Russell Moore Loses His Religion

We are live on the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. Wow, it's been a while, huh? It's been about a week since I podcasted, I think. I think, yeah, it was last, what, Thursday or Friday?

Usually I don't, you get a podcast from me almost every day. Usually I don't wait that long, but a little explanation is in order because my own mother even contacted me, I guess it was yesterday, and she said, is there something wrong with my phone maybe because I'm not getting your podcast.

I said, mom, that's because I haven't made any. That's right, my mom is my fan and I am not ashamed to say so. So anyway, how's everyone doing out there? I hope you're all having a good summer. Feel free to write in the chat box what you're doing and we'd love to know.

I'm having a good time for the most part. This week's been busy. I'll explain, I'll let you know what's happened and what's prevented me from podcasting a little bit here. First, last week, I went on a camping trip.

The first camping trip, even though it's now August, but it's the first camping trip of the year with my wife. We went away to the Finger Lakes, which if you're in New York, you know where that is, but it's a beautiful area.

We went to a place called Watkins Glen. And then we went to a few different waterfalls near Ithaca, New York. And my wife has wanted to see this band, Nickel Creek, for a long time. She actually bought tickets to see them at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville.

And her brother lives in Nashville. We thought this would be a great opportunity. My brother lives in Tennessee. We'll go down, we'll visit family and we'll see them. And we got there and they canceled it because one of the singers, Chris Thilly, I guess, was sick, if you know the band, you'll know.

He's a mandolin player. And so that was kind of a bummer. And so she found out though, they put more dates on their tour. And one of them was, I mean, it's still like three and a half hours from us, but it was at this apple orchard south of Syracuse, New York.

And it was just spectacular. So anyway, yeah, it was really, really good. Oh, Trudle just put in the chat, he has not camped or smoked meat at all this summer. What are you doing, man? What are you doing?

The weekend's coming. So maybe this weekend, smoke some meat. I made some really banger pulled pork, by the way, last week. My first time ever doing pulled pork with the smoker. And yeah, the people who had it said it was really good.

My wife doesn't normally like it. And she even liked it, which I was kind of proud of. So I'm getting into that a little bit more. But anyway, we went on this little trip and we had a good time. It was like two and a half days.

And then when I came back, we have a home inspection that happened today. But it was for, some of you know, my wife runs an Airbnb and there's some new regulations. I think this is happening everywhere.

Regulations are just going in in all these little towns and counties because Airbnb, well, there's probably some legitimate reasons. Airbnbs are causing a ruckus. People are, especially in my area from New York City are buying up properties and then using them as Airbnbs to renting them out like that and making money.

And they're not there to see the kind of people that are throwing parties or, you know, whatever the noise pollution, whatever it is. But of course, they, as the government does, they went to the extra step of putting in a whole bunch of regulations and they justified it under the COVID.

They're still doing that under the COVID policies of healthcare. So they had to come assess our home for safety violations. And it's pretty crazy in my mind what they require. But anyway, that meant that most of this week I had to be up cutting down trees and cleaning out my basement and doing all kinds of things that I wasn't really expecting to do, but I'm doing it.

So it looks like AD Robles is stopping by. Hey, AD, how you doing? Good to see you. I know AD's having fun this summer. He was fishing. I saw some pictures and that's one thing that I wish that I was doing more of.

And I mean, it's already August, but I think I've only gotten my line wet like once and I didn't even catch anything. It's really bad. That used to be my summer was fishing, but smoking meat's also pretty good.

So anyway, all right, well, we do have serious stuff. This is the Conversations That Matter podcast. We're not just gonna talk about my summer and how it's going. But you know, some of you, I think, find that interesting.

I would appreciate your prayers, by the way. I don't think I should probably share all the details of this, but I'll just put it this way, because I have said this on the podcast before, that my wife and I have been navigating some fertility stuff.

And I'll just put it this way. We're at a point where we have to make some major decisions and there's just a lot of financial issues involved in all that. So I appreciate your prayers. I do wanna say one thing that just to encourage you as well, because it encouraged me.

