#211 | Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for American Evangelicalism | Russell Moore

Crisis is often a necessary step toward the right kind of change.

There has to be a shifting and a disorientation, a disruption of the status quo, because a lot of what we had was unhealthy and needed to be done away with. And there never comes a time when we will say, oh, well, now's the time that we're going to address those.

And I'm on a roll. It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollo's Watered a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming and I am your host. And today on our show, we're having another one of our deep conversations.

You've undoubtedly heard the stats and the stories. You may be, well, tired of hearing about it, that the Western church is in crisis mode. And you might even think it's true.

Your church might be doing just well. Fine, thank you. But when you're looking at it across the board, it is in free fall. And most people agree with that.

We haven't actually heard anyone argue the point. And most of us have the same gut reaction, though, when we do hear it. Oh, that's awful. How do we fix it?

I mean, it's a huge, complex problem, but I think we may be looking at the entire situation wrong. What if the crisis is actually the best thing for us? What if God is not only using the crisis, but is actually bringing it about? Let that sink in.

Now, why would I say that? It's because. So we can get back to the heart of our faith and that's Jesus. See, we can get caught up in power plays and culture wars.

We can get caught up in feeling our way of life is being threatened and it threatens our understanding of the world. It threatens our understanding of how the world operates and our place within it. But God calls us back to Himself.

Today I'm having an important conversation with a very influential and perceptive pastor and theologian in his own right.

He's a writer and speaker and has held the position of president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and is currently the editor in Chief of Christianity Today. If you don't know the voice from the opening, the description probably gave it away.

Today we are talking with Russell Moore about his brand new book, Losing Our An Altar Call for Evangelical Christianity Christianity.

Russell has been through the wringer in the past few years because he has taken principled stands for the faith, specifically that Christians are called to look, act and sound like Jesus. Now that sounds crazy because it's so obvious. Of course we are to look, act and sound like Jesus.

But it doesn't take too much to go online, see some clips, watch the news, and Christians really aren't looking, acting and sounding like Jesus. And we're going to see that when we don't look, act and sound like Jesus, we lose more than our credibility, we lose a piece of ourselves.

I don't know if you grew up in a church that did altar calls, but I did. And altar calls are about one thing. Repentance. That's what this book is about. It's provocative. I got to ask about the problem with revival.

Why wouldn't God want to revive us in the midst of this? Will he? I mean, I hope he does. But what if he revives without things changing? Hmm? How can we become modern day pagans?

What about the power plays that we see being brought out politically within churches and in denominations? What about patriotism versus Christian nationalism?

And we even talked about how some of our recent legal wins may actually not have the long term effects that we hope for. It actually could go the other way. It was a short and fascinating conversation with one of the more important voices of our day.

And I hope and pray that God might use it to encourage you to make you think and act in such a way that is pleasing to Him. Now let's get to my conversation with Russell Moore. Happy listening. Russell Moore, welcome to Apollo's Water.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

I am so delighted to have you on the show today. And are you ready for the Fast five?

I suppose so. As ready as I can be, I guess.

Okay, here we go. I know you're a comic book guy, so Marvel or dc?

Dc.

Okay, then here's a sub question. Batman or Superman?

Oh, that's pretty good. I was talking to someone the other day and he said, I love Batman. I said, you're nothing like him. He's like, that's probably why I like him.

The dark part that I don't get to be and.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, here we go. Second question. Funniest cross cultural experience.

I don't know. I mean, I suppose it's an inter. Us Cross cultural.

I was going to say that. Go ahead.

But I had a. My college roommate was from Belmont, Massachusetts. And seeing him adjust to southern culture.

We were at the University of Southern Mississippi together was often. Hilarity ensued when I would have to explain, you know, when you Ask the girl out. And she says, I probably for ice cream.

And she says, I probably shouldn't because I need to lose weight. She's not asking you to say, yeah, you probably do. She's asking you to say, oh, no, you look great. Come on. And then she'll say, yes.

So I lived in the north shore of New England. I understand that that's a different world. It's a different world. It's a different world.

And being in the south now, I'm still trying to figure it out. I'm like, I need. Like, is there an interpretation of Southern culture? Someone to walk around, you know, like.

Speech, communication, where the Prof. Said, I don't know what you're talking about, because he was presenting on charge Cats. And I don't even know what that he said.

