The Face of Evangelical Cruelty - Russell Moore

Alright, well let's start today, which is likely going to be a serious video, and let's start with a little bit of humor.

My son, you can see him on the screen right now, he just turned four by the way, so happy birthday to Ezra.

Anyway, he built a, he showed it to me and he said, hey look dad, I made an 8 -bit apple.

And I was like, what? He made it, I turned around and he's got a Duplo thing that kind of looks like an apple made of squares.

And the kids always know that when a video game is made of squares, that's 8 -bit, because you know, 8 -bit was squares, so it's a pretty good 8 -bit apple.

I'm teaching him to grow apples, even if it's just an 8 -bit Duplo apple. But anyway, so yeah, today's video is going to be a little more serious, and about a year ago, actually almost exactly a year ago, it was

March of 2020. I reviewed an article by Russell Moore, and guys, you know, the reality here is that a

Christian needs to become practiced at seeing the world for what it really is, and hearing people for what they're really saying.

Because the world is all twisted up and upside down. Sometimes things that are really ultimate arrogance sound humble to, you know, the way it's put by people in our culture.

And so we need to be trained at understanding that, you know, what's what, you know, what's a spade, a spade's a spade, you know, up is up, down is down, that kind of stuff.

It sounds simple, but sometimes it isn't. You know, one of the examples I like to use about arrogance is you'll often hear people that say that the

Bible's nuanced on LGBT issues and gender identity and stuff like that.

It's nuanced, and that sounds pretty humble to our modern ears to say that the

Bible is nuanced about those things. But it isn't. The Bible isn't nuanced about gender identity.

And so while it sounds humble to our modern ears, it is actually the height of arrogance to say that God hasn't really spoken clearly on an area that he has spoken crystal clearly.

You know what I mean? Like, it's not humble to do that. It's actually extremely arrogance.

Nothing could be more arrogant. And so there's another way that this kind of falls into place as well.

This article I reviewed in March of last year was written by Russell Moore, and it's in the

New York Times, and it's full of flowery language that sounds very caring.

It sounds very loving. It sounds like he really does care about the sanctity of human life.

But make no mistake, this article can only be written by a man who has mastered cruelty.

Russell Moore is a man that is full to the brim with cruelty. It's arrogance, it's cruelty, it's brutality, and the reality is that your mealy -mouthed evangelical author and conference -speaking leaders are brutal.

They sound really lovely and flowery. It's just like the false teachers in the Bible, where it says that they have smooth -sounding words.

Their words, it says in the Scripture, are like butter, but there's war in their hearts.

They come to you, and they're smooth operators. That's the thing about false teachers. You know, the way that Big Eva and evangelical leaders talk, you would think that the

Bible says that false teachers sound angry, and they use harsh words and harsh rhetoric all the time.

It's just the tone. They have a tone problem, false teachers. The Bible actually says the opposite. It much more warns about false teachers' smooth -talking people.

And their words sound flowery and buttery and lovely, but when you actually break down what they're saying, it is cruelty, it is brutality.

And Russell Moore is a brutal, cruel evangelical leader. There is no question about that.

So here's—if you remember this article, it was about the economic lockdowns. And he made the argument—and we ripped this apart back in March of 2020.

We ripped this for what it was. It was childish thinking, and it was ridiculous, right?

And the whole concept was, well, lives are more important than the economy. And so, yes, we should shut down the economy if Dr.

Fauci says so, because your stock portfolio is not as important as lives.

And it's like, well, he's right, obviously money is not as important as people. But in this video,

I made the argument many times that you cannot disconnect money from people, because the economy and what we produce and how we trade, and money is an important part of that, how we trade our labor for goods and how we make those goods better.

We make raw materials into actual usable items that actually improve the lives of people.

That actually is part and parcel of life, right? We can't disconnect economic activity from life.

And I remember saying many times that that's a childish way of thinking. Let's actually watch a portion of this video where I reviewed this.

