In Which Russell Moore, Mike Cosper, Clarissa Moll, and Your Humble Servant Have a Frank Exchange of Views

Introduction

Perhaps you might allow me to begin by describing one of my first evangelistic endeavors. This was some time in the late fifties or early sixties, and so it was when I was just a wee kid. My parents subscribed to Christianity Today, which at that time looked like a serious scholarly journal with a plain cover. Carl Henry, a genuine standfast character, was the editor back then, and the magazine represented evangelicals who, you know, believed things. Anyhow, there were a bunch of back issues around our house, which I rolled up like newspapers, secured them with a rubber band, and delivered individual copies up and down the street to all the neighbors. This evangelistic outreach effort had not been pre-approved by my parents, and my memory is hazy over what happened after that.

I bring this up merely so that you might recognize how much things have changed.

How They Introduced the Topic

Last week, the Christianity Today podcast devoted some time to the CNN interview, and the link is here.

So Mike Cosper gave the CT podcast folks some background on me. He said there was a brief moment back in the day when I was kinda sorta mainstream. He mentioned that my novel Evangellyfish had won a CT Book of the Year award in fiction. He said that I had debated Christopher Hitchens, and had acquitted myself well in those exchanges. I was able to speak at Desiring God conferences. But then I had an online debate with Thabiti over my book Black and Tan, and that “derailed” me from the mainstream.

Now I am grateful for the kind words here, but it is not quite accurate to say that I had my “respectable period,” followed by any kind of fall from grace. Our ministries here in Moscow have been under embargo for decades, almost from the beginning, and yes, there have been a few brief periods when we broke containment. Whenever we did break loose, it was usually controversial for the people involved, and after some festivities, things would go back to normal, meaning that for the most part, the embargo worked, and we were effectively cordoned off from all that evangelical unity.

But what this did was enable us to build out our own platforms, figuring out how reach a lot of people directly—for just one example, think Canon Plus—and we were able to do this without reducing the official gatekeepers to tears. They were not reduced to tears because they didn’t know what we were doing. The embargo more or less worked when it came to anything related to Big Eva, with occasional glitches. The gatekeepers thought it was working well because we weren’t really coming through any of the official checkpoints. But we were busy in the meantime, building out methods of reaching people that can no longer be ignored. And so it is . . . that we are no longer being ignored, as the CNN interview would indicate.

It was acknowledged several times in the CT podcast that the Overton window has shifted. As I have argued before, it is not possible to move the Overton window from inside the window. You have to say and do things that are outside the bounds of “approved discourse,” and I do acknowledge that I have done quite a bit of this, mostly on purpose. I have been seeking to speak with moral authority from outside that window for some years now.

And incidentally, speaking with authority. and authoritarianism are not the same thing. Just thought that might be good to note somewhere.

At the same time, there has been another contributing factor that has made it possible for the Overton window to move, at least when it comes to evangelicals. And that has been the collapse of the moral authority that men like Russell Moore and David French used to have. Moore says in this interview that he was enraged by the thought that people would listen to me and think that “this is what Christianity is.” But I can assure you that there were more than a few people who looked at a vaxxed and double-masked Moore, and decided that they absolutely needed to find something different. Moore should not leave out of his calculation all of the folks he chased our way.

In other words, regime theologians lost a lot of their credibility when the regime itself stepped on the COVID rake, and this rake-stepping feat was celebrated by the regime theologians as the very model of what it means to love your neighbor.

Russell Moore’s Take

Russell Moore said I have a “dark and non-Christian view of who God is.” Add to this his view that I have some “weird psychological stuff about women” going on. These are worrisome assertions indeed. But what does he mean by them?

I write books on parenting that reach men and women with young kids, at a time when they feel like they don’t know what they are doing, and this was a slick move. I establish my authority on topics like disciplining your rambunctious two-year-old, and then the dark authoritarianism comes later. What does this dark authoritarianism want? Lower tax rates! Smaller government! No more tax money going to sexual deviants! Perhaps you can tease out from this complaint one of the reasons why we are winning.

Moore says there was “no excuse” for not seeing what I was up to from the beginning. This is quite true because I was writing books explaining what we were doing. And when you give books the silent treatment instead of answering them, you cannot be surprised when a number of people conclude that you don’t have answers. And then, when you move from silence to engagement, but that engagement consists largely of gasping, pearl-clutching, and name-calling, you can’t be surprised when even more people conclude that you really don’t have answers.

Moore was “enraged” by the fact that there will be so many non-Christians who will watch the CNN interview and think that “this is Christianity.” Now I do grant that what I am talking about is not Christianity Today. It is more like . . . I don’t know . . . Christianity yesterday.

He brought up the fact that I conducted the marriage ceremony for a convicted sex offender, and represented my defense of this as simply shrugging “because its legal.” This shows how much he knows about that case, which is almost nothing. He then contrasted that with our teaching on the sin of empathy—as though we were going to run all the empathetic individuals out of the church, and welcome in the pedophiles. In bringing this slanderous farrago up, he is simply displaying what happens when you get your news and information from hate sites.