You know, charge cards, credit cards, Visa, MasterCard. Oh, okay.

That's so good. I think the fact that you're doing the accent and you do it well. You do it well, by the way. You do it well. All right, here we go.

Number three, what is the one dish you ate growing up that encapsulates your use?

Fried shrimp.

Fried shrimp, yeah. Any seasoning? Certain way to do it.

I don't know how my mom does it, but she. She does the best fried shrimp I've ever had. And we're from Biloxi, Mississippi, which is a seafood town, and that's the major industry. And. Yeah.

And so it's. I'm kind of a snob then for seafood if I'm anywhere else, especially if I'm inland somewhere.

Okay, that's good. Number four, how about this one? What is the one thing about Northerners.

That you just don't get that? They often don't. It kind of goes back to what we were just talking about.

They often don't understand the way that Southerners soften the blow of things with sort of polite wording that if you know what you're saying, you know what you're saying. But there's kind of a.

Kind of like, bless your heart kind of the. Bless your heart.

There's kind of a bluntness that I think is more true in the Midwest, actually, than it is in the Northeast. That's good. I have less sort of culture gap with Northeasterners than I do with Midwesterners, I think.

Huh. I never would have put those two together. All right, here we go. Number five. If you could be a Johnny Cash song, what Johnny Cash song would you be?

And why Walk the Line? I guess because that's what I would like to do is walk the way, walk the line.

That's actually a really good one because I do think that's indicative of your life. Now, let's transition here for a little bit. I'm not from the south, though. I live here now.

And, yes, where I'm at is very much of a Southern part of the culture. Jacksonville.

Yeah.

You've been raised there. You live in Nashville now. Lifelong Southern Baptist. These deep cultural roots. How has. How about. How have all of these shaped you?

That you would tell us in the northern, Midwestern and Western evangelicals about what's going on culturally, even in the America that others just don't get? Like you get it in the south, you see it because a lot of the stuff that you wrote about is very much Southern. But it does go across the culture.

Yeah. And I think that there's, like, with everything else, I think that there's an ingenuity and a shadow side to any ingenuity that's there.

So I actually was having a conversation just this morning, oddly enough, with a Northern evangelical who's operating in a Southern evangelical space who's having culture shock. And I'm a Southern evangelical working in a northern evangelical space who's having culture shock. And so I was trying.

I was trying to explain to him kind of how Southern evangelicals think. And a lot of that is the reason that we've been able to build things, because there really isn't a.

There isn't as much, I think, risk aversion in Southern evangelical spaces that can lead to an impulsivity. Let's just build it. But things get built. They don't always succeed, but they get built. So that's one thing that I see.

I mean, the other thing is, if you look at.

You've had a kind of cultural Christianity in the south for a long time, Bible Belt that has kept some bad things from happening, but has not been spiritually good for Southern evangelicals, that's shifting and changing, but it's changing in a different way than I expected it to. I thought what would happen is that the Bible Belt would become more like.

Not exactly, but more like New England and the Pacific Northwest just 25 years after everybody else.

And what I didn't really count on was that cultural Christianity would just dechurch and morph into, rather than the kind of cultural Christianity that would say, I have to belong to a Methodist or Baptist or Episcopalian church in order to sell real estate or meet a spouse or be seen as a good parent or whatever that's gone away. But what it's been replaced with is a sense of Christianity, quote, unquote, identity.

That's about what one posts on social media, even though there's no connection to community at all. So that's a big change. I think, that's happened in the Bible Belt just over the last. Really accelerating over the last 10 years.

Do you think that with the shift culturally, with everyone moving to the south from the north, especially from the blue states into the red states, that that's reinvigorated some of that as well?

I think what's happening is, and I've noticed this in Nashville, is that sometimes you have people who are thinking, oh, all these people who are coming from New York and California are bringing New York and California with them. In many cases, I think the problems that we've had have been the reverse. It's kind of like any congregation I've ever served.

The people who would be upset if you quoted a Catholic authority, for instance, are all ex Catholics. They're the people who are sort of rebelling against that.

And so a lot of times, if you look at, we've got some crazy school board meetings that go on around here, and often they're Californians or New Yorkers or something like that who are expecting the exact reverse in every way of whatever the last bad thing they had was. And so when they don't get that, are really hotly upset about it, I think it's not worked the way that some people either hoped or feared.

