Lessons Learned from Russell Moore

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Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris. As I record this, it is the morning, about 11 a .m.

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on the fifth Saturday of June, 2021. And there's some discussion going on online.

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Of course, it's a weekend, so a lot of people are out. It's probably gonna blow up more on Monday, which is when I think I'll post this, but there's kind of a discussion going on.

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People are mad, people feel used. Some people, at least, who are conservatives in the

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Southern Baptist Convention, more theologically conservative and politically conservative by Russell Moore. And then there's people on the progressive side who are just incensed because they believe everything

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Russell Moore has written and they're upset at the executive committee, Mike Stone in particular, et cetera.

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And I don't know all the strategy behind this, what I'm about to discuss, which is essentially, it's a leaked letter that Russell Moore had written to J .D.

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Greer. But it follows on the heels of another leaked letter that was supposedly to the Executive Committee of the

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Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission from last year, which apparently that's not even true.

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A lot of them found out about it the same time many of us did. But I don't know,

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I'm not sure what they're trying to accomplish. There's a few thoughts that are in my mind. One is, this is trying to drive up the negatives for Mike Stone before the convention.

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And it's obvious to me it serves a completely political purpose. You read this letter from Russell Moore to J .D.

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Greer. Basically, if I had to summarize, it's like, I don't know, like 13, 14 pages maybe. He says that basically

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Mike Stone and the Executive Committee and the SBC are just these horrible people trying to cover for sex abuse.

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Now you don't have to read the letter. That's basically the gist of it. And he includes all kinds of language in it though that make it clear to me, this is a public grandstanding measure of some kind.

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He's not writing to J .D. Greer in a personal way. For instance, saying things like, Rachel Denhollander, who is an

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Olympic athlete, and giving some facts about her as if J .D. doesn't know who Rachel Denhollander is. Of course J .D.

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does. But the letter is gonna, the attempt seems to be, I think, probably, that people who don't know who

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Rachel Denhollander is are going to read it. So from the beginning, this letter seems to be crafted in such a way as to go public.

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And I think, it's not an accident that it leaked. It's not an accident that the other letter to the, supposedly to the Executive Committee of the

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ERLC leaked last week. And I said when that happened that Russell Moore's fingerprints are probably even over the leak.

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This serves a completely political agenda. And it's, as one person said to me,

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Russell Moore will probably do more damage outside the SBC than he will in the SBC. And I think that's true. When I heard it,

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I thought that's probably true. And now I'm pretty convinced of that. Or at least he'll do more damage to Christianity, evangelicalism outside the

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SBC. So in my mind, I read this and I was kind of like, this is really boring, actually.

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This is kind of the same stuff we've already know, we've already heard from him. It's also, for someone very used to progressives, just knee -jerk, accusing people of misogyny or covering up for sex abuse or they're racist or whatever, you get used to seeing that same template over and over and over and it just doesn't become interesting anymore.

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Even like some of the facts in the letter, things like, we heard sexual abusers compared to Potiphar's wife.

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And no one's there for the exchange. They don't know what the executive committee was saying. But people familiar with this debate know that questions often arise in this whole

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Me Too movement and Believe Women, how can you adjudicate between someone who is making a false accusation of abuse versus someone who's making a true accusation?

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If it's just Believe Women, there's no way to do that. You could have a Potiphar's wife situation where Potiphar accused

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Joseph of indiscretion and ended up, Joseph was found guilty in the eyes of Potiphar.

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So how do you adjudicate those things? And so that was, I assume that was probably a discussion, but Russell Moore is taking that, whatever that is, and just saying, they accused sexual abuse survivors to Potiphar's wife or something like that.

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And it's just, there's just a lot of tactics that I'm used to seeing in this letter. So it's not very interesting to me, but it's got people,

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I think this is the reason I think people are upset about it. People are upset because if they're conservatives, theologically and politically, they feel like they funded this guy and they feel used.

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He used the platform he had in the SBC and in the ERLC for personal, projecting his personal career forward.

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He also tried to create the SBC, make the SBC into kind of like this egalitarian engine for political change of some kind or just social change within the denomination, within society in general.

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So they feel used. This isn't what they wanted their money allocated for. And I think people on the progressive side are angry because they believe everything

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Moore said and they think there's a bunch of sexists running around the higher echelons of the

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SBC. For someone who is paid by the SBC and supposedly loves the SBC, you wouldn't think this would be the way to go about it necessarily, especially if you knew that this was a problem for as long as you did and you withheld that information.