His rhetoric on the podcast was really something—”enraging and tragic,” “insidious,” “Satanic,” and the “spirit of antichrist.” Well, then. Jesus said that when people talk about you this way, the response should be to bless them . . . and so I do. May God richly bless Russell Moore. Seriously. May God pour out manifold blessings, over his head and shoulders.

Moore said he has had to deal with a lot of men who got into my stuff. He then backhands them all as “losers.” “Look at the results. They’re terrifying.” I cannot respond to this with any specifics because I don’t know who he is talking about. But I can say this. To backhand men who are at least attempting to structure their lives around Scripture as “losers” is perhaps not a response consistent with the empathy that Moore enjoins us to have. Perhaps the contempt shown them is one of the reasons why they are not listening anymore.

And secondly, this is a great place to extend our standing invitation to critics like this. Moore said “look at the results,” and so I would invite him to come to Moscow. Come, look at the results. We will pay your way. We can do this with cameras or without cameras. We can arrange a venue for you to speak to our people publicly, or we can do the whole thing quietly. We have thousands of believers living in genuine community here, and I can assure you that the word that would not come to mind is “losers.”

What is the difference between Politico, the Associated Press, CNN, NBC, etc. on the one hand, and CT on the other? CT is the one that won’t send a reporter, but reserves the right to talk trash anyhow.

Boiled down to the bone, Moore said in effect that our denial of a secular public square was in fact a “denial of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” It is here that I would locate the central problem. If I can be opposed to a Muslim takeover of Dearborn and then have this represented as a denial of the gospel, we can see at a glace that for Moore the post-war secular consensus is in effect a gospel settlement. For him, to challenge it is to challenge the gospel. And that would be a glaring example of mixing partisan politics and theology, which I thought Moore was supposed to be against.

Clarissa Moll’s Take

Clarissa Moll came in with the observation that I didn’t think certain people belonged. And then went on to say that Black & Tan gave the “impression” that I didn’t think black people belonged here, at least not with full civil rights—and she asked if this was Christian nationalism “laid bare.” No, but it was the next best thing, which was Christian nationalism “lied about.”

I am against the importation of large numbers of people who have an alien worldview. It is an immigration policy guaranteed to lead to ethnic unrest, as it has done, and it makes assimilation impossible. American blacks have been here for centuries, and it wasn’t their idea to come in the first place.

I would invite Clarissa Moll to go through all my writings and find me even the whisper of a hint that black people don’t belong here. She said what she said because Black and Tan gave her that “impression.” I would suggest that she brought that impression with her.

Mike Cosper’s Take

Mike Cosper decided to intrude some good sense in the discussion by saying that when progressives denigrate masculinity, “we shouldn’t be surprised that this stuff has resonance.” I agree with that completely.

Because of my ability to “use words,” they acknowledge that there are places where I have been “profoundly persuasive.” Well, yeah, I use words. But I don’t just use them to produce lurid metaphors, the kind that make loud splashing noises. I arrange words into arguments. And I would simply say this. You cannot blithely ignore the arguments without being seen at some point as those who are avoiding the arguments.

For example, Cosper said that the stuff on slavery is “unquestionably problematic.” And so I would ask this question. What distinguishes my “problematic” position on slavery from the apostle Paul’s position on slavery? Where does my position differ from his?

In other words, CT’s embarrassment is embarrassment over the teaching of Scripture, and over the uncomfortable presence of some Christians who are not so easily embarrassed. Does this raise questions? Of course. Are some of them challenging questions? Or course. But let Paul say above what he says. And if you want to work through the difficulties in a way that honors Scripture, and also values the kind of liberty that the gospel brings to all men, I would recommend that you read Black and Tan instead of using it as a scarecrow.

The Famine of Meaning and the Evangelical Crack-Up

Man cannot live without meaning. Experiments in meaninglessness inevitably result in men sinking to the level of beasts—which is precisely what we see happening all around us. It is the nature of our disintegration, and it is all happening downstream from Darwin. In the grip of a bad idea, we are ceasing to be “talking beasts.”

But for evangelical Christians, for those who profess to believe the Bible, we know that meaning must come from outside the world. The only thing that can provide us with objective meaning is a Word from the eternal God. This means that whatever He says must stand in a place that is able to correct us.

When we get too cozy, this usually means that we do not want to be corrected. We want to do what we have always done, and we want to maintain the status quo. Over time, the custodians of meaning want to bring that meaning down from outside the world to an assigned place inside the world. They have a closet to keep it in. But when this happens, the words ceases to be the Word. It starts to turn into something else.

In order to remain evangelical, we must have preachers who ascend into their pulpits in order to tell us what would have been the absolute truth had none of us present ever been born. Our opinions, prejudices, views, and hot takes are all irrelevant.

But when we lose this Word from outside, we find ourselves stuck with words from inside. These inside words are in the custody of those who would never willingly disturb the decorum of the house. So instead of preachers, we find ourselves with house mothers and hall monitors. Or library ladies.

And as you might know, library ladies can shush you pretty hard.