One of the supporters out there, randomly, okay? One of the listeners, he's probably listening now, sent me some gold. And it's just some like gold to put away in a safe, like gold coins, I guess. And I was just, like, first of all, sending it through the mail, I was like, whoa.

You know, that takes some guts. I guess some faith in our postal service. But he just wanted to do it. He doesn't know me, just wanted to bless me. And there have been a few times in my life, over the last few years, especially since I started doing the podcasting and the writing and the speaking and all that, it's not always a consistent income.

And I'm so thankful for the patrons. I'm so thankful for those who support it. And sponsors, if there's sponsors out there, you know, that helps, all that helps. But there have been times when we come up short and God always comes through.

And in this case, I just see this as a connection. I mean, it's right when we were starting to discuss, okay, like, how are we gonna pay for some of these medical bills if we go down the road that we're probably gonna go down?

And it's right then when someone sent me what will probably cover it, which I just, I'm amazed by that kind of thing. God does that kind of thing. And anyway, for those concerned about all that, you can pray.

I should probably let people know, some people get weird about that when I bring up things like fertility related issues because they're thinking insemination, they're thinking IVF, they're thinking there's all these ethical concerns.

And I just wanna let everyone know I'm very aware of all of that. So that's all I'm gonna say. I probably already said more than my wife would want me saying, but I just appreciate the prayer. So anyway, yes, AD.

AD says, partner with John, this is huge. This work is huge. Thank you, AD. Thank you for that. So anyway, we got a bunch of people streaming right now. And yes, we gotta get to the serious stuff here.

Do we really want to talk about Russell Moore? Why don't we just take a vacation from that, shall we? No, no, we have to do it. All right, we'll start there. And then I have an announcement at the end of the podcast for those who wanna stick around.

Russell Moore’s Book as a Critique of Evangelical America

But I wanna get into the material because Russell Moore just came out with this new book and it's called, Losing Our Religion. Great title, Losing Our Religion, An Alter Call for Evangelical America. So you can tell already, like you don't even have to read the book and you can tell that based on the cover, he's insinuating that, look evangelicals, you must not actually have the gospel.

You're not really one of us. You're not really Christians. You need an alter call. I mean, what's an alter call, right? That's when you call someone forward to get, I was gonna say get saved, but it's true.

It's get saved, it's to receive the forgiveness that comes with believing in Jesus Christ, trusting in him for salvation. It's the gospel message and the response. That's the alter call. That's what at least traditionally it's supposed to mean.

And Russell Moore saying this applies to evangelical America. They apparently need the gospel. And this is so boring to me in a way, just because I've seen, and maybe not to all of you, but it's because I'm immersed in this stuff.

I read this stuff all the time and it's just such a constant theme. And it's been that way since like the early seventies. The evangelical leftists always want to insinuate that the side that they're politically against somehow doesn't have the gospel, right?

And they do it in like vague ways. And sometimes they didn't as much in the seventies. Now they do, they do it in vague ways, in general ways. Russell Moore does give us some stuff to sink our teeth into, but honestly the book is kind of a word salad.

It's what you would expect from Russell Moore. It's like his blogs. It's wrapped in this very pietistic sounding veneer, but then when you dig down, you're like thinking, okay, what are you actually saying here?

And it's all these insinuations. It's honestly kind of effeminate. It's the way that like, like if I listened to my wife talk to her friends and this is a positive example, so I'm not making a complete parallel here, but I noticed the way that they talk to each other is different than the way I often talk to my friends, right?

There's just a tendency women have to speak in more emotional language, okay? Not that men can't, I'm just saying that women in general relate to each other in emotional ways and they're able to communicate to each other sometimes in these.

Now this is positive when I'm listening to my wife talk to her friends, but I've noticed though very often when there's gossip or slander or those kinds of things, men and women go about it very differently, right?

And it may not even be gossip or slander. It may just be opposing something. It may just be communicating a problem, critiquing something. And men have a tendency to be more direct, to say, this is the problem.