Look, I'm a much more fresh -faced young man here, not as hardcore, not as thick of a beard and all of that.

This is before I knew what was coming in 2020. This is like probably right when I first started realizing what was happening.

Anyway, enjoy this. This is an old school AD video. And then I've got something to talk about that I saw in the news yesterday.

Food or spreading germs, but about how we treat the most vulnerable among us. A pandemic is no time to turn our eyes away from the sanctity of human life.

I agree. Let's continue. We already are hearing talk about weighing the value of human life against the health of the nation's economy and the strength of the stock market.

It's true that a depression would cause untold suffering for people around the world, hitting the poor the hardest.

Still, each human life is more significant than a trillion -dollar gross domestic product.

Stocks and bonds are important, yes, but human beings are created in the image of God.

Okay, so I'm just trying to think of how I'm going to respond to this. Because he knows, he knows, he knows.

Russell Moore knows. He's not an idiot. And the way he's even written this paragraph, he knows what he's saying here.

Because he said, it's true that a great depression would cause untold suffering for people around the world, hitting the poor the hardest.

And he says, still, each human life is more significant than a trillion -dollar gross domestic product.

While that's true, he already has told you, he knows that the gross domestic product is part and parcel of human life and human flourishing and human thriving.

And if you have a great depression, it'll hurt the poor the hardest. Okay, so you can see that this article is just, it's a bunch of rhetoric, it's a bunch of nonsense.

He knows that an economic shutdown will destroy the economy and it will hurt the poor the most.

Yet, he still says that it's going to be helpful for us in the long run because, you know, the COVID virus is the worst thing since the,

I don't know, the Black Death or whatever it is, which, you know, who knows. Anyway, so that's insane.

And my argument was that everyone needs to decide for themselves what risks they take and all of that because Russell Moore, from his ivory tower with his leather -bound book collection behind him, who spends the economic crisis, you know, doing

Reading Rainbow episodes instead of actually helping Christians and think through issues, from his ivory tower, yeah, if he ends up in an economic hardship, it's going to affect him a certain amount.

But for someone who's living paycheck to paycheck, who works a minimum wage job, who has to borrow money to put food on the table, you know what that is?

When you have to go on a credit card to put food on the table. Let me just break that one down for you so that you can actually understand what's happening there.

That's what it was like in the Old Testament when it said that you become in need and you're in want and so you sell yourself into slavery in order to provide for your family.

That's a desperate situation if you're living on a credit card to put food on the table. I'm not trying to shame you, by the way.

The Bible makes cases for people like that are in those kinds of dire straits. I have sympathy for you, and I suggest you go to your church and ask for help before you put yourself into debt to put food on the table.

That's the first step I would suggest. However, I'm not trying to shame you. I'm just saying that the situation that you've put yourself in, if you have to dip into credit cards in order to provide for basic needs, you know, shelter, food, things like that, that is the same thing that the

Bible talks about when people use to sell themselves into indentured servitude to provide for their families.

It's the same exact thing. It's just we do it with with plastic cards now. Anyway, the point is, though, that Dr.

Russell Moore knew that these lockdowns would put people, would force people into those situations, yet he promoted them anyway, knowing that it would be the poorest of the poor that would suffer the worst benefits.

I might be unhappy to go to the store and have to pay double for a bag of rice than I used to last year, but ultimately

I'll be able to do that. I'll be able to take more money out of my savings to put food on the table.

Poorer people than me. And if you go down the list to the poorest among us, it hurts every group more and more and more the poorer you get.

So the less net worth that you have, the harder it is to overcome economic hardships.

See, for me, if my car breaks down and I have to pay a thousand dollars to fix it, that will hurt my economic situation by a thousand dollars.

But that thousand dollars is not made equal, because for someone who has a net worth of two million dollars, a thousand dollar conflict isn't that big of a deal for someone who has a negative net worth or is on the margins.

