evangelical 360°

Ep. 16 / Top Trending Episodes ► 3 Most Watched in 2024

• Host Brian Stiller • Season 1 • Episode 16

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Step into the most compelling moments of Evangelical 360’s top episodes of 2024! Featuring insightful interviews with Russell Moore, Tim Alberta, and Walter Kim, this video dives into the identity crisis within the evangelical movement—unpacking the challenges of cultural Christianity, the rise of deconstruction, and the pursuit of authentic faith. It challenges listeners to consider the true meaning of revival and how to engage with the surrounding culture while staying true to the essence of Christ’s teachings.

• Examination of what it means to be evangelical today 
• Analysis of cultural Christianity and its implications 
• Discussion on the rise of deconstruction among younger believers 
• Exploration of true revival and its unexpected characteristics 
• Addressing the contentious issue of Christian nationalism 
• Importance of a holistic evangelical public theology 
• Emphasis on unity, love, and service within faith communities

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Brian Stiller:

Hello and welcome. My name is Brian Stiller, Global Ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance and host of the new podcast, Evangelical 360.

Russell Moore:

When it comes to evangelicalism I mean a class on a very, very secular university and I had my friend, tim Keller, went to be with the Lord last year. Join me one day. And one of the students said to him, why do you want to keep the word evangelical when it has become so associated with scandal and politicization and all of these other sorts of things? And Tim's response was to say, well, because most of us are in Asia and Africa and Latin America and elsewhere and the North Americans don't get to just choose what we're called. And the student said, fair enough, and sat down and I pondered that later and I thought, you know, the most important thing that Tim said was us, and we in that conversation, to say there's a much bigger world to gospel Christianity.

Russell Moore:

And I encounter especially younger evangelical Christians. I'm hard-pressed to find one who wants to use the word evangelical or who will use the word evangelical. Problem is, I don't think there's an alternative to describe the kind of Christian, the kind of Christianity that we hold, with that particular emphasis on the need for new birth and the authority of Scripture. There needs to be a word for that. So I'm not ready to give up evangelical just yet.

Brian Stiller:

You come from the Southern Baptist, which is the largest evangelical denomination in the US. But how would you say the evangelical church is doing overall Well there are a couple of things going on there.

Russell Moore:

One is, if you look at secularization rates of people who are claiming no religious affiliation, that's been relatively stable over the last two or three years, but it's been a dramatic rise from 10 years ago, 15 years ago. So that's a new reality. And one of the things that makes it hard to know, numerically kind of where anything stands right now is that there's a new kind of cultural Christianity that has emerged in the United States. So for most of the 20th century, in most parts of the country, somebody had to be nominally a Christian in order to be a regular person. So you needed to be able to say I'm a Methodist, I'm a Presbyterian, I'm a Catholic, I'm a Baptist and whatever, and have a church to which you belong, even if you don't really believe else, which is a kind of Christian identity that is not connected to Christian community. So you will have people who have no church connection at all but who are posting Christian memes on social media and who think of themselves not just as Christians but as evangelical Christians. And that's one of the reasons why it's very hard for surveys and polls to identify evangelical Christians, because you have some of the people who fit most the typical definition of evangelical, theologically and in terms of practice, who don't want to call themselves that. And you have a lot of other people who don't, theologically or in terms of practice, meet any of the qualifications of evangelical but who identify themselves that way because they think of it as a cultural or a political identity.

Russell Moore:

When I started in ministry, if a young person who grew up in the church came to me and said I'm losing my faith, I'm walking away from Christ, it typically was for one of two reasons. It was either because the person is saying I can't believe in the supernatural anymore. I can't believe that a virgin became pregnant. I can't believe that a dead man came back to life, I can't believe in miracles, or it's because someone is saying I don't agree with the church's strictness on moral issues, now usually dealing with sex. I want to be free from that. Those were usually the reasons that would be given. I almost never hear either of those reasons. Now. It's almost always in terms of authenticity.