It's nuts and bolts. This is what we can do to fix the problem because this is out of whack here, right? It's very specific, oftentimes, more so I would say. Women tend to think more in terms of, this is my observation, how they feel about it, the impact it makes on them.

They will make more insinuations. Things can sometimes even be more extreme and more just, they'll use sometimes charged language. I'm not saying men don't use charged language. Sometimes men can be much more aggressive.

That's also in the male. But women, I think, they tend to see themselves in the situation. They're not quite as detached generally from the situation. And so things become personal for them more so. Now, if you wanna contradict me, go to the chat section and let me know what you think and say, John, you're off.

You've misdiagnosed this. That's just my diagnosis. That's just what I've noticed. Russell Moore, he is so, yeah. Someone says engineering versus nursing. Engineering versus nursing, yeah. Russell Moore is on the nursing end of it.

He's on that more like therapeutic bedside, trying to have a good bedside manner. That's the whole winsomeness thing. And the way he communicates in his book is that way. And that's what annoys me, I think, as a guy reading it, not just a Christian, but a guy, just like, just say what you mean, just cut through it.

And he could probably, in like one or two or three paragraphs, give us what he wants to say in the book. Instead, he stretches it out over this whole book. So what would he say, like if he was going to write it like a guy?

I think he would say something like, evangelicals have gone off the deep end because they've embraced a political gospel that's a false gospel. And they followed Trump to perdition and they got involved with online conspiracies.

And I, Russell Moore, and my friends didn't go down that path. We did the right thing. And as a result, we have more moral credibility and authority even with the world. And you should follow our example.

We don't have a lot of hope for evangelicalism because this is part of the DNA in a way, but we do have hope that something can come and replace evangelicalism that we're a part of. We're gonna usher in a new thing, whether it's called evangelicalism or not, it's gonna be different.

And that's what we need to do. We need to usher in this new formula, this new approach to Christianity. That's the book. There you go. You don't have to read the book. I am though going to go through a number of things in the book for you so that you know what's in there.

And I'm also writing. I'm in the middle of writing. I'm actually probably over halfway done with a review of the book for True Script. And that'll be shorter and pithy and all of that. But if you want all the ins and outs and the rest of it, well, then you'll enjoy this particular slideshow.

So let's start here. The purpose of the book. Russell Moore says that evangelical Christianity at its best is all about small solutions. Genuine renewal in the church comes one by one, soul by soul. The temple is built stone by stone.

This book is a word of testimony. Testimony of what one fellow Wayfarer has learned about how to survive when the evangelical, when the evangelical and the evangelicalism seem to be saying two different things.

That requires naming what we have lost, our credibility, our authority, our identity, our integrity, our stability. And in many cases, our sanity. This book will consider all the ways evangelical America has sought these things in the wrong way.

So basically he's gonna say, I'm gonna highlight all your errors, evangelicals, and suggest that perhaps it's by losing our life that we will find it again. So you failed to take Jesus seriously when he said that you should lose your life.

Instead, you are trying to do things like gain power. You're involved in political moves that just, they sacrifice your witness. Along the way, I'll suggest little choices that you can make, not just to survive this dispiriting time, but in order to envision a different future.

Now, one note I wanna say, Russell Moore also thinks it's a dispiriting time, right? That should encourage you a little bit, right? So it's not just conservatives who are sitting around saying, man, I don't know what's going on.

Trump was just indicted yesterday. I don't even know what my country looks like, what my church looks like. I think Quiana Shaw, she just put a comment here. Russell Moore is all about power. Yep, I think that's right.

I think that's right. He's obsessed with it and he accuses, he projects, he accuses other people of that. But anyway, you're sitting there and you're bemoaning the situation we're in. Guess what? Russell Moore is doing the same thing.

Huh, that's interesting, right? He's on kind of the opposite end of things, but he's also sitting there kind of bemoaning the situation, which tells you we're still in a culture war, guys. This isn't over.