Well, as we look at the culture right now, and you've mentioned how things are shifting all over the place, you've also written, and especially as we were talking about your book, Losing Our Religion, An Altar Call for Evangelical America, you mentioned the church is in crisis. And I don't think anyone disputes that. I don't see anyone walking around saying, hey, the church is. Yeah, but you actually say it's a good thing.

But I want to know why you say it's a good thing. Because most people are like, wait, oh.

No, no, no, no, no.

You're saying, no, this is a good thing.

Why? Because I think that. I say it can be a good thing.

Oh, can be.

It can be a good thing. And a lot of that is going to depend on our reaction to it. But I think that crisis is often a necessary step toward the right kind of change.

So if you think about it, I was talking to a guy not long ago who was really worried because he said, I think I'm going through a midlife crisis. And I said, great. And he said, why do you say great? And I said, for two reasons.

I mean, one, you're not really going through a midlife crisis in a stereotypical kind of way. If you know it's a midlife crisis, people who are falling apart don't know they're going through a.

But secondly, because it's much, much better to have that crisis now of figuring out, you know, what's the meaning of my life, what am I doing, than to go through that kind of crisis on your deathbed. And so just look and see what God is doing in the crisis and what God's bringing out of it. And I think the same thing really applies to the church.

There has to be a. A shifting and a disorientation, a disruption of the status quo, because a lot of what we had was unhealthy and needed to be done away with.

And there never comes a time when we will say, oh, well, now's the time that we're going to address those things. So it's kind of like with a lot of, for instance, a lot of the kind of mega church scandals that we have seen over the past several years.

And there have been a lot of them in almost every case.

You have people who knew where this was heading and who said, here are some serious problems that we've got to address, but we can't address them right now because we're in the middle of this building program or in the middle of this missions emphasis or whatever. But there just never comes a point where you say, okay, well, now nothing's going on, so now we can go in and deal with the problems that we have.

That moment never comes. And crisis often, often does bring those moments in which you say, wait a minute, where are we going?

And is Jesus in front of us or is he somewhere else? And if we respond rightly to this crisis, that could be a good thing.

You mentioned, though, not having revival at this point in time, because the. We're in that disorientation because we don't want to have revival.

And you actually quote Tozer in the middle of that when he was writing in the early 50s that if we were to have revival at this moment in time, it would continue to perpetuate the issues that are there. So we don't want revival. We need reformation before that ever occurs.

And of course, we know that every 500 years there is a massive shift that we see going on.

Yeah.

However many of the people that we interact with in our churches, they still have this vestige of Christendom culture. Or this cultural Christianity, if you've referred to it yet, it's really not. You actually say that it's a form of paganism. You call it out.

How is this Christianity? Because I know most people are like, wait a minute, what? I'm a pagan. How am I a pagan? I believe in Jesus.

Help us to see how this, this morphing of Christianity, that's actually not Christianity.

Well, Christianity is premised upon the, the notion of new birth, the notion of conversion. We, we articulate it in different ways in different Christian traditions, but that' core of it.

And when that's absent, you end up with something other than Christianity. Especially when what you end up with is a Christianity, that's a means to some end. And so there are a couple of ways to paganize.

I mean, one way is to say we're going to replace Jesus with Thor. But another way is to say we're going to replace Jesus with Thor and call him Jesus. You know, that's paganization, too.

And a lot of times what we end up with is something that's not Christian at all, but is useful in the sort of world that we want to live in. And that's just not the way of Jesus. Jesus.

If you notice the way that Jesus interacts with the people who follow him in the Gospels, they are always saying, hate what is happening. Peter says in John 6, I'd like to walk away from here, but I've come to believe that you're the one who holds the words of life.

I mean, that is the way that Jesus operates. So a useful Jesus who just happens to agree with all of my social and cultural and political emphases, that's easy to create.

And I think often that's what we end up with, not just in the United States, but you end up with it all around the world. And it repeatedly happens.

So look, for instance, at the Russian Orthodox Church, a really extreme example, which in many cases was, at least in some sectors of it, heroic in combating Soviet domination. But now, at least at the leadership level, has become an extension of Putin and Putinism. Well, that's any authoritarian wants that.

You always want that because you want to have the ability to have that totalizing sort of secular authority. If you come against me, I'm going to do bad things to you.