It's a huge deal. So it's the same thousand dollars for me and an extremely poor person and an extremely rich person.

But that same thousand dollars doesn't affect us the most. And so only someone who's an elitist, who doesn't understand the first thing about what actual care for the poor is, could utter words like this.

And Russell Moore is exactly like that. He wants you to think, using buttery words and flowery rhetoric, that he cares for the poor.

But he doesn't know the first thing about how the poor actually live. And he doesn't know the first thing about what caring for the poor actually is.

You see, here's the thing. The economy is not disconnected from human life. I saw this meme.

I guess this is a meme. It's more like an infographic, I guess, on Beretaria. This is

Big Bear, who posted this. If you could see, that's a bar of iron, right? It's like a, is that an ingot?

Ingot? I don't know how to pronounce that word, but it's a bar of iron. And the meme says this. This bar of iron costs five dollars.

OK, so that bar is worth five dollars worth of iron. And it says, if you make it into horseshoes, it's worth twelve dollars.

If you make it into needles, it's worth three thousand and five hundred dollars. If you make it into balance springs for a watch, it's worth three hundred thousand dollars.

And so his point here is an inspirational meme. But the point, though, is that the same raw materials, when you add skill and effort and time into it, it ends up becoming worth more and more and more.

And so that economic activity, the activity of going to the watch factory or the workshop and making needles, making springs for watches, making horseshoes, whatever it is, there's a value attached to that.

And so it's not disconnected from people's lives, because if you think about needles, horseshoes, springs for watches, all of those things improve the quality of a person's life.

You have access to needles. Now you can sew. We can have more clothing and seamstresses and stuff like that.

And by the way, these bars aren't just falling from the sky. It actually takes effort to pull that from the ground as well, because in the ground it has no value.

But when we pull it out from the ground, we dig it out and we and we are able to process it into bars like this.

That makes it worth five dollars. But before that, it wasn't worth anything. See, God put the raw materials in the earth for us.

And then he says, OK, now you work the ground. You go and make it better. You go and improve this situation. And that's what we're doing.

That's what Christians ought to be doing. Economic activity is part and parcel of what the image of God is all about.

God commended us to do this. God commended us to engage in economic activity. But Russell Moore is over here saying, well, you know, yeah, well, you know, we got to save lives by us forcing you not to work.

Now, at the time, I said that it doesn't take a genius to understand that if you stop the economy, you tell poor people that they can't go to work because it's too dangerous.

It's going to actually kill people. It's not going to save lives. All it's going to do is transfer who dies.

And so you're picking winners and losers. You see, that's the cruelty of Russell Moore and all of the state worshipping big eve of people that just want to grant to the state the authority to do all kinds of stuff to you and your family.

Don't follow these people. These are the false teachers that speak to you in smooth sounding words.

And they can write a buttery article for New York Times. But really, there's cruelty, brutality and power lust in their hearts.

You see, they want to pick the winners and losers. They don't want the people to be able to have the authority to decide for themselves what risks they're going to take.

You see, I said in this video, go ahead and watch it. This video was before the pandemic had really gotten to full swing.

I said the economic shutdowns are not going to actually save lives. What they will do, though, is change who dies.

And who's going to die is going to be the most vulnerable people among us. That's who's going to die.

Because if I can't go to work for six months, I'll probably be OK. If a person who works at McDonald's or Wendy's can't go to work for six months or, you know,

Marriott Hotels or whatever it is, you know, works as a server at a restaurant, can't go to work for six months.

They're going to suffer extremely. And there's no nothing can save them because that economic activity is lost forever.

So someone down the chain is going to end up suffering. Here's a study that I saw yesterday.

Now, let me say at the outset, I don't know whether to believe these studies. That's not the point. The point is not whether the study is accurate or not, because whether or not this study is done in the in the appropriate way, it doesn't take a study to know that people, when you say that an entire segment of the economy is going to be banned from working, you're just banning them from going and earning a living.