This is still ongoing. Keep your chin up. Keep yourself in the fight. It's the fight for truth. Even if it's a rear guard action, and maybe in some ways leftists are never really, truly happy. But Russell Moore seems to think that things are going in the wrong direction in evangelicalism.

And I would say if he's right about that, that's an encouraging thing. He's jaded. And this is probably, I'm gonna start off with the most legitimate thing Russell Moore has to say. Some of you probably can't read this print because there was too much I was packing in.

I had two slides on it. But let me just read for you some quotes. This is so interesting to me. He says, a friend and respected older Baptist leader called when I was at the lowest moment of all this psychological warfare.

And he's talking about when, I guess the ERLC, when his job was in jeopardy at the ERLC, because basically some dumb things that he did over the course of years. He wants to make it out like it was just Trump.

It was just, I supported Trump and the ERLC. He actually in the book, this is what he says. He says at one point that it was a heresy inquisition. I think that's the exact phrase he used, something like that.

And heresy trials, that's what he says. And then he says, I hadn't changed my theology or my behavior at all. What I had done as the president of my denomination's public policy agency was refuse to endorse Donald Trump.

And so he thinks that's the issue. But really there was this report that the Southern Baptist task force put out and they cited a bunch of stuff. They cited the fact that more participated in the evangelical immigration fund, which is partially funded by George Soros.

He filed an amicus brief in support of a mosque in New Jersey. He failed to support religious liberty in California during COVID -19. There was just a bunch of stuff in that. It wasn't just, oh, you supported, you don't support Trump.

That wasn't what it was. And even that was about mission drift more than it was about Trump. So anyway, getting back to the quote at hand here, this is the time he's talking about. So this respected older Baptist leader called when I was at my lowest point, I assumed he was to check on me or pray with me.

Instead he acted as though I had betrayed a fraternity into which he had inducted me. This is not how you play the game, he said. You give them the 90 of the red meat they expect. And then you can do the 10 of the side stuff that you wanna do on immigrants or whatever.

He was right. I had played the game poorly. I didn't understand the culturally conservative positions I took to be red meat. I was pro-life and pro-family for the same reasons I was pro-racial justice and pro-refugee.

I didn't realize that we were playing a game. Now this is interesting to me because this reminds me of David Platt. If you remember when David Platt left the North American Mission Board, David Platt said basically it's a den of corruption there.

And I can't believe what Southern Baptists are doing. I can't believe how bad Southern Baptists behave behind closed doors. It's not what you think. And he never gave you any specifics. Really helpful, David Platt.

Thank you for telling us how corrupt the domination is and you're just gonna wash your hands of it. And you don't even tell us where to look or who to blame or any of that. Russell Moore does something actually very, very similar here with these observations.

He's saying, look, this is the way the game's played. And he was told this by people in his denomination that, hey, look, if you're gonna be a Southern Baptist, you're gonna play the game, you're gonna be part of this denomination, then really what you gotta do is give the people 90 of what they want.

It's a formula. And then you push that needle 10%. This sounds, I mean, he's giving away so much here. This sounds exactly like what the gospel coalition does. Let's give you 90 of the good stuff and let's put the 10 of the leftism in there or something.

And that's what this guy's advising. And I don't know for sure, but I'm wondering if this guy's Al Mohler saying, look, this is what you do. You give them 90 of the pro-life stuff and all of that, and then give them that 10 of what you wanna talk about.

Push that needle. Yurter says for 4 .99, since we all know Russell Moore is watching this, I just want to challenge him to come down from lily white rich neighborhood and debate any of us. Yeah, that's a good point.

I've heard that Russell Moore actually, that is an accurate depiction of where he lives. Through David Platt too, since we're on the subject. I mean, they talk a lot about being among the marginalized and being in the inner city.

And then you look at where they live and it's like the whitest neighborhood around. But anyway, the next one is I've seen over and over again, people who cover their own internal shame and guilt with a seeming mission to shame others for the very things to which they are secretly in bondage.

This is not irony or coincidence. It is a key aspect of how depravity works. That's why the Bible speaks of the mindset on the flesh, both in terms of sexual anarchy and envy and violence and quarrelsomeness and religious zeal apart from the gospel.