But you also want, if you can get it, the kind of authority that says, if you go against me, you're going against God and you're going to hell. And so that becomes, then a useful tool. And that's a perpetual temptation but it's.

One that Jesus rejected, the Constantinian temptation. In a way.

We've come from circles, we come from similar tribes where people talk about fighting for truth, but when we get into this idea, we find out it's often not truth itself, but it's a cultural fabrication. It's power, it's this of identity. You mention this a lot in the book.

How do we help people to see that there's a power grab at play under the guise of doctrine? How do we help people to see that?

I think the way that we do that is unfortunately a very long process. I think there are a lot of people who would say, okay, how do we sit down and have an intervention in terms of let's replace that with Christianity?

I don't think that's the way it works. I mean, it can on a one by one basis in some instances, but not usually. I think usually what it takes is the shaping of intuitions.

And so it's not that you're. It's not that you're preparing people for whatever they're going through right now, because usually that's too late and you have to do some of that.

But it's usually what you're dealing with in front of you right now is something that is kind of light from distant stars. It was set in motion a long time ago. What you're actually doing right now is not dealing with what people are debating or fighting about.

What you're trying to do is to shape and form the kind of intuitions that are able to say, wait, I think I've recognized that.

And so they're able to recognize good things because they're embedded in a biblical storyline and they can feel those things as good, even if they can't yet kind of articulate why that's the case. And they can see bad things and realize, oh, wait, I've seen this before somewhere.

And it's because they know what Jeroboam does with the golden calves at Bethel. Even if they can't articulate it, they know what happens at Babel because they've been in that storyline.

And so that takes a long time of not just teaching, but also my friend Ray Ortland talks often about Gospel culture happening congregation by congregation. It takes that and it takes a long time for any of us to be shaped and formed.

One of the things that we've tried to advocate on the show oftentimes is like a missionary identity or a missionary ecclesiology, this idea of reaching, reaching out and having that type of same gospel culture. But I find still that I, when I interact with pastors, that there is much more of the fear of the political ramifications.

And I had one man actually make a post on a, I run a Facebook group for a certain theologian and he, he said, this is great and a congregation's a hermeneutic, but. And then he starts going into America and how it's been given to us and we're to be called to be stewards of it.

How do we recognize what true patriotism is from a Christian sense and juxtapose that against Christian nationalism? How do we identify that idolatry that you talk about a great deal within the book? Matter of fact, allow me to read this quote.

Christian nationalism is not a politically enthusiastic version of Christianity, nor is it a religiously informed patriotism.

Christian nationalism is a prosperity gospel for nation states, a liberation theology for white people, in that it has more in common with the lifeless establishments. The old liberalisms. And some of the social gospels which preferred a gospel that changed externals, did not demand personal repentance and faith.

It submerges personal transformation under social transformation, thus making both impossible. You talk about a mite drop. I mean you, you did not pull a bunch of shits in there.

Well, I mean, if you think about J.

And some people, when they hear it, think of what I'm committed to, to liberal democracy, free constitutional democracy. But what he meant was the kind of liberalization that makes Christianity useful.

And one of the things that Machen said was, does Christianity address communism? Yes, but if Christianity becomes a means of fighting communism, it has become a different religion. And so what he was seeing is this idea that.

And if you remember early in the 20th century, the so called liberals were very missions minded. But often they were missions minded because they were saying in order to civilize the world, you have to have Christian cultures.

And the way you have Christian cultures is to have Christian missionaries. And that's what Machen was rejecting, saying, no, that is reordering the priorities in a way that actually changes what the religion is.

And I think that's exactly what we see happening right now. You have Christianity. It's useful in that sense. And it's frankly easier to change externals. It's easier.

That is much easier than repentance and much easier than new birth, because new birth requires supernatural intervention. And so it's just really easy to give a message of total catastrophe. Everything's falling apart and they're coming to get you.

You can get people revved up with that. Or if we just do this, this and this, we can reclaim everything. That's an easy message to give.

In the same way, I see a lot of what's happening with Christian nationalism as sort of a secularization of a lot of the prophecy chart movements of the last generation, when it was really easy to come in and say to people, we are in the terminal generation. The rapture is right around the corner. I can tell you why, because of these signs that are happening right now.

