"Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention says it is time for evangelicals to tone down the rhetoric. Preaches Pullback From Politics, Culture Wars"
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Finally getting the hint, we can be assured that this texas mental midget "brumar" failed to get the memo
 Russell Moore, the principal public voice of the Southern Baptist Convention, warns evangelicals not to become 'mascots for any political faction.' Melissa Golden for The Wall Street Journal
For years, as the principal public voice for the Southern Baptist Convention, the country's biggest evangelical group, Richard Land warned of a "radical homosexual agenda" and pushed for a federal ban on same-sex marriage.
His successor, Russell Moore, sounded a different note when the Supreme Court in June struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. "Love your gay and lesbian neighbors," Mr. Moore wrote in a flier, "How Should Your Church Respond," sent to the convention's estimated 45,000 churches. "They aren't part of an evil conspiracy." Marriage, he added, was a bond between a man and a woman, but shouldn't be seen as a "'culture war' political issue."
Since the birth of the Christian-conservative political movement in the late 1970s, no evangelical group has delivered more punch in America's culture wars than the Southern Baptist Convention and its nearly 16 million members. The country's largest Protestant denomination pushed to end abortion, open up prayer in public schools and boycott Walt Disney Co. over films deemed antifamily. Its ranks included many of the biggest names on the Christian right, including Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell.
Today, after more than three decades of activism, many in the religious right are stepping back from the front lines. Mr. Moore, a 42-year-old political independent and theologian who heads the convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, says it is time to tone down the rhetoric and pull back from the political fray, given what he calls a "visceral recoil" among younger evangelicals to the culture wars.
"We are involved in the political process, but we must always be wary of being co-opted by it," Mr. Moore said in an interview in his Washington office, a short walk from Congress. "Christianity thrives when it is clearest about what distinguishes it from the outside culture."
Along with much of the religious right, Southern Baptists are undergoing a generational shift as Mr. Moore and his allies recalibrate their methods and aims. The moment is significant not only for America's religious life but for its politics, given the three-decade engagement by evangelical leaders that kept social issues on the front burner and helped Republicans win national elections.
Self-described evangelicals still vote heavily Republican. Exit polls show that nearly eight in 10 sided with Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election, a larger share of that group than either of the previous two Republican nominees received.
But Republican operatives with ties to the evangelical movement say much is changing. Every year tens of thousands of evangelicals, particularly the young, leave the Southern Baptist and other big denominational churches for more loosely organized assemblies that oppose abortion but are less likely to hew to other Republican causes.
"Republicans are finding it increasingly hard to collar evangelicals for political purposes, simply because the movement is so fragmented now, so decentralized, and a growing number of evangelicals simply find politics distasteful," says Mark DeMoss, a former chief of staff to Mr. Falwell and an adviser last year to Mr. Romney's campaign.
Mr. Moore is responding to this drift. He warns evangelicals to avoid becoming "mascots for any political faction." He focuses on how to keep millennials engaged in the church. His advice to church leaders: Be "winsome, kind and empathetic."
His advice meshes with those in the Republican Party who want the GOP to back off hot-button cultural issues to stress themes such as job creation and education. Party leaders earlier this year released a manifesto calling for the GOP to become more tolerant, welcoming and inclusive. The shift also comes as Republicans face a growing rift in the party between its activist tea-party flank and its more traditional business wing.
Mr. Moore and other prominent Christian conservatives are blunt in conceding that their long quest to roll back the sexual revolution has failed. The fight, they say, sowed divisions within the movement and alienated young believers.
"I would characterize the movement as having experienced a very tough defeat that now requires a shift of tactics," says Ralph Reed, who ran the once-powerful Christian Coalition through the 1990s. Religious conservatives once promised imminent victories, he says, "but we are now looking at 50- and 75-year horizons."
Some evangelical leaders compare the moment today to the retreat that followed the 1925 Scopes "Monkey trial" over Tennessee's effort to limit the teaching of evolution in public schools. The trial led to a public backlash against evangelicals.
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"Evangelicals felt a sting from the culture after the Scopes trial that they weren't used to feeling," says Mark Dever, an ally of Mr. Moore and pastor of the Capitol Hill Baptist Church. "What is happening now with evangelicals is a disabusing of any idea of a simple victory of the right in a fallen world. They realize that is not going to happen."
The change in approach, which not all evangelical groups or churches share, isn't without risk. Albert Mohler, a top voice in the church as president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and a Moore mentor, says the transition to a less confrontational approach, which he supports, could alienate church members from its leaders.
"When Richard Land spoke to most issues, he was certain that Southern Baptists were behind him and he was their mouthpiece," Mr. Mohler says. "Russ will need a deft touch to make sure that Southern Baptists stay behind him."
Mr. Moore is in no way a liberal. He equates abortion with the evils of slavery, considers homosexuality a sin, and insists the Southern Baptist Convention will never support gay marriage. At the same time, he emphasizes reconciliation and draws a traditional doctrinal distinction between the sinner and the sin.
Southern Baptists still make up more than a third of all the country's Protestant evangelicals, by far the largest single denomination under that umbrella, which itself comprises more than a quarter of the U.S. population. But their primacy is on the wane.
