{"id":1583981,"date":"2022-08-02T07:31:08","date_gmt":"2022-08-02T11:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1583981"},"modified":"2022-08-02T07:31:26","modified_gmt":"2022-08-02T11:31:26","slug":"russell-moore-and-evangelical-elites-cant-let-go-of-their-jeremiad-against-conservative-christians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/russell-moore-and-evangelical-elites-cant-let-go-of-their-jeremiad-against-conservative-christians\/","title":{"rendered":"Russell Moore And Evangelical Elites Can\u2019t Let Go Of Their Jeremiad Against Conservative Christians"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">28<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Frussell-moore-and-evangelical-elites-cant-let-go-of-their-jeremiad-against-conservative-christians%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1583981&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>Former Southern Baptist Russell Moore is at it again. Even the overturn of <em>Roe v. Wade<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/06\/29\/russell-moore-wont-celebrate-dobbs-because-hed-have-to-admit-pro-trump-christians-are-good-at-loving-their-neighbors\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">failed<\/a> to produce a moment of unity between Moore and the un-woke evangelicals he\u2019s attacked for six straight years. <\/p>\n<p>The <em>Dobbs<\/em> decision unleashed a decades-in-the-making, nationwide, pent-up celebration among evangelicals who\u2019ve fought tirelessly for the protection of the unborn. But Moore and most evangelical elites didn\u2019t and don\u2019t feel festive at all. Rather than celebrate, they <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/07\/29\/instead-of-praising-death-of-roe-v-wade-russell-moore-breaks-silence-to-trash-trump-and-his-voters\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">chided<\/a> the rank-and-file evangelicals who pay their salaries, saying now was not the time to gloat or take victory laps.<\/p>\n<p>What accounts for such a striking disconnect between evangelical elites and their erstwhile followers? The short answer is Donald Trump. The longer answer is that elite evangelicals have betrayed their vast constituency, the largest reliably conservative voting bloc in the nation, in an attempt to please Democrats. The <em>sine qua non<\/em> of success on that front is to signal contempt for Trump and his supporters. And so they have. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Accordingly, on June 24, Christianity Today\u2019s Russell Moore <a href=\"https:\/\/www.plough.com\/en\/topics\/faith\/witness\/faith-fiction-and-christian-nationalism\">tried<\/a> to draw parallels between violent non-American nationalist movements and evangelical MAGA hat crowd. A few days later Moore <a href=\"https:\/\/protestia.com\/2022\/07\/21\/russell-moore-says-in-light-of-overturning-roe-v-wade-conservative-who-voted-trump-have-not-been-vindicated\/\">continued<\/a> his jeremiad against Trump nation at the Faith Angel West meeting of religious journalists. In a jab at Trumpers Moore said, \u201cI morally think \u2018lesser of two evils\u2019 is not workable\u201d and then admitted that he thinks the <em>Dobbs<\/em> case is morally tainted for Christians because \u201cone has to look not only at the final result in this case but what is the cost of hitching the pro-life movement to a figure such as [Trump]?\u201d Moore\u2019s commitment to the Never Trump cause reaches back to his 2016 Washington Post declaration that evangelicals who support Trump must \u201cdeny everything they believe.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Moore reflects the posture taken by influential evangelical elites who long ago embraced superstar NYC pastor Timothy Keller\u2019s fixation upon \u201cblue communities\u201d deemed capable of keeping evangelicals on \u201cthe right side of history,\u201d \u2014 college-educated, Democrat-voting denizens of the nation\u2019s cities and blue enclaves clustered in and around universities from sea to shining sea. The tentacles of the Keller-inspired movement penetrated the largest evangelical publishing houses and denominations including the Presbyterian Church in America, and the gigantic Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). By 2012, Christianity Today\u2019s Skye Jethani could justly dub the phalanx of luminaries and institutions involved as the Evangelical Industrial Complex (EIC).<\/p>\n<p>The EIC was stunned and embarrassed by the 80+ percent of evangelicals who rejected their directives and voted twice for Trump. Baptist pastor and author John Piper rushed out a blogpost on the eve of the 2020 election to argue for the comparable \u201cdeadliness\u201d of Trump\u2019s character flaws with the killing of the unborn. Washington D.C. pastor Mark Dever praised the \u201cmulti-issue\u201d African-American Democrat voters who \u201crealized a long time ago that nobody\u2019s gonna do much about [abortion].\u201d For Dever, such sophisticated voting compares favorably to the supposed simpleton, single-issue, white GOP loyalists who \u201cjust don\u2019t know any other way to think about voting.