Russell Moore:

So it's not that people have cognitive trouble with believing the Christian message, it's that they don't believe. It's real that they don't believe it's real. What they're saying is what a Roman Catholic man said to me after living through the sexual abuse crises in the Catholic Church, and he said I just I don't go to mass anymore, and it's not because I don't believe what my church teaches. It's that I don't believe my church believes what my church teaches. And that has been the case if you look at not just the sheer number of revelations of scandal, but behind that, the suspicion that the religion itself is just a means to some other end. The religion itself is just a means to some other end, and what we have seen look at, for instance, the trajectory of the mainline. Once someone determines, well, this religious practice is a means to some end, they're going to figure out what the end is. Even if they like it, they can pursue it without giving up a Sunday morning. And so that is, I think, where the real challenge is right now People are deconstructing their faith.

Brian Stiller:

But, as a theologian, when you see the younger generation both in a deconstructive and a reconstructive mood of what they believe, what guidance would you give them theologically, as they are attempting to refine their faith over against what they inherited from the previous generation?

Russell Moore:

Well, the first thing would be to ask someone what he or she means by deconstruction, because the word has become so porous. Some people mean by deconstruction losing the faith altogether. Some people mean I'm re-examining how much of what I've inherited is real and how much of it was just assumption and there's everything in between. So I think the best analogy that I can think of I was having a conversation with Yuval Levin, a friend of mine who's a he's a political scientist, philosopher he was talking about in a completely different context. The difference between childish, juvenile or mature is when you have a childish response. If you think about when you're a child, relating to your parents, you think that everything that your parents say to you or do is default. Right, and you accept it at complete face value. Right, and you accept it at complete face value. There's a juvenile sort of response where an adolescent will say everything that my parents did was wrong. And then there's a maturity that comes about later that starts to say much of what my parents did was actually right and good and true. Here are some things that they did that I don't want to repeat, that I can see weren't good or true. That's a mature response and I think the same thing is true when we're dealing with a theological legacy, which is to do what the Bible's always told us to do test everything, hold fast to that which is good.

Russell Moore:

It's not unique to the United States that religion is used as a political tool. That's happening all over Europe. As a matter of fact, there's a really important study, body research done by Tobias Kramer in England, looking at these nationalistic movements across Europe that emphasize Christianity and are led by atheists or neo-pagans. And you talk to those people and say you know what's Christian here? And what the leaders will say is well, what we mean by Christian when we use the symbols and images of the cross or, in France, of Joan of Arc or these Christian sorts of figures, is to say we're French, we're German, we're Dutch, we're not Jewish, we're not Muslim. So it's a cultural identity and a carnal identity that's using Christianity.

Russell Moore:

Well, what we have seen over the past 2,000 years is that that ultimately leads to paganism, and it does in two ways. It does because, once the Christianity is itself not useful, it's hollowed out and tossed aside hollowed out and tossed aside and because the people who confuse Christianity with whatever the nationalistic message is on the outside. By rejecting the nationalistic message, they assume that they're rejecting Christianity. That's a very, very dangerous place to be, and so what has to happen in an American context is a Christianity that actually is connected, an overreaction to personal evangelism. And so you would have people who would say, well, evangelism is manipulative or it's canned and so forth.

Russell Moore:

But those churches that actually emphasized you have a responsibility to your neighbors to share the gospel. The people who are actually doing that and actually interacting with their neighbors could not fall into this children of light versus children of darkness sort of mentality that we have in American life all over the place right now. What they were reminded of constantly is every human being is made in the image of God, Every human being is offered life in Christ 2 Corinthians, chapter 5, the message of reconciliation, and every human being is sinful, in need of grace, including me. So that sort of. When that's de-emphasized and the church becomes something else, we lose a great deal. I mean, if you were to go in a time machine to 40 years ago, 30 years ago, one of the easiest ways to draw a crowd would be to have a prophecy conference. We're going to tell you tonight from the book of Ezekiel where the Soviet Union fits in God's prophetic plan. You know those sorts of things. People would come to that and what it would give to people is this sense of you are part of the terminal generation. You are here for this last, final stand. There's something very special about you and we have a secret sort of code that we can give to you that will help you to make sense of the world.