The very active denunciation can feel like discipleship, at least for a moment, but it destroys the person doing this and often innocent others too. Some of the most ferocious of denouncers of sexual immorality in the culture are sexual nihilists inside.

Now, here's the question I have. How does Moore know this? How does Moore know this? This is a guy who has lived most of his adult professional life within the Southern Baptist Convention, within church evangelical circles, and this is what he's saying about it.

He's saying, look, the people who are the most against the sexual anarchy are the ones that in their own personal lives are living sexual anarchy. Again, it's like David Platt. He's not telling us who, where, how, why.

He's just telling us that's what's going on. Not very helpful, but it's revealing. He says, within just a few years, this atheist, and he's talking about James Lindsay here, he doesn't name him, but that's who he's talking about, found support with a Christian activist, end quotes, who ran cruises for Christian ministries, that's Michael O 'Fallon, and he's talking about Christian nationalism, but this is hysterical to me.

Actually, Russell Moore goes after, I'll just, before I finish the quote, Russell Moore goes after James Lindsay and Michael O 'Fallon for the way that they partnered with Christian nationalists when they are some of the most aggressively anti-Christian nationalist voices on Twitter.

And yet, Russell Moore, we've said this for a long time, though, that, look, the secular world doesn't see a dime's worth of difference when you say, I just want Christian values, or I want Christian identity and Christian values.

The world is just like, they don't want Christian anything. And so, Russell Moore just doesn't even see, it's just funny to me, he couples them in with that, but he talks about them, and he says, this Christian activist, James Lindsay, was appearing on documentaries, so he's talking about by what standard, and invited to speak at Christian pastors' conferences and on Christian media to attack as cultural Marxist Christians concerned about racial injustice, or who called for reforms to deal with sexual abuse.

The atheist had not changed his mind on God, was not a new Christian, wanting to combat the error of his old ways. The atheist, though, was able to tap into a market of professing Christians who were willing to see Christianity as a fundamentally, an ethnic or national or political category, and heresy as whatever deviates from that.

Now, this is an interesting point, not because Russell Moore's right about this, but because Russell Moore, like he's looking at this situation, and he's identifying something that I know I said, and a number of people said, at the time when James Lindsay was being platformed by G3 and by other Christian ministries, we were saying, some of us were saying, I'll just say, more so in back channels, I don't, I might've said something publicly, I'm not exactly sure, I can't remember.

I probably would've said like, look, I tried to make a very clear line, like, look, James Lindsay is someone that you, there's a limited amount of things you can go to James Lindsay for. You, if you wanna understand kind of how critical race theory operates, and you wanna use James Lindsay's material, fine.

All right, I have his book, I don't, I think it's in a box in my shed now, because I didn't find it that helpful. I got, I got like two chapters in, and it just, there's really good things and helpful things in it, and I'm grateful for the things Lindsay's done that's exposed some of what's happened.

But he definitely does not write from a Christian understanding, or even a conservative understanding at all. And so when you look at his material, you're reading an atheist who's pro-abortion, who's pro-homosexual, and that factors into it.

And there was other things too, but one of the things that I know I had said, and a number of people had made the observation at the time is, look, if we're critiquing critical race theory, because we're saying, look, this rests on atheism, its foundations are atheistic, and that's part of the problem with it, and it gets you off on the wrong foot in that way.

And then it's an atheist that we're platforming to kind of combat it. Like, aren't people gonna see like, oh, that's kind of, there's some tension there. And I think my response to that concern, which I did have, is that, well, as long as you make the lines very clear, and it's very hard though for people to do that.

And anyway, Russell Moore though, is weaponizing this. He's using this, and he's not the only one to have done this. A lot of people have done this. And so this is another way that Russell Moore's kind of jaded because he's thinking, this is just another manifestation of the corruption that these guys are hypocrites, that these guys are willing to, and he's talking about guys on the other side, politically from him, are willing to compromise.