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That's the big thing in my mind. If it truly is such a horrible thing that there's these misogynists at the highest level of the

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SBC, you would have, without squinting or winking, you would have very clearly named names a long time ago.

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This is not an accident that these letters came one after another and that Mike Stone is named now.

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All of a sudden, Russell Moore is naming names. And I'm just telling you, this was, I think, written to be released.

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The reactions that are happening right now are the reactions that were intended. Further division was intended.

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And whether, I don't know, maybe it's to drive up Mike Stone's negatives before the convention because if he gets to the second round of voting, then he just may not make it because the negatives are too high.

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That may be part of it. Or it may be that Mike Stone's the guy they want to run against. He's the guy that they'd love to get him in the second round with an

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Al Mohler or a Lyndon. And I don't know, he's the one they wanna, because I don't think they're so naive as to know that if Russell Moore, kind of the arch enemy of conservatives in the

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SBC, as many people see him, if he identifies this is the bad guy, if Mike Stone's the bad guy,

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I think they know that's gonna have an opposite effect. Conservatives are gonna try to rally around that. So I'm not sure.

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I'm just putting possibilities out there. I don't know what the angle is here exactly, but certainly it is an attack.

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And certainly it is disheartening to see someone, if you're in the denomination who was funded for so long, you think your money's going for ethics and religious liberty.

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And then you have a guy who doesn't really defend religious liberty throughout 2020 of all years and pushes all kinds of egalitarian, social change stuff within the

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SBC. I talked about the Caring Well Initiative last Friday. You can go watch that video because a lot of it seems to kind of surround that.

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And I'm glad I put it out the day I did. But I wanna give some just, that's the political thing.

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That's the muck and the mire of what's going on politically. I wanted to just talk about Russell Moore in general.

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Step back, bird's eye view, what lessons are to be learned from the last however long, however many years he's been in the

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URLC. It's been a while before that teaching at Southern Seminary. What lessons are to be learned in this?

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And what's the takeaway from Russell Moore himself?

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How should we view this guy? And I'm pretty direct, but I'm pretty, in my mind,

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I want everything laid out very clearly and very chapter and verse.

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This is, I can point you to why Russell Moore was a problem, why this should have been known a long time ago.

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This should have been taken care of and why this is a reason never to hire someone like that again.

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And what are the signs? And how do we view Russell Moore? Is he, do we even treat him like a

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Christian? Or a false teacher? How do we treat him? And so these are some of the questions

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I have sought to address. And I did so in a, there's a letter by the way.

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Yeah, you can see how long it is. But I did so in a post on Facebook.

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See here. And by the way, the rainbow, the profile picture with the rainbow flag says, remember the

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Noahic Covenant. You can't read it. It's so small. I just wanted to say that for those who aren't familiar.

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For the month of June, or at least part of the month of June, I changed the Conversations That Matter profile pic to a rainbow flag and remember the

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Noahic Covenant to kind of take back the rainbow as a symbol that God is never going to flood the earth again.

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And I just think it's a wonderful tactic to do that. A lot of people are doing that. So no, there's no support for any of the

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LGBTQIA, et cetera, stuff from Conversations That Matter as far as the political goals and all of that.

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But yeah, let's go through this. I'm gonna just read for you. These are my thoughts.

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I wrote this and I'll expand on it where I feel like I need to expand.

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But I think there's some lessons to be learned and we need to learn them. So as a young man, Russell Moore learned close to everything he knew about politics from the

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Mississippi Democrat Party in which he served as president of the University of Southern Mississippi Young Democrats and as an aide to Democrat Congressman Gene Taylor.

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Now, this is just where Russell Moore has written about this himself on his own blog. That's where I'm getting at. I mean, there's actually a lot of interesting things on his blog.

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If you mine it for things, Democrat related things, years ago you'll find he wanted to marry someone like Hillary Clinton.

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There's a lot of weird stuff there. But he admits that this is where he learned about everything about politics pretty much came from the

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Democratic Party of Mississippi. Throughout the years, whether it's his support for going to same -sex marriage receptions, which he did support that, opposing

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Trump and Christian nationalism, quote unquote, or advancing the standpoint epistemology behind the Me Too movement,

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Moore has shown evangelicals his politics have not changed much. And we could add so much more to this list, couldn't we?