Baptists are departing from the religious traditions of their childhood faster than any other Protestant group, according to statistics gathered by Pew Research, an independent polling organization. Adult baptisms within Southern Baptist churches, meanwhile, have slid 20% over the past decade, according to LifeWay Research, a polling firm tied to the Southern Baptist Convention. The firm projects the church's membership will fall by half to 8.5 million by 2050, returning to the level of the mid-1950s.
Recent polls have found younger evangelicals drifting away from some of the conservative views of their parents and grandparents. A March survey of nearly 1,000 white evangelicals by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan polling organization, found half of those under 35 favored same-sex marriage, compared with just 15% of those over 65. The younger evangelicals were more likely to be independents over Republicans, while the opposite was true of their elders.
"The religious right was born on the theology of numerical expansion: the belief that conservative churches grow while liberal ones die. That conceit is gone now," says David Key, director of Baptist Studies at Emory University's Candler School of Theology.
Mr. Moore would like the Southern Baptists to be able to hold on to people such as Sarah Parr. The 31-year-old social worker grew up in a conservative Southern Baptist family in southern Virginia. She graduated from Liberty University, founded in 1971 by the Falwell family. But she says she found herself increasingly less at home in the church, and left it altogether in her 20s.
She now attends a nondenominational church that meets in an old theater on Washington's Capitol Hill. Politically, she describes herself "as a moderate at best, if I'm anything. But I don't find myself in either party."
When Mr. Moore took over in June as the Southern Baptists' top public-policy advocate, he startled some in the church by declaring as dead and gone the entire concept of the Bible Belt as a potent mix of Jesus and American boosterism. "Good riddance," he told thousands of the faithful at the group's annual convention in Houston in June. "Let's not seek to resuscitate it."
In an essay for the conservative Christian magazine "First Things," titled "Why Evangelicals Retreat," he dinged the movement for "triumphalism and hucksterism" and lampooned a time when its leaders dispatched voter guides for the Christian position on "a line-item veto, the Balanced Budget Amendment, and the proper funding levels for the Department of Education."
Mr. Moore says there is no doctrinal daylight between him and his church, and he insists he isn't seeking to return the Southern Baptists to a past in which it shunned politics entirely.
He travels almost weekly from his home in Nashville to Washington to meet with members of the Obama administration and with congressional leaders. He has allied with the Roman Catholic Church and other religious groups to make the case that overhauling the U.S. immigration system is a Christian goal. He is pushing the Pentagon to give religious chaplains in the military freer rein to preach, and has helped build a new coalition to fight a federal requirement that insurers provide contraception coverage.
His approach, however, is strikingly different from that of his predecessor Mr. Land, who for a quarter century served as the leading voice of the Southern Baptists. Like many evangelical leaders of his generation, Mr. Land, a Princeton-educated Texan, openly aligned himself with the Republican Party and popped up frequently in the Oval Office during the George W. Bush years.
Long before their divergent approaches on the gay-marriage issue, Messrs. Moore and Land split over the huge rally held by conservative talk-radio host Glenn Beck in front of the Lincoln Memorial in August 2010. Mr. Land attended the rally as Mr. Beck's guest, and later compared Mr. Beck to Billy Graham, calling him "a person in spiritual motion."
Mr. Moore, in an essay posted after the rally, said the event illustrated how far astray many conservative Christians had wandered in pursuit of "populist God-and-country sloganeering and outrage-generating talking heads."
In an interview, Mr. Land said the Southern Baptist leadership is divided into those who think the culture war is lost; those who are weary and want it over; and those who think they are losing the war but feel victory is still possible. He declined to say where he puts Mr. Moore, but said he counts himself among the latter. "We are like where Britain was in 1940, under heavy attack but still not defeated," he said.
Asked to respond, Mr. Beck in a written statement applauded Mr. Land and said, "In times like these, we need to find common ground."
Mr. Moore grew up with a Catholic mother and a Baptist father in a working-class, heavily Democratic neighborhood in Biloxi, Miss. His paternal grandfather was a Baptist pastor. He went every summer on Baptist Bible outings, and gave his first youth sermon when he was 12. ("It was dreadful," he recalls. "I vomited before and after.")
Through college he worked for Rep. Gene Taylor, a Democratic freshman congressman from Mississippi who later gave him a Bible signed by President Bill Clinton, which he now keeps in his home. He calls his vote for Mr. Clinton in 1992 "a great mistake," and says he "loved" George W. Bush. He remains a registered independent.
Mr. Moore has pushed to patch up rifts within the Baptist movement between the conservative Southern Baptist Convention and a growing number of more liberal breakaway groups. While still living in Louisville, he met repeatedly for coffee with Rev. Joe Phelps, the liberal pastor of the city's Highland Baptist Church, which welcomes openly gay and lesbian members. The church broke from the convention in 2002.
"He respects me and acknowledges that I am living out my Christian convictions," Rev. Phelps says, "while others in the movement might not even recognize that I am a Christian."
Speaking at his inauguration in mid-September, Mr. Moore told the gathering of congressmen, pastors and church leaders to look beyond trying to save American culture. One day, he said, "the monuments to American power" that dot the Washington landscape will be in ruins. While continuing to fight for justice, he said to a rumble of agreement, "we must also remember that we are not Americans first. We belong to another kingdom." |
