who want to be diplomats or serving in government in all sorts of other ways, but who don't really feel as though they could fit into the sort of political categories that are demanded right now.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  In a column from 2020, you wrote that, I'm quoting, "In some ways, the day after Roe will be the beginning of the pro-life movement, not the end of it." That's something I've heard from a lot of people who are opposed to abortion, whether in National Review or elsewhere. We are now living in that world. What are the next steps you would want the anti-abortion movement to take? And how plausible are those steps being taken?

• 47:13Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, what I would say is, to people who disagree with pro-life Americans and who believe that a decline in pro-life conviction would be good for the rest of the country, what I would say is, if you look at the surveys that are showing where the life issue ranks in terms of people's priorities, it's often very low right now in terms of the right, being replaced by issues like immigration and those sorts of things. I think even people who disagree with me on that question ought to be concerned about that.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  Because regardless of what you think about abortion, you have to understand that people who are committed to a pro-life view actually do care about human vulnerability. You may disagree with them about where they find that vulnerability, but they really are motivated to care for those who are defenseless. They don't see human life as being determined by usefulness or viability. None of us are viable. We're all dependent upon one another. And so the loss of that would be really dangerous, even for people who disagree with me on this. So that would be the first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is...

• 48:38Speaker 02

  The end of Roe does not mean that abortion goes away. And that's especially true when we see the ways that even before Dobbs, abortion was shifting from the clinical to the chemical in many ways. And so that's, that's the beginning of not just working in the legal arena and the political arena, which I think are important. But we have to be working at the cultural level and the level of persuasion.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  What do you think is going to be the hardest part of that mission? Because I think, I've argued before that in some ways, the existence of Roe protected the most maximalist elements of the anti-abortion movement. Because if you never have to do it, if you never have to like write the law or tell the woman she can't have an abortion or change how these doctors practice, you can say anything. It's a benefit of maximalism. So what do you think is going to change or need to change about what being pro, opposed to abortion or pro-life means?

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Well, one of the things that I've been trying to say to the church for a long, long time is to say, the actual practice of abortion usually doesn't recognize the political divisions of pro-life and pro-choice. Meaning, there was an article I read years ago by someone who was working in an abortion clinic. And who said, you know, most of my patients are not pro-choice. They're not people who have concluded the fetus is not a person and therefore this is morally neutral. Said, most of the people in the waiting room there at the clinic were evangelical Christians who were saying,

• 50:27Speaker 02

  I know this is wrong and God will just have to forgive me. Or Catholic Christians who were saying, I know this is wrong and I'm going to go to confession and just hope that God will forgive me. And so the issue is not just speaking to people who have arguments denying the reality of personhood for the child.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  It also is speaking to all sorts of people for whom, as the feminist leader said right after Roe, I think, "Most people are pro-life with three exceptions: rape, incest, and my situation." That is a reality, which means we're not just speaking to the outside world when we talk about a culture of life. We have to also speak to ourselves.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  When it became clear that Roe would be overturned, you wrote a piece where you said to your fellow evangelicals, "Let's be pro-life, even if that makes some of our pro-justice allies uncomfortable. And let's be pro-justice, even if that makes some of our pro-life allies uncomfortable." What are pro-life people going to be called to do that is going to make them uncomfortable?

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's a consistent view of human dignity and human vulnerability. So that I will often have, sometimes in the same audience, one group of people where, in their church, it would be really easy to get up and say, "Abortion is wrong. We ought to stand against abortion." And the congregation will say, "Amen." But when they say, "We have a group of Kurdish refugees down the street that we need to care for, or we need to be working against unarmed black men in our community being shot," then that becomes very uncomfortable. And there will also be churches where the reverse is true,

• 52:17Speaker 02

  where it's very acceptable to talk about racial justice, to talk about immigrants and refugees and others. But when abortion is mentioned, that's politically unacceptable in that congregation. We have to be defined by a consistent vision of life, and that is going to put us out of step with some of these political tribes at any given time. That's part of what it means to care about human beings more than you care about your political silos.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  I'm interested to know, especially as someone who is, I'm bisexual, I'm in a same-sex marriage. And I was always struck, being raised Catholic, I, you know, I'm a lapsed Catholic, because I understood, I get it. But it was always something where I noted that, on the one hand, there are many people who believe that sin is sin. That the sin, if you believe it is, of homosexuality is equivalent to the sin of adultery, to the sin of bearing false witness. But in much of what I would call kind of secular evangelicalism, sins having to do with sex are so much worse than the sin of usury.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Or the sin of, you know, if you are a family man and you never commit adultery, but you are terrible to your employees. And I just keep thinking about how many of Christ's parables were about forgiveness, but also about how a camel has a better chance of passing through the eye of a needle than a rich man as entering heaven. My theory has always been that, and again, I'm using the term "sin", because I think that that's a language that you understand what I mean here, that the sins with which you don't struggle are the sins you can be far more angry and strident about. If you have never, again, I'm using this terminology,

• 54:15Speaker 01

  but if you have never struggled with the sin of homosexuality, of course, it's really easy for you to throw out your gay kid, or to be really angry at your trans neighbor. But if the sins that are closer to the heart, it's far less easy for you to condemn them. Is that why the sin, you know, people are always kind of yelling about how Christians don't talk enough about poverty and homelessness and a lot of issues that they see, especially if you are in a more liberal denomination, they're very focused on immigrants and the poor and homeless folks, whereas more conservative denominations are like, "We're gonna talk about sex." "And we're gonna talk about sex in this very specific way." "It's I-Kiss Dating Goodbye, and gay people are bad."