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Just even in the last year, the way he treated the BLM protests in the summer versus the way he treated

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January 6th, I mean, it's so telling. His support for BLM in general, and that whole narrative, the whole support for the masks and the vaccine and not really raising a ruckus about the lockdowns and the threats of religious liberty that those were, it's very telling.

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In fact, the Open Societies Foundation, which is George Soros' money, bragged about the success of their grantee,

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Russell Moore, in 2015. And this is totally true. This is something, I've held the documents in my hand before they were even published.

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And someone gave them to me and said, like, check this out. And I was like, oh, you've gotta be kidding me. Open Societies Foundation, funded by George Soros, did brag about it.

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Capstone Report, I know, has published the screenshots from their annual report of that year, where they say, hey, our grantees did a good job.

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Russell Moore's one of them. And this was for, I think that he was, it was along the lines of refugee resettlement and that kind of stuff in the wake of the shooting out in California.

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Russell Moore had done some damage control or something, and they were just, you know. But this is the kind of, you don't wanna talk about funding.

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This is the kind of association Russell Moore has. He had a George Soros organization bragging about basically what

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Russell Moore accomplished with their money. Not only has Moore helped change the definition of pro -life to include support for illegal migration, but he's used the

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Southern Baptist Convention as a vehicle for egalitarian social reform and career advancement.

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And many Southern Baptists who paid his salary feel used. Now, some of this goes back to Russell Moore has done interviews with people who were,

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I'm trying to think of the name of the guy now. Ron Sider is his name, who was kind of a pioneer of this holistic pro -life movement.

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And Russell Moore says, you know, I have two shelves full of Ron Sider books. You know, how much of an impact, how much respect he has for Ron Sider.

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So Russell Moore's carried that on Ron Sider's ideas. Now, Ron Sider thinks like smoking is a pro -life issue.

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Yeah, he expands it to all these quality of life issues, which are not related to murder. And Russell Moore has done kind of the same thing, but mostly on illegal migration.

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Yeah, perhaps the most offensive feature of Russell Moore's activism is the way he corrupts the gospel. And this is what

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I wanna focus on. And this should have been noticed by everyone. And the sad thing to me is that a lot of the critique against Russell Moore from even conservatives has been, well, he's a

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Democrat. Yeah, but the Democrat politics, if you wanna call it that, influenced something much greater.

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It influenced the way he viewed the church. Mission of the church was so much more than just the

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Great Commission. They were activists for egalitarian social change. But it's corrupted the gospel.

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And this should have been the thing I kind of wish, and this is a lesson learned, I think, I kind of really wish that if we could go back in time, and I don't mean me personally, because this is before even

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I got involved in talking about any of this. But if you went back to MLK 50, and even before that, there's been so many things

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Russell Moore has said that show you, he views the gospel a bit differently. I'm gonna show you one example of that.

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I wish that was kind of the rallying cry, that theological conservatism, we are for the gospel, and this man is corrupting the gospel.

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He's adding things to the gospel. He's creating another gospel, that kind of thing. I don't know why that wasn't the case, and I don't know why it still really isn't the case much.

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It's starting to creep up. Some people are starting to notice that issue. But where were the theologians?

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Where were the entity heads, and even people on the executive committee for the

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SBC, or not even just in that, but just pastors, just leaders in the denomination who were opposing

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Russell Moore on some level. Why wasn't this part of the critique? And I'm not trying to critique, maybe it's coming across that way.

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I'm not faulting anyone in particular. I'm not saying that it was so bad that this was so obvious, and someone should have just made this the rallying cry.

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My own perception is that most people don't pay attention, especially if you're a pastor, even if you're high up in the

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SBC, or if you have your own responsibilities, whatever those are, you're not paying attention. You just assume people do their job.

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Russell Moore, he does his job, and then you hear these kind of liberal, progressive things, political things, and that's the first thing you'll think, is, well, he looks like he's an agent for progressives.

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I just wish, and I think a lot of people wish this, looking back over the years, I wish we, meaning conservatives, had paid attention a little bit more, and were able to articulate the theological problems.

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The standpoint theory behind Caring Well, for instance, why wasn't, hey, Caring Well is a postmodern front.

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Why wasn't that the narrative? Why, as far as Russell Moore's activism, why was it not, he's using the gospel, he's corrupting the gospel in order to bring about a political end.

