Russell D. Moore's Blog, page 6

Growing Up with The Moviegoer

Over at The Atlantic, Andrew Santella writes about his lifelong obsession with Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer. Like Santella, I typically re-read this book every year or so. Unlike Santella, I’ve never found this childish or unhealthy, but after reading this essay I can see why, for him, it was.

Santella writes that his problem was that he identified with Binx Bolling as a kind of role model “for the smart, droll young man I wanted to be. In fact, I was such a mess that I didn’t notice was a mess Binx was.”

Santella says that he modeled his life, perhaps unintentionally, after Bolling, including his flawed and failed perception of women. This would be akin to identifying with the Preacher of Ecclesiastes in the first ten chapters of the Book, and living out one’s life in the pursuit of meaning through wisdom or pleasure or riches.

I love The Moviegoer for all sorts of reasons. It is set in the region I call home. Parts of it take place on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, my home, and the protagonist lives in the Gentilly neighborhood of New Orleans, where I went to seminary. Beyond that, Percy pictures, better than anyone I’ve read, the angst that comes from a sinner alienated from God, and thus from the cosmos, without knowing how and why he’s alienated.

Here’s the line from the book that sticks with me, most persistenly over the years, and rings even more true to me today now that I work, once again, in an arena where so many people’s lives are defined by their ideologies. Percy writes about Binx’s practice of going to the library to read, in turn, conservative and liberal magazines. He feels the jolt of satisfaction every time the liberal magazine zings the conservatives, and then vice-versa. If the book were written today, Percy might well have situated Binx at home on the couch, flipping channels between Fox News and MSNBC.

Binx reflects:

Though I do not know whether I am a liberal or a conservative, I am nevertheless enlivened by the hatred which one bears the other. In fact, this hatred strikes me as one of the few signso of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsideown: all teh friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.

It seems to me this is a persistent pull for those who’ve lost the sort of purpose that comes only with being found in the cosmos. If there isn’t a sense of mission found in a spiritual conflict in the heavenly places, the only life we find is in being the best team on the field or the most sarcastic argument in a Facebook comment thread. That’s certainly true for me. And it reminds me that I’m always just a gospel away from being Binx Bolling.

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Jim Crow vs. Jesus Christ

Jim Crow is dead; Jesus Christ is alive.

But, like a zombie, the spirit of Jim Crow keeps walking. The answer is a gospel that is as big as the kingdom of Christ.

Trillia Newbell, consultant for women’s initiatives here at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, is one of the most powerful young voices in evangelical Christianity. In her new book, United: Captured by God’s Vision for Diversity, Trillia asks us to imagine what it would look like if reconciliation were more than rhetoric and programs but a Christ-shaped vision of an empty tomb that casts out fear, hate, and division.

Christianity Today reviewed Trillia’s book here, and you can order it here. Read it and ask how your church can grow to look more like the kingdom of God, resplendent as it is with those from every tribe, tongue, nation and language. We’re united, after all, not by the blood of our ancestors but by the blood of Christ Jesus, not by the spirit of the age but by the Spirit of God.

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Lessons from Riverside Church

Tim Challies posted a piece about the history of Riverside Church, in his digital walking tour on objects that explain American religion. The post made me think of a visit I made on a Sunday morning to that church, pastored years ago by the