But he's saying everyone's willing to compromise, except him apparently. In our mythology, two men, he says, had saved the convention from liberalism. I'm pretty sure it's Al Muller and Paige Patterson.

They were in the way we told history as our Lutheran Calvin. They were revered by many, though the higher one went into the domination, the more one could see the respect evaporate, and he replaced only by fear.

No one wanted to get flowers delivered from one of them, said to be signed that one was dead to him. And if dead to him, then dead to Baptist life. More than that, one didn't want to get a fiery letter or a phone call from one of their wives.

So anyway, he's basically saying, this is the way the Southern Baptists operate. You have your elite figures, and they control everything. And yeah, it stinks. It's corrupt. He's telling on the denomination here.

Now, do you believe him? That's up to you. I've seen enough over the last few years that I tend to think this is probably one of the areas where Russell Moore is actually onto something. But again, it's Russell Moore, and most of what he says in here is just, it shows some bad judgment.

When key leaders justify their complementarian views of male headship with positions, such as the rejection of the eternal generation of the sun and other aspects of Trinitarian dogma, those deviations were tolerated as inside the camp.

So instead of James Lindsay, now he's using Owen Strand, and I guess Bruce Ware. He's saying that these guys have a Trinitarian heresy because they believe in eternal subordination of the sun, and yet they're platformed within conservative evangelicalism.

So he's saying, he's doing the same thing he did with James Lindsay there. Let's see, I could keep going here, but you get the point. He says, he talks about the 1990s boycott of Disney. And he talks about how Baptists, I guess, were hypocritical even on that.

He talks about, he says, Jesus' point after laying bare the hands of the religious leaders were lifelessly mimicking religion, exploiting the piety of their followers, was that reviving or expanding such lifelessness makes a terrible situation even worse.

So these are all things that I think, as an insider, you have to wonder, was Russell Moore being in this organization, the Southern Baptist Convention, for as many years as he was in there, is he complicit in any of this?

How does he escape the charge of being also at fault? I mean, he ingratiated himself this year. He ladder climbed in this organization. That was a stepping stone to his job at Christianity Today. And now he's gonna tell on all of them, but he won't name names.

He won't tell you exactly where. And he'll just say that that's what's going on. So anyway, looking at the comments now, lots of comments coming in. Yeah, Mueller is a big time mafia boss, sending you flowers when you lost his blessing.

I don't know. I don't know any primary source for that, but you wonder when Russell Moore says stuff like that. Okay, so this is a good comment too. Krianna Shaw says, yes, but he is just mad that he got, I guess, ridden, rode out of town.

So now he is turning state's evidence. He is not sad or remorseful. He would still be in the game if there wasn't pushback. That's a really insightful comment, actually. I think that's probably true. This is just the, this is revenge.

Russell Moore has been engaged in that for some time. Okay, now Russell Moore in all this positions himself as the underdog. He stood against Donald Trump and paid the price, he says. He compares himself.

I won't read this long quote. It's actually very laughable. He compares himself, believe it or not, to outlaw country music artists. He says, just like the outlaw country music artists like Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash and all of them, Chris Gustafsson, they were bucking the Nashville formula.

And Nashville, you know, didn't like them, but they were more authentic and real. And so Russell Moore says, that's basically saying that's kind of like me. You know, and I think that's what we need more of.

We need to start our own thing. We need to have a different form of evangelicalism that bucks the trends, that's rebellious. And he sees himself this way. And he'd like, and anyone who listens to Russell Moore, you know, has to laugh and just be like, you're an outlaw country music?

I mean, those guys were kind of known for their masculinity, right? And Russell Moore is just, he's not exactly known for his masculinity, which is, I think the thing that makes me think this is funny, but it just shows that he's so insulated.

He lacks the self-awareness to compare what he's doing and his friends to outlaw country singers. I would say this too about outlaw country singers. For the most part, they were, and Russell Moore even admits this, they were going back to a more traditional sound versus what was, and a look, to be honest with you, versus what was in vogue in Nashville at the time.