And so you are at the pinnacle of history. That's a lot easier than coming in and saying, no man knows the day or the hour, but be ready. That's a much.

That's a much less easily used sort of statement. But. But the second statement is the true one.

It is, have we created this culture that we are then by having almost a shallow theology or an otherworldly theology? I had Vishal Mangawati on, and he started going off on Moody Bible Institute saying that Moody and Biola. But he said was.

He goes, there's a reason why on the Supreme Court we have Roman Catholics and Jews but no Protestants.

Is it because we had a shallow theology of we're just otherworldly that we've failed to understand, which seems to fly in the face of our political involvement now.

Well, I mean, I would have made that argument, and as a matter of fact, I did make that argument in my dissertation 20 years ago. But I no longer think that the problem is otherworldliness.

I think it's the opposite problem, problem across the board, which is carnality and worldliness that sometimes can be articulated in other worldly terms.

So if you think about, for instance, back things up to the 19th century and you look at the sorts of arguments about slavery that were being used to defend slaveholding. Some of them were sort of, look at these biblical texts, they affirm slavery.

A lot of what, though, was the most powerful sort of argumentation is this spirituality of the church idea that says, we can't talk about that because that is Not a spiritual issue. Well, is that otherworldliness? No, that's carnality.

Because you had people with an interest in keeping the enslavement of human beings going, but they could use otherworldly arguments to say, wait, wait, wait, when you talk about that now, you're talking about something that's a justice issue, and that's a justice issue. It's not a gospel issue. So I don't think that it's otherworldliness.

And I think the reason, for instance, that you see Roman Catholics, and I mean, even in the case of Justice Gorsuch, he's an Episcopalian now, but comes from a Catholic background. The reason you see, that has to do more with the populist nature of evangelicalism than it does with any sense of otherworldliness.

And again, like we talked about at the beginning, there's a good side and a bad side to that. The good side is you're able to evangelize the Western frontier with people who are going out and just setting up tents and preaching the gospel.

That's the good side. You're able to do that.

The bad side is that there starts to become this idea that discipleship means a reflecting back to people, whatever the loudest and angriest mobs within the people want. And once that starts to happen, then you really can't end up with a kind of reflection.

You end up instead with populist movements, and they burn themselves out. And I think that is more, more to blame than any sense of.

Of, well, we're not going to give ourselves the life of the mind because we're not going to be here. I just don't think that that was the primary problem.

Do you think going forward that we're going to see more of the life of the mind and a holistic faith at the. Whatever this is, this disorientation moment that coming out on the other side. Let's say that there's a.

I hate to say remnant because there's talking about millions of people. That seems strange, but do you see that there's going to be more of a revival and a more of a robust theological framework?

Because looking at the denominational, the pew released the.

The numbers on denominations and all went down except to the Assemblies of God and PCA and of course, Ken Keller, giving much more of a life of the mind idea. But I'm seeing other rumblings of others that are saying, no, no, no, I want more. I want to go deeper.

I'm tired of this McDonaldization of the church and this very floaty you know, surface spirituality. I want to go deeper. And of course, there's the other danger.

But do you think it's going to be stronger as a result of going through this disorientation?

I have mixed feelings about that. And the reason I do is because when I was starting out in ministry, I assumed that the problem was a lack of theological depth.

When you're looking around at Bible belt cultural Christianity, my assumption was because there is so little theology, there's a lot of emphasis on evangelism and missions, and that's great. There's a lot of emphasis on maintaining programs, but there's not a lot of deep theology. The way we counter that is with theological depth.

What I came to see over time is that you could end up with all the same problems of cultural Christianity, but just with a group of people who are stroking their chins and blasting people with theological arguments instead of evangelizing their neighbor. That's not a good trait. And so we need to have a deeper theological reflection. But theology is not enough.

And so there's a reason why, just as with a human being, you can't be chatgpt in the flesh, just algorithmic data. You instead have to have reason and imagination and affection and intuition and all of those things together to be a holistic person.

I think the same thing is true of the church.

And sometimes what we do is when we emphasize one of those things, we end up doing exactly what Paul says you can't do with the body of Christ, which is for the eye to say to the hand, I have no need of you.

So where I think we'll have health is when you have tension with one group of people saying, wait, we really need to step back and look at this theologically. And another group of people who are saying, yes, but we have an urgency to share the gospel.