• 55:00Speaker 02

  I think the problem is, the New Testament, at a very significant point, the Apostle Paul says, "Do I judge the world?" Speaking of the world outside the church, "No." He said, "It's those on the inside that I judge." And what he means by that is that the church is to bear witness by its very life, and not to demand that the culture around us pretend to be like us, to actually bear witness with our lives. And that means moral character and credibility that is consistent. And so, you're exactly right. You often have people who, it's not just that they're more focused on sins that they don't commit,

• 55:43Speaker 02

  or that they don't struggle with, but also with whatever they don't see in front of them. You could see that happening with, say, divorce. The more common divorce became in American life, the less that you had any moral component about it preached, and the more you had a therapeutic component about it preached. And it's because you're looking at people in front of you. Some of that is warranted, because you have people who are saying, "I now understand what some people are going through when they go through a divorce." Some of it is just cultural accommodation and really political calculation.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  I'm not going to talk about this passage of Scripture, because I have people who give a lot of money in the congregation who won't like it, or I'll have appointments that I don't want to have to have. I think that what has to happen is a consistency in both conviction and compassion. That we have to understand we're all sinners, and we're all in need of God's grace. And to understand that we have an accountability before God to live in ways that are consistent with what he has told us. I think both of those things are true. And you're right. Sometimes you will have churches on the left who will speak really clearly about the

• 57:09Speaker 02

  social aspects of morality, but tend to mute it when it comes to personal aspects of morality and character. And you'll have churches on the right that will speak very, very strongly and boldly about personal sin, and yet will step back when you're talking about responsibility to the poor, or responsibility for care for immigrants and refugees around you, or racial justice, those sorts of things. Well, it's both. It's both of those things. It's not one or the other.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Clearly, there's a massive interest in spirituality among young people. I was actually thinking about this yesterday with the number of people I know who are very into astrology, and also use astrology in a way that implies that they believe astrology is real, which, to me, I do not believe it to be real, and I find that very odd. But clearly, there are people who are looking for spirituality. Why do you think that the church isn't winning more of them over? Or is there something going wrong with that? Because I think it's not that people want an easier religion. You know, there have been recent articles about people converting to Catholicism. People want something that's more strict.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Why do you think that the church isn't getting more of those numbers?

• 58:32Speaker 02

  There's a fascinating book by Tara Isabella Burton called Strange Rights, where she's looking at the way spirituality is developing, in exactly the terms that you just mentioned. There is a desire for spirituality that often comes along with a suspicion of institutions.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  Which can develop itself into all kinds of super individualized and sometimes commercially exploited kinds of spirituality. So you think of the book, Mindfulness, that's talking about a kind of American Buddhism that wants to take the spiritual practices but evacuate it of the hard parts of what it means to be a Buddhist. That happens in almost every area of spirituality right now as well. I think we could see that as, at one level, bad news because you have this, you have this morphing, form your own spirituality all over American life.

• 59:37Speaker 02

  We should also see it as good news. People are recognizing that there is more to life than just the material, than just status. They're starting to say, "These things are disappointing me." I don't think they're finding the right answers, but they are starting to recognize that there is a void there. And that's something to which I think the church should speak.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  You're now editor in chief of Christianity Today, which is one of the most influential Christian publications in the country. If you have, I mean, American Christianity is such a wide and broad category that includes everyone from our beloved Presbyterians to Catholics, Methodists, and the whole host of nondenominational Christians. But if you could, what is the direction you are hoping to steer American Christianity towards?

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  Well, I'm not hoping to steer American Christianity, but what I am hoping to do is to speak to a joyful, confident Christian witness that is defined by the good news of the gospel. And I think that the message, "You must be born again," is still applicable to the world and to the church. And in many ways, the church does need to be born again. By rethinking through our priorities and seeking first the Kingdom of God, having a confidence in the future that God has for us, and being, being willing then to take

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  up the cross and to follow Him, you actually can speak to the outside world in a loving, compassionate way and fully convictional about what you believe.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  And go forward with that sort of witness.

• 1:01:20Speaker 01

  On this show, we like to ask for three book recommendations. So Russell Moore, what are your recommendations?

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  Well, if you're someone who's interested in exploring Christianity, I would say, look at C.S. Lewis, a really significant figure in my own life, not just because of his, his arguments, but because this is somebody who really wasn't trying to market anything or sell anything, but just bear witness to what he's seen. I would say you could start with The Weight of Glory, a collection of essays, including one that I think is maybe especially pertinent to our time, Learning in Wartime, Mere Christianity, and then read some of his fiction. Read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  I would also add in The Screwtape Letters, which I really enjoy, especially because that is the letters of a senior demon to a new demon. And it talks a lot about how best to influence people. And I was interested in how much Screwtape Letters seemed to mirror things I see in daily life.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  I think often about, my friend Alan Jacobs wrote a book about that era, when Screwtape Letters was written, and talked about a letter that went to the publisher of someone outraged by the advice given in this book is, is often positively diabolical. And they had to explain, well, that's what it's meant, it's meant to be advice from a demon. So you gotta, you gotta turn it around to see what he's, he's actually doing.

• 1:02:51Speaker 01

  What are your other recommendations?

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  Well, that would be, that would be what I would advise people if they're wanting to sort of get a surface level picture of Christianity. If someone's interested in sort of the historical questions, they have questions about the resurrection. N. T. Wright has a book, The Resurrection of the Son of God. That's huge and massive. You might not want to read the whole thing, but you can read sections of it. And I think it's really helpful. And then, of course, Marilynne Robinson's novels, The Gilead, I used to say trilogy, but there are four of them now, are really beautiful in terms of looking at human dignity.

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  Russell Moore, thank you for joining me on the Ezra Klein Show.

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin and Roji Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker, and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Sonya Herrera and Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristen Lynn and Christina Samiuluski.