You can't do certain things. Of course, people are going to die. Like, that's not the point.

The point is not the accuracy of this particular study. Although people like Russell Moore, they just have to accept this stuff because they've already dedicated themselves to just drinking the fire hose of propaganda and accepting it.

If you don't accept it, you're a conspiracy theorist. So for me, I don't care if this is true or not. For them, they have to accept this.

So here's a study that said they can they can track 30 ,000 deaths in the

US linked to unemployment alone. That's not to count all the other stuff like depression.

You can't see your family, you know, you know, you know, isolation, stuff like that.

Deaths of despair. This is only linked to unemployment. And it says what it does is it tracks unemployment related deaths.

And that could be, you know, depression. It could be hunger. It could be all kinds of stuff. But this is saying that that 30 ,000 can be taken into direct correlation to the effects, the short term and long term effects of unemployment.

This is things like, you know, I don't have money, so I'm not going to get screened for this and this disease.

Or, yeah, I've got a pain in my stomach, but I can't afford going to the doctor because I can't I don't have a job anymore. And then you end up dying from whatever it is that you're you know, is wrong with your stomach and things like that.

This is that's what this stuff is all about. So so when when Russell Moore says it's all the people are made in the image of God, we must shut down the economy.

What he's doing is just saying, I want to be able to pick who lives and who dies.

And I want to be able to do it in such a way that they don't have a choice. You see, this is the cruelty of Russell Moore.

God doesn't do it this way. God says, look, everyone is responsible for their own economic situation.

So they're going to have to make some decisions on whether they put themselves in harm's way. What they do, how they operate and things like that.

But no, no, no, no, no, no. Russell Moore wants to grant to the government the authority to shut down entire segments of the economy and tell you what you have to do.

That's preposterous and it's cruel. We can't just say, OK, oh, well, he just doesn't know. Oh, it's just it's a political disagreement.

OK, it might be a political disagreement, but it's a political disagreement in the sense that any kind of policy can be a political disagreement.

It's cruelty. It's there can be cruel political disagreements. Right. Russell Moore is an abjectly cruel person.

He's brutal. He would love to be a part of the official state religion. In fact, him and his ilk are helping usher in the the great brave new world that we that we're all living in right now.

It's just that simple. And so stop following these guys. Stop following them. Stop buying their books.

Stop inviting them to your conferences. Just reject them. They're cruel.

They're not loving. They're not loving your neighbor. They don't have anything to offer you in terms of how to love your neighbor.

Well, all they have to offer you, though, if this is what you want, then go ahead and follow them. If you want to look like you're loving your neighbor to the modern pagan culture, if you want to appear like you're very humble and very loving and very caring to the modern pagans, if that's your concern, what you look like to the pagans.

Russell Moore is your man. Let's pull up a picture. Here's your man right here. This guy will help you help it so that you look really good to all kinds of unbelievers.

He'll to people that hate Christ and hate the Lord. This guy is an expert at making you appear respectable and loving.

If you if that's your goal, then follow Russell Moore. But I would argue and I would suggest and I would just, you know, humbly suggest that that's probably not the right goal.

You should not really be concerned with what the pagans think about you. They think you're a good guy, reasonable, smart, intelligent, loving.

The pagans think those things of you, I would suggest. That's fine. But it might be worth reconsidering why they think those things of you, because people that hate

Christ typically hate people who follow Christ, typically people who behave like Christ.

And so if people speak well of you and you're invited to the New York Times to write a propaganda article about why we should get to pick the winners and losers in the pandemic and why we should force people into unemployment where 30 ,000 of them die because they have various reasons related to it.

Yeah, sure. Follow this guy. He's got great advice. But if your concern is ethics and pleasing

Christ and being a Christian and actually being a loving person, I would suggest ignoring this guy.

Because this is the face of cruelty. Anyway, I hope you found this video helpful.