And another group of people who are saying, we have neighbors who are hurting around us. Let's do that. That kind of tension is actually healthy because it causes everybody else to see things.

When it's working the right way, it causes people to see things that they wouldn't ordinarily see. And so if a healthy gospel Christianity, I think, will look like that.

I remember reading Dan Strange in Thermilios when he mentioned that in the first millennium we're debating on the nature of Jesus, the second one, the nature of salvation, but now we're talking about what does it mean to be human.

Yeah.

And this idea of holistic embodiment, the emotional side, even the. As you've mentioned, when you mentioned we have a thin relational place we're at right now. The technology, we're stretched so thin.

We have these pseudo connections, but they're thin. So we need to have those thicker relationships.

And you also mentioned the story, seeing ourselves in the biblical story, rather than just seeing as an add on, but finding ourselves in it, which is that formation idea, which isn't just taught, it's actually seen and exhibited within the cultural confines of where we're at.

I'm looking over my shoulder. Do you feel like you've been ostracized because you've written this is a lot of this is autobiographical in the book.

I mean, you've reflected a lot in there. There's some real pain that have come through the pages, but also a lot of hope, too, because I know you have a lot of friends.

That's where you've been nurtured and you've kind of attracted people that have come out of that. Where are you right now as you're dealing with that and processing it?

Well, I don't really. I don't really think that I have been through anything unusual.

As a matter of fact, I think in some ways I was more protected than, say, a young pastor who's dealing with a congregation and doesn't know what's going to happen to me and where am I going to go? I mean, so I think that I haven't really experienced what a lot of other people have to the degree that they have.

And I only wrote autobiographically. And I actually was wrestling with whether to do that because I really hate. Oh, I know you've been through a lot.

Well, I mean, everybody's been through a lot, and I'm fine. But the reason I did was because I knew that where I end up is very hopeful.

And one of the things that I see is just like the kind of cliche about the simplicity on the other side of complexity. That's a cliche because it's true.

There's a kind of hope that is just naivete or willful blindness to the problems that are there or Refusal to speak about those problems. And I wanted to say, no, I see the problems and I've lived through the problems.

And I'm still a Christian and there's a reason why I'm still a Christian and it's because exactly what the crowds say. At the end of John 10, John the Baptist did no signs. But everything he told us about this man Jesus was true.

And so I'm able to say, okay, I have reevaluated everything I've gone through this time of thinking all of this through and where I've ended up is with a sense of, well, a lot of it needed to go.

But everything that they, and by they I mean not the Southern Baptist sort of ruling structure, but the churches, the people who raised me in Southern Baptist life, everything they told us about, everything they told me about Jesus was true. And there's more that was true. And there were other things they told me that weren't, but that was.

And I'm even more convinced about the truth of the gospel than I was before.

And I'm even more hopeful, hopeful about the advance of the, of the gospel and the, and the future of the church than I was before because I don't see it as dependent on the institutional structures in the same way that I was. And I'm a huge believer in institutions and in denominations. I mean, it's. I'm still not used to the fact that I'm in a non denominational church.

We love our church, but it's just I'm the last person on earth to be involved in anything non denominational because I really believe that institutions, when they're working well, are meant to have that long term sort of influence that's longer than any one given human life. And so that's why I gave so much of my life to shoring up an institution and to shoring up a denomination.

But we're at a point right now where I'm able to step back and say, okay, God is not though, bound to that and is doing a lot of things. Even as a lot of the structures are falling and a lot of the other structures have become decadent.

God's still at work and the gospel's still going forward. And I believe that.

I remember discussing with Malcolm Guide, he says, hey, even if we get down to 12, we're good.

Yeah, even if we get down to 11, we're good. 12 and one leaves, we're good.

That's an encouragement, though.

I think we need that encouragement because it can seem like the sky is falling, but yeah, When I look at how God has brought, I mean, I know we could get into the topic of immigration, but I worked with immigrants for many, many years and in seeing so many of them come from Christian backgrounds and seeing them reinvigorate the church, being in New England, seeing the white evangelical churches were in decline, but the global evangelicals who were brought in were bringing new life in this incredible way and giving me believable hope and an opportunity for those who don't yet know Jesus. I mean, we had Muslims coming to services, Hindus, they were inquiring because God is doing a work globally.