Russell Moore:

The exact same thing is happening right now, but it's not happening out of the book of Ezekiel, it's happening through these very secular categories. But it's the same sort of thing. It's the same sort of apocalyptic kind of rhetoric. And you look at it in terms of, for instance, the language of spiritual warfare, which has been thoroughly secularized to mean something completely opposite from what the New Testament means by spiritual warfare categories, which is, we don't wrestle against flesh and blood, we wrestle against principalities and powers in the heavenly places. My neighbors who don't agree with me are not my enemies. My enemy is the accuser of the world, the, the deceiver of the world, and and the way that that spiritual warfare is fought is through the gospel. Now you have spiritual warfare language being used in the exact reverse way, which is to say, we're fighting spiritual warfare by dividing, uh, the the the world up into the people who are the good people and the people who are the bad people, and the bad people have to be totally defeated and overcome. That's not the message of the scriptures.

Brian Stiller:

At the heart of your theses, losing Our Religion. You talk about revival. Now, revival, the word triggers particular meaning for me and I'm sure, as a Southern Baptist, it does for you. But as you look at the church in America, america itself, but also the church, the evangelical witness, if the Spirit of God brought revival to your land, to your church, what might that look like?

Russell Moore:

Well, I think one of the things that we've seen historically is that revival is not just a return to whatever came before, and I think that's what we often assume that revival is it's. We have these forms and we have these institutions and we have these expectations and they're flagging, and revival comes in and just brings them back to where they were. That's not what revival does biblically or historically. Instead, revival does very unexpected things.

Russell Moore:

I was saying to a Wesleyan friend not long ago I am more and more convinced that the Wesley brothers are more of a model for the future of Christianity, of whatever theological tribe, than I ever would have imagined before.

Russell Moore:

Because if you look at what the Wesleys were doing, it seems to be a failure because it didn't change the Church of England structurally and institutionally. What it did was something different, went around that and created a different form of revival. That's the way it always works. So I think that if we see genuine revival, we're going to be surprised and shocked. If we see genuine revival, we're going to be surprised and shocked in many ways by what that looks like and in some ways, I think, even unnerved. I think that if you think of the reaction that the Scripture says that Jonah had to the repentance of the Ninevites, to the repentance of the Ninevites. I think many of us actually face that struggle, which is to say, if our neighbors actually did come to see the beauty of Christ, there would be some people who would be upset about that, that the wrong people are coming to Christ. It's going to look very different than what we expect.

Tim Alberta:

What I had sensed over the years was this creeping existential paranoia that had begun to really penetrate much of the American evangelical movement, this idea that we've lost the culture, we've lost the country that our enemies, the secular, humanist, pagan, left, that they're going to come after us, that they're going to try to eradicate the Almighty from civic public life in America, and that this is our last stand, that time is running out and we had better do something about it. And I think, really, this very acute ends justify the means mentality where people began to say to themselves, I think very clearly do not share the values of the church, but who are perceived to be these bare-knuckle brawlers who are willing and able to do for the good, humble, peaceful, pious Christian what he cannot do for himself.

Brian Stiller:

The title Christian nationalism has become ubiquitous as a definer of what you've just described. Circle around and do 101 on Christian nationalism, at least as it's finding its roots in the US.

Tim Alberta:

I'm not entirely sure that we'll ever get to a place of real agreement on what it means to be a Christian nationalist. Some people view it as an insult, others wear it as a badge of honor. I think Christian nationalism in many ways is the marriage of bad history and bad theology, and the bad history is necessary in order to then well-funded, well-coordinated effort in America to literally rewrite the history books. There are people, there are groups that will travel the country, going into churches and basically present the argument in a very compelling way, basically arguing that we were founded as a Christian nation, that we were intended to be governed by Christians, by Christian men, by white Christian men. Right, and they will try to convince you that everything you know about the establishment clause of the Constitution, about the separation of church and state, about the warnings that were written down by our founding fathers, that actually all of that is nonsense, that really that's just a bunch of junk fed to you by the secular left to keep God out of public life secular left to keep God out of public life. That bad history then creates the sort of lays the foundation for a separate but codependent movement of people who would attempt to then dramatically change the ways in which centuries of Christians have interpreted scripture. They would change it to then sort of view all of the teachings of Christ, all of the epistles from Paul and others, as actually a sort of coded permission structure for us to reclaim control of the institutions of power in America by any means necessary, because, again, the ends justify the means. If this was meant to be a Christian nation, if this was a nation conceived in covenant with the Almighty and it's been taken from us, well then we aren't just fighting for America, we are fighting for God himself, right? And then you feel that you are sort of ordained almost to set aside the Sermon on the Mount, set aside the Beatitudes, set aside the great command to not only love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and all your strength, but also to love your neighbor as yourself, because your neighbor is made in the image of that God. We can set that aside, temporarily at least, because we have this call to retake our country for God himself.