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And I'm not saying no one did that. I'm sure there were voices, I'm sure who did, but it wasn't the prominent thing.

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And I think that's a takeaway, is to pay attention to what's going on in entities, institutions, denominations that are funded by conservatives.

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So, let's look at this some more, this Facebook post here. Yeah, perhaps the most offensive feature of Russell Moore's activism is the way he corrupts the gospel.

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Now, let me give you an example. Moore delivered a speech in 2018 featured by the Gospel Coalition.

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This was at the MLK 50, entitled Black and White and Read All Over the Why Racial Justice is a Gospel Issue. Moore declared that the

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American evangelical church needed to be more evangelized itself.

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American evangelicals needed to be more evangelized. They failed to be a gospel people because of their silence in the face of systemic sin, such as poor working conditions for sanitation workers, the shootings of African -American young men and present segregation in the church.

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So, they failed to be gospel people, they need to be evangelized. And this is how he's talking about the church. Moore contrasted this attitude with the example of Martin Luther King Jr.,

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who sacrificed popularity in the short term in order to preach the gospel in the longterm.

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You didn't hear that wrong. Martin Luther, the church is not filled with gospel people.

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They need to be evangelized. Do you know who knew the gospel? Martin Luther King Jr. He's the guy that knew the gospel.

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And this is concerning for a number of reasons. I've talked about this before.

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There's a lot of things that you can point to with Martin Luther King Jr. that are worthy of admiration.

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And I think the I Have a Dream speech is probably the main one that most conservatives go back to and admire.

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But when you think of Martin Luther King, let me just give you a few examples. And Russell Moore should know this. I mean, this is at the

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MLK 50. He should be aware, at least in general, of some of the problems with Martin Luther King Jr.'s

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theology. Let me give you some examples. Martin Luther King liked Walter Rauschenbusch's social gospel and Gandhi because they exemplified the love of Jesus.

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His paper in seminary, The Humanity and Divinity of Jesus at Boston College, I should say, contained heresy.

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His pastoral call to set the captives free like Jesus did was a physical, not spiritual setting free.

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So he twisted scripture in the same way social gospel advocates did.

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On King's 1959 trip to India, he admired the spiritual strength of Indian people and said the bourgeoisie were the same all over.

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So spiritual strength of people who predominantly would not have been Christians, spiritual.

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I mean, this is who we're talking about here. He called his Selma March with Catholics and Jews a second great awakening.

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Well, there's no gospel in that. This is an ecumenical movement. And that's why there was a lot of conservatives at the time saying, we can't participate necessarily in these marches and activism and the civil rights stuff the same way.

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I mean, you're calling this a second great awakening. That's one angle.

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That's one thing that some people don't understand today is, hey, why weren't they more activists, conservatives more activists when it came to this?

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There were a number of reasons, but that was one of them. Wasn't just racism, right?

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He called, let's see, what else? I have a few notes written down about him that I wanted to just share.

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Just have other examples of him twisting scripture. I don't know if we have the time for all of this. Let me read for you some quotes.

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This is from 1968. This is an address to ministers leadership training program. So this is very late in his life.

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We have the power to make the church that institution that even young people who feel temporarily separated from it can respect. We can even get them to have a new loyalty because they'll know we are on the battle line for them and they'll come to see the

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Jesus Christ was not a white man. Christianity is not just a Western religion. We can make the church recapture its authentic ring.

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We have power to change America and give a new kind of vitality to the religion of Jesus Christ.

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We have the power to give vitality to the religion of Jesus Christ. That's what he said, direct quote. He also says that Jesus started

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Operation Breadbasket and the first sit -in movement and Jesus had a glow of the divine.

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If you know the way progressives use the term glow of the divine, that is actually an attack generally against the divinity of Christ.

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He just had the glow of it. Christianity had a revolutionary edge.

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The rich man in the story of the rich man Lazarus went to hell because he was a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

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That'd be just really twisting scripture on its head. Let's see here.

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This is here the most interesting statement to me. In 1952, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, "'Let us continue to work, to hope, work and pray "'that in the future we will live to see a warless world, "'a better distribution of wealth "'and a brotherhood that transcends race or color.

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"'This is the gospel that I will preach to the world.'" Let me read it one more time.

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"'Let us continue to hope, work and pray "'that in the future we will live to see a warless world.'" Okay, that'll never happen before Christ comes.