I sometimes wonder where, if we're in the way, we're getting in the way of that, with some of our religiosity.

In a lot of ways we are.

When you think about a lot of things that are being exported out from the United States, I'll often hear from faithful African Christian pastors who are saying, just when I start discipling my people, they start getting prosperity gospel material from and it's all from the US that sort of thing.

But if you look at what I was just talking to a Canadian yesterday who was talking about the state of the Canadian church, which of course is very Western European, and he said you're seeing that continued irrelevancy and decline. But where you see churches that are thriving, they're Nigerian, they're Korean, they're people who North African.

They're people who are really re enlivening Christianity with a kind of Christianity often that has been forged at least sometimes just a generation back, but has been forged by minority status over against Islam or over against Hinduism or something else, or over against Chinese state secularism. And that's actually Christianity does best in those circumstances.

I am in total agreement. One of the things that you mentioned, that was another eye opening thing for me.

You talk about the Church of Ireland or the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. You mentioned the sexual abuse scandals that were there, the failure to people to believe it when it finally came out.

And then you put a tie on it that I wasn't anticipating where you mentioned how it wasn't too long after that. Then they vote in favor of abortion almost like nationwide.

And you basically say that the onus and the reason for that vote was because of what happened before, their failure to do it because they lost credibility and authority in public life. Do you think there is a, I mean there is a lesson obviously for that in our culture?

Do you think we are reaping what we have sown already because of certain decisions that we've made in that same respect with gay marriage, with what we see going on in a variety of different factors, racial issues, election things. I mean, do you think that we're starting to reap that or is that yet still to come?

Well, I think if you just look demographically at where the country is under 30 and where the country is going under 30, that's clearly the case. And so you end up with a. That was one of the reasons why I would always say it used to drive me crazy with, for instance, the abortion issue.

I'm pro life to my bones, working in that area for 25 years. And it would drive me crazy when people would say, well, we don't need laws, we just need to help people to find alternatives to abortion.

Say we have to do both. If we're actually dealing with two people instead of one, then we need to care for both of those people.

And what that requires is a church that really believes that and is supporting them and a civil state that is doing everything that it can too. But the kind of, the mirror image of that is this sort of using of abortion as a political argument, even in terms of enacting certain laws.

But without a culture that understands human vulnerability and dignity of human life.

And when that goes, I mean, a pro life view and cruelty and misogyny can't stay together because people eventually see, wait a minute, that is not consistent. And so what do you end up with?

If you have a church that doesn't have credibility, then you have people who are saying, well, I don't trust where the church was on that.

So that's what's happening in Ireland is you had people who, as Fenton O'Toole talks about in his book, you had people who eventually realized when they were in some cases parents bringing their child to apologize to the priest who molested the child, eventually there was a realization. Wait, it's not just that the church is hypocritical, it's that we are more moral than the church is.

And once that happens, then there is a loss of credibility and a loss of authority. And usually in just the way fallen human nature works, it works this way in the church, it works this way out of the church.

Is that most people say, okay, I've seen this bad thing, or I've experienced this bad thing. So the answer has to be the complete opposite of it. And that's almost never the case. But, but that's, that's what we do.

And that's, that's one of the reasons I think I mentioned this in the book, I'm not, I don't remember. But if I encounter, you know, I'm in college campuses, university campuses all the time.

I'm talking to atheists and agnostics all the time, 98% of the time, great civil, kind, curious people about Christianity. When I do encounter angry atheists.

I know one time I said nine times out of 10, I had to correct that 10 times out of 10, every time I've ever experienced this, it's been somebody who has had some sort of horrific relationship to a church or to a religious person. And so far in my experience there have been none of those circumstances where I've said, well that really wasn't that bad in every case.

Like, yeah, that is horrible what was done to you and it's horrible that that was done to you in the name of Jesus. And they're reacting in, in this way, in the other extreme.

So that's, that's just the way that human nature works and you're going to see it societally.

So if you don't have, if you don't have the sort of pro life vision that's disconnected from partisanship and cruelty and is stepping back and speaking to the rest of the outside world, then what you're going to end up with is exactly what we're seeing right now, which is skyrocketing rates of pro choice people. So what have you really won?

If you get a bunch of pro life laws that are Then repealed in 20 years by people who are saying we are never going that direction again and who come to increasingly extreme defenses of that, that's not much of a win. So even in terms of the very same standards of success that culture warring sets, it's failing doesn't.