Tim Alberta:

The Christians in sub-Saharan Africa and in the underground church in China and elsewhere have a much more grounded and mature outlook on these things. I would say, though, to your question. For anyone who is fearful of the oppression of the state, anyone who believes that there are forces in politics or in culture that are coming for them and that will punish them and persecute them for their beliefs, I would just encourage them to remember that this is exactly what Christ promised would happen to you, that there are very few ironclad promises that Jesus made to his followers, but one of them was that if you follow me, if you become my disciple, they will hate you because they hated me first. I've marveled at the argument that we hear from some in the American evangelical world who have said well, we have to fight back, we are under siege, but as Christians, we signed up to be under siege. That was part of the deal from the very beginning.

Tim Alberta:

Right Sales, not management. We are not God. He is Ultimately. We are here to serve him, to enjoy him forever, and we must not get caught up in this notion that somehow we must fight for the kingdom of America or the kingdom of this country or that country, as though it is the kingdom of God, because it is not.

Walter Kim:

I think one of the weaknesses of evangelicalism, certainly as expressed in many forms of evangelicalism in the US, is we're very strong in the popular and pietistic aspects of faith, personal conversion to Jesus, deep devotional life. We are not as strong as developing our public theology, our public discipleship. So, in other words, we have very robust understanding of what to do in helping someone strengthen their personal prayer life or strengthen their marriage. But what is the place of marriage in society? What is the role of the church with poverty alleviation in society? How do we function in our relationship, in a pluralistic society, to a secular government? We don't have robust discipleship on this issue, on this issue. So in the absence of that discipleship, politics has filled the vacuum.

Walter Kim:

The short-term issue is yes, we do engage on these issues. Make it clear that the NDE is not in the business of endorsing political candidates, but we are engaging with public policy issues. Again, it can range from creation care issues. Cleaning up air pollution in urban settings because of its impacts on the unborn connects the issue of creation care to the issue of pro-life racial justice. Historically, white evangelicalism has a very checkered and, I think, lamentable history of engagement on this issue and that's raising up new kinds of conversations about the application of the gospel to historic social issues that impact different communities, and so it can include what does it mean that Native American communities need access to clean water, that historically they have been disadvantaged, and how can the church be involved with this theology, undergirded and applied by robust public discipleship? And the longer-term issue needs to be addressed so that these problems of politics, entering into the vacuum of discipleship, won't keep on recurring in our context again and again in future years.

Brian Stiller:

Walter, I know that the media paint with a very wide brush, but for many of us who are observers both in America and globally, it seems that so much of the people who would call themselves evangelical supplant the very teachings and words of Jesus. Supplant the very teachings and words of Jesus In that kind of world.

Walter Kim:

How do you make known the gospel, as Jesus articulated it? I think the articulation that we would pursue at the NAE is the one that Jesus himself presented in his own inaugural speech, so to say, in Luke, chapter 4, when Jesus entered into the synagogue at Nazareth and found the place in the book of Isaiah and read it. The Spirit of the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoner, sight for the blind, release for the captives, the year of the Lord's favor. What we seek to pursue is this kind of comprehensive gospel that touches on all aspects of life, and I also think this is how Jesus started and how did Jesus end his public ministry?

Walter Kim:

In John, chapter 7, when he could have prayed any prayer as his final prayer for his people, his disciples, before he was crucified the next day. What did he pray? He prayed for the unity of his disciples, because in that there is unity with the triune God and there is the unity of witness and power and purpose. So Jesus' start and Jesus' end for me shapes the DNA of what we seek to do at the NAE. We want to love those who are our brothers and sisters. We want to engage across these differences, provide unified, humble presence or, as James puts it, be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger, because human anger doesn't accomplish the righteousness of God. There is kind of this built-in sense that those who would honor Scripture are counseled by Scripture to have the kind of humility, the ability to pray for our enemies, to bless those who persecute us and to distinctly present an alternative to the hyper-politicized and partisan view that would traffic in anger and in fear and that is what we believe not to be the way of Christ.