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"'A better distribution of health "'and a brotherhood that transcends race or color. "'This is the gospel that I will preach to the world.'"

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That's the gospel. That's the good news. That you'll preach to the world. This is the man that Russell Moore is saying.

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He gets it, but the American Evangelical Church, yeah, they don't. They don't get it.

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The executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, yeah, they're a bunch of misogynists. But meanwhile, Martin Luther King Jr. and all the revelations about his moral indiscretions, how he ran around on his wife, even,

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I can't even say some of the things if you have kids in the car that have been reported now by some of the,

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I guess, spying that went on concerning him, but laughing as actual abuse was taking place, that kind of thing.

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Russell Moore should know about all this. This isn't a secret stuff that MLK had a roving eye, to say the least.

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But yet, he is the one to be the, he's the example. He's the one that can show these people that are failing to be a gospel people, these people that need to be evangelized who are evangelical

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Christians. Martin Luther King Jr. is the one that sacrificed popularity in the short term in order to preach the gospel in the long run.

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This is giving you a window, guys, into his idea of the gospel. It's giving you, into his basic theology, this is giving you a window.

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And it should scare you. This is from, what, 2018? It's not ancient history, but it's also not recent.

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This has been around for a while. And presumably, the American church would become a gospel people if they followed

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Russell Moore's advice by crucifying their worship styles and political alliances, regardless of whether or not they adopted

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Martin Luther King Jr.'s heretical views and moral indiscretions. So what's important to the gospel, what's fundamental to the gospel is basically the social activism.

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It's the works that are attached to it. That's what makes the gospel the gospel. You can have the works that Russell Moore thinks are attached to the gospel without the actual gospel, and that's a better gospel than what evangelicals have.

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Such teaching confuses the gospel by making the church's ability to keep additional ethical demands, mostly derived from a new left moral framework, necessary in order to maintain the reality of the gospel's presence in the life of the church.

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Jesus argued against this kind of moralism. In the parable of the Pharisee and the publican, which he directed to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and viewed others with contempt.

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Does that maybe characterize Russell Moore? Ultimately, it was not the Pharisee who fasted and tithed, but the tax collector who cried out for God's mercy, whom

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Jesus considered justified. While scripture teaches that genuine obedience is evidence of a heart transformed by the gospel, evidence, right?

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It is never a precondition or basis for Christ's atoning work and that is the difference. Evidence, fruit versus precondition, grounding, basis.

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Unfortunately, many leaders and evangelical institutions like Moore are following the template laid down by liberation theologians by conflating the demands of social justice with the gospel itself.

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The false gospel Russell Moore promoted is championed by most on the social justice side of what was formerly evangelicalism.

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In the epistle to the Galatians, the apostle Paul referred to those advancing another gospel, which incorporated elements of the law.

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He ultimately characterized them as false brethren who desired to boast. You think Russell Moore's boasting?

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Ultimately, they stood accursed before God. In common usage, the term translated as false brethren refers to traitors within a city who allow the enemy to sneak into the city and survey its defenses.

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You think Russell Moore is letting enemies of the church sneak in and survey the defenses of the SBC? Paul used similar language in his epistle to the

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Philippians when he referred to the false circumcision and enemies of the cross of Christ whose end is destruction.

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Those who actively fuse the demands of social justice with the gospel fall into this category. Russell Moore's longevity in the

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SBC and path of destruction serve as a warning to Christians to never again hire a political activist who subverts the gospel and uses the church for their own career advancement.

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May God have mercy on Russell Moore and us if we even tolerate men like this with God's money ever again.

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And that's my warning. And I wanna say the shoe does fit on the other foot. If you had conservatives coming in and saying, you know what, it's part of the

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God, I'll give you an example. What if they said, you know who gets the gospel right? It's the Mormons. The Mormons get it right because they're so politically conservative and they fund all these conservative organizations.

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The free market or pro -life, you know, pro -life activism is part of the gospel.

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Those things are part of the gospel. We could say those things are very good. Those things, that is part of Christian ethics, right? That's not part of the gospel.

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That's not, the Mormons don't have the gospel because they pursue some conservative political end when their gospel's actually heresy and adds works to the gospel.

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So if you had a conservative come out and say that, you know, the Mormons get it right or something like that. And you know, the evangelicals, they're just not conservative politically enough.