And so if you really want to go back to a more traditional evangelical Christianity, then it's not going to be in the direction Russell Moore wants to take things. Just saying. Hey, someone just said Aaron Watson got rejected from Nashville, came back to Texas and wrote old fence posts.

That's a good song. And I'm surprised that someone actually put that in the chat because I know those obscure country references. So I figure not many people probably do. I don't talk about it much. I actually, I've been listening to, what is it?

I'm going to talk about outlaw country. Colter Wall. I've been listening to Colter Wall's album. I mean, it's just like old cowboy music. That's, yeah, it's different than Nashville, but it's more authentic.

It's more traditionally country. And that's what Russell Moore thinks he is. He's the more authentic version of evangelicalism. Earl Starbucks says, Russell Moore for $2. He says, Russell Moore is authentic as AstroTurf.

So I don't know what this comment means. So Moore is going to join Doug Wilson. I don't know what that means. Okay. So maybe Tara, you want to explain what you mean by that? I don't get it. Jason O 'Brien says, tried that in a small town.

That's pretty fun. Okay. So this is how Russell Moore thinks of himself. And he uses, he engages in a lot of projection, okay? He critiques and justifies the means thinking, yet supposedly thinks things like attending gay wedding receptions are important to be a witness, or you should do that to be a witness perhaps.

So he doesn't like this thinking of and justifies the means. And he has this whole quote from Eugene Peterson of all people, right? Russell Moore hasn't drifted theologically. He hasn't changed. He's quoting Eugene Peterson, which is kind of weird.

It's not on something heretical though. I mean, the devil had, he talks about the three temptations that Jesus had and how they were about ways and means. In other words, they do the right thing using the wrong means.

And so he critiques this, and it's like trying to get Donald Trump in there and doing so though is wrong because you're making a deal with the devil to try to combat a greater evil. That's what he's trying to say.

And so he makes this argument. And if you think about Russell Moore, you wanna just say like, do you have a mirror? Who are you, man? Because that's exactly what you've done. And that's just one example.

You've said it's okay to go to a gay wedding reception to show love. So you have this higher purpose of love and witnessing to your neighbors. So you compromise your morals. Like how do you not see this?

He accuses Trump supporting evangelicals of relativism when they justify their position using the lesser of two evils approach yet uses the same approach to justify prioritizing character issues over theological correctness.

So he says this, he says they engage in whataboutism and that he says one embraces moral relativism that would make a postmodern deconstruction a slink out of his faculty lounge in shame by embracing that logic of supporting Trump because he's a lesser of two evils.

And here's the thing, Russell Moore does the same kind of thing. He uses that same kind of approach, something similar at least to justify prioritizing character issues over theological correctness. So it's just so important how we come across.

I mean, you think of like even an MLK 50, the speech Russell Moore gave where he even says at one point that basically evangelicals failed to preach the gospel the way Martin Luther King Jr. did. Even though Martin Luther King Jr. was a heretic and didn't preach the gospel, but we failed to preach a authentic gospel of King because we weren't as engaged in the civil rights stuff.

And so what does that mean for Russell Moore? Someone who's got character flaws like Martin Luther King Jr. is held in a superior position. How is that any different? In fact, it's worse because the people that generally in Christianity justify voting for Trump, when they say lesser of two evils, what they're doing, they're not saying that we need to use evil to fight evil.

They're choosing to, they're saying that despite the evil of Donald Trump, it's still a better choice to get him in there than the alternative. That's what they're saying. That's the lesser of two evils approach.

They're not praising him. They're not saying that those evil things in and of themselves are actually good or he does something that washes it away. Like he's so good that it just justifies himself and he doesn't have to answer for those things.

Of course he does. Of course he does. Okay. Other stuff. He opposes conflict entrepreneurs, but so he talks about like talk radio hosts and politicians and social media combatants who are conflict entrepreneurs.

They are people who are going out there and trying to stir up controversy or take advantage of controversy for their own ends. That's what Russell Moore does though. Like I'm just thinking Russell Moore does that same thing.