Well, you mentioned that with the prohibition, you talk about how that was so quickly repealed and, and I think many Christians are starting to wonder that because we have the end justifies the means for many. Look, we've, and you talk a lot about Trump in the book and it's no secret the public issues that you've had.

And because speaking out and saying, hey, this isn't a Christian thing to do, it's not whatever criteria you look at, there's no way that you can justify or mold this to make this happen. And yet people say, well, the injustifies the means, look is what happened. But as you've said, it's a short term win.

It's a short term win and it's not even a long term win.

I mean, go ahead and elaborate that. Yeah. And it's I mean, what you have to look at is whatever it is that you're saying, okay, transactionally, this is what we're getting.

You have to ask, okay, but what is happening to you?

What are the things that you're willing not just to kind of ignore, but to actually sanctify and to find ways to justify biblically what's happening to you.

And then also what's happening to the credibility of a church that says that is so tied with a particular personality, Especially when, and I said this to some people one year at the March for Life, when President Trump addressed the March for Life and it wasn't the way that previous presidents would do, which is to say, I'm with you and thank you for what you're doing. It was essentially a campaign speech.

And I said, just in terms of pragmatic persuasion, if you're dealing with a person this unpopular with under 30s and you are saying this is what the pro life movement is, to be pro life is to have a red golf cap on, then what do you think's going to happen to the pro life movement?

I mean, just put aside all of my moral and constitutional and mental health and everything else, sorts of problems that I have there, even just on your own terms, that's not, that's not a win.

Well, I know that we've come to the end of our time. You're a very busy man. We like to end our show because we are Apollos watered. We want to water people's faith.

And we, we like to end the show and say by giving people a water bottle for the week, something for them to sip on. What's a water bottle that we can give our audience to sip on this week?

Well, I'm teaching through Exodus right now at my church. And one of the things that I'm struck by is how God seems to be absent in Exodus 1 and 2, just doesn't seem to be involved at all. And yet he is.

God heard his people and he knew.

Exodus 2 says, and so God is at work in all of these ways that we're not seeing, both in terms of the broader world, but also in terms of our own personal lives. And that's part of what that Hebrews 11 walk of faith is about.

And so simply having a sense of I really can trust you to be at work even when I don't see what you're doing is a blessing.

That is a blessing. I want to thank you for coming on Apollo's Water.

Thanks for having me.

Russell has been through it in the Last few years he's come through the fire not unscathed, but with his faith intact and hopeful. That's a great testimony to us and for us.

I actually let Russell riff on a couple of topics from the book and we honestly barely scratched the surface of the things that he covered in it. We didn't have that much time. I mean, he was talking about losing our credibility, losing our authority, our identity, our integrity and stability.

And all of those are true. In each chapter he outlines both how we lost those elements and what we can do in response. That's where the encouragement comes.

And if you've been paying attention to Russell's journey and writings over the past couple of years, it sort of distills it all in one place. It is certainly uncomfortable at various places in the book. I mean, he really does poke and prod.

And in the book he calls us both individually and as the church to repentance. Not in a mean spirited or holier than thou kind of way, but in a genuine let's follow Christ sort of way.

He's hopeful, at least in part, as he said, because for all of the things the church of his youth got wrong, and I think we can all say the churches of our youth got some things wrong and for all of the things we've had to jettison, we can see that honestly, oftentimes it got Jesus right. And that's the main thing.

I particularly loved his water bottle for the week that in Exodus 1 through 2, when it seemed God wasn't there, he heard and responded to his people. I love the words of Francis Schaeffer, he is there and he is not silent.

We can be tempted to think that God isn't there in our lives, that he's not at work in our culture. But he knows he sees and we can trust that he is at work in both the world at large and in our lives. In particular, he is at work in your life.

As John Piper has said, God is doing 10,000 things right now in your life and you might be only aware of one of them. He sees what's going on with you. He sees what's going on in our culture. He is there and he's not silent. Even when we can't see Him. He's there.

That's a good word.

I want to encourage you to check out our website, ApolloSWater.org and learn about our watering weekends because we would love to be able to come and visit your group or your church as we help equip others in their missionary encounter with Western culture. I want to thank our Apollo's Watered team for helping to water the world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered.

Stay watered, everybody.