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The most serious EIC attack on evangelicals is their repeated suggestion that fervent support for Trump suggests a lapse into idolatry whereby they put a man and a political party in the place of God. Such EIC rhetoric displays a profound misreading of what motivates evangelical Trump voters and an egregious misunderstanding of Christian conservatism by scholars who ought to know better.<\/p>\n<p>The EIC operates with a truncated, distorted, and demeaning view of political conservatives provided to them by the blue communities they wish to please. For them, support for the GOP reduces evangelicals to anti-abortion, greedy, environment-destroying deplorables who cling to their guns and Bibles and aren\u2019t comfortable with people who don\u2019t look like them.<\/p>\n<p>One would hope presidents of seminaries would be more familiar with that classic \u201cconservative\u201d spoken of by Edmond Burke, Russell Kirk, and Roger Scruton who is driven by an instinct for home and who lives life according to a covenantal relationship between the living, the dead, and the unborn. Such conservatives mainly want to be left alone by the political party in power. Displacement of God in the conservative mind by a political party or a politician just isn\u2019t on the cards for such folk.<\/p>\n<p>In contrast, progressive movements reaching back to the Jacobins of 18<sup>th<\/sup> century France do in fact reject God and put in his place comprehensive, utopian, worldview-casting ideologies such as Marxism and its neo-Marxist progeny like the current critical theory-inspired identity politics, critical race theory, the LBGTQ+ agenda, and the Green New Deal. Blue communities, having largely rejected Christianity and religion generally, do unashamedly hanker after a God-replacing political ideology to embrace. Red communities don\u2019t look to politics for their religion, they already have one.<\/p>\n<p>One wonders if Moore and the other evangelical Never Trumpers are paying close attention to what has become of the Democrat party the deplorables refuse to vote for.\u00a0Democrats now not only support abortion on demand at every stage of pregnancy but also indoctrination of children with CRT and dogmas of the LBGTQ+ movement that Romans chapter one deems an \u201cabomination\u201d before God. <\/p>\n<p>When conservative evangelicals enter the voting booth, they are not looking for a new religion or a new God. Rather, they seek to serve the one they have by opposing the evil one, the tempter from whom our Lord taught his followers to pray for deliverance. If Russell Moore and Tim Keller fear that some Americans place idolatrous hope in politicians and a political party, they\u2019d do better to address those concerns to the blue communities they serve, not the red ones they\u2019ve abandoned and insulted.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<div class=\"article-author-description fst-italic\">\n  Mark DeVine is a pastor, former missionary in Bangkok, Thailand, and a theology professor in<br \/>\nAlabama. He is the author of &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Bonhoeffer-Speaks-Today-Following-Jesus\/dp\/0805432612\/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=bonhoeffer+speaks+today&#038;qid=1584320486&#038;sr=8-1\">Bonhoeffer Speaks Today<\/a>&#8221; and &#8220;<a>Shalom Yesterday, Today, and Forever<\/a>.&#8221;<\/div>\n<div class=\"article-comments mt-30 mt-sm-60\">\n<div class=\"article-comments-container d-flex flex-column align-items-center py-30\">\n    <img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"110\" height=\"106\" src=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/12\/fdrlst-mark.svg\" class=\"img-fluid mb-20\" alt=\"The Federalist logo eagle mark\" \/>    <\/p>\n<p>Unlock commenting by joining the Federalist Community.<\/p>\n<p>    <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/plans\/pricing\/\" class=\"btn btn-on-white\">Subscribe<\/a>  <\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Former Southern Baptist Russell Moore is at it again. Even the overturn of Roe v. Wade failed to produce a moment of unity between Moore and the un-woke evangelicals he\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":969,"featured_media":1897865,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1583981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_finder_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/08\/02\/russell-moore-and-evangelical-elites-cant-let-go-of-their-jeremiad-against-conservative-evangelicals\/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=russell-moore-and-evangelical-elites-cant-let-go-of-their-jeremiad-against-conservative-evangelicals","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1583981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/969"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1583981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1583981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1897865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1583981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1583981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1583981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}