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So they need the gospel preached to them. They need to be evangelized. They're not a gospel people. We would rightly say that that's heresy.

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And I think everyone would probably recognize that more easily. If someone said, you know what, without pursuing the free market or having a free market or something like that, you don't have the gospel.

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We'd all say, wait, that's crazy. That's exactly what the social justice warriors are saying. Only they're flipping the script and it's, you know, it's, because it's a political religion.

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So they're saying that basically you have to have some form of redistribution or some progressive political end.

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And if you don't have that, then you don't have the gospel. That's what's going on. And the difference between the religious right and some of the folks like Russell Moore, the religious left now,

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I guess if you want to call it that, is the religious right didn't really do that. I'm not saying there wasn't someone here or there, but they weren't characterized.

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Like Jerry Falwell, for instance, who is usually, you know, historically looked at as kind of the father of most of that.

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He wasn't conflating the gospel. He wasn't saying, well, you know what? We don't have the gospel unless we got some pro -life activists, you know, or, you know, at least

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I'm not familiar with any of that. They at least kept them separate somewhat, that there's the gospel and there's

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Christian ethics and we need to be about Christian ethics. But you don't see that on the religious left.

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They completely conflate them. And this winds you up in false teaching. Russell Moore has promoted false teaching, which would make him a false teacher.

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It's been a while. He's been, I know at some level he's aware, he's been confronted somewhat on some of this, but he's made the mistake, he's repeated this over and over and over.

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It's a conflation of law and gospel. And it's not even a biblical law. It is a law derived from the social justice movement and progressive politics.

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And so that's the warning. We want God to have mercy on Russell Moore's soul, but he must repent for these horrible false teachings that he's put into the church and all the people that are straying from the faith because of it.

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I mean, Russell Moore has some responsibility in this. And he can't just come back and say, well, you're a bunch of racists or you're a bunch of this or that.

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He needs to grapple with the false teaching that he himself has promoted. So what if the people, what if there are sinners, people who have or have sinned in the

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SBC or in evangelicalism, because everyone has sin. The point of the gospel is that Christ forgives that sin.

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And when you then take the gospel and attach it to works, there is no forgiveness.

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There is, you can never meet the barrier or the level that you need to meet to be worthy because you'll never be perfect.

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And that's the kind of law crushing gospel that Russell Moore, I'm assuming, lives under even in his personal life, if that's what he truly believes.

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And we should have some level of anger that so much of God's money went to a man to promote this within a

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Christian denomination. But there should also be a sense of fear that comes from this. Fear that someone like this, a fox could get into the hen house like this and wreak havoc.

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Fear that this could be a sign of God's judgment. Fear for Russell Moore himself and his own soul.

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And I'm being serious. Fear that there's such a lack of discernment in a large denomination like the

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SBC that a guy like this was able to slip in under the radar somehow. And people like Al Mohler who promoted him and stuff haven't said a word publicly about any of this.

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Should be a fear there. And those are some of the lessons that I think need to be learned. Again, this isn't about politics right now or social issues.

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This is about the gospel. And that is the level of, that's the level at which

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I wish, I almost regret that this wasn't the main attack. It needs to be.

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That needs to be the main attack against the social justice movement. It's not the only one. They have a false ethic. It's egalitarianism instead of equality before the law.

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But there needs to be an attack on this false gospel. So that's all I got for you today.

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I hope that was helpful to maybe clarify some of your thinking and processing some of the emotions some of you have with these revelations.

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We'll have more later in the week. I'm hoping to get to some positive things one of these days. I think as we lead up to the

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Southern Baptist Convention though, and I'm not, that's something I'm focusing more on now just because of the lead up and things are heating up, et cetera.

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But there's a lot of other things going on. It's a big world out there. And hopefully we'll be talking about some of those other things as well.

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But I wanna help you Southern Baptists who do listen. I know there's a number of you. God bless you. And I hope you have a wonderful day the rest of the day.

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And if there's any encouragement is that the gospel does not have works attached to it. There is nothing.

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There is no standard to meet. It is simply faith in Jesus Christ. That's the only instrument that God requires to gain the merits of Christ and to be in a right relationship with him.

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And you don't have to meet Russell Moore's standard of whether you're sexist or racist or any of those things by his definition.

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You just have to be loved by Jesus Christ. And I think that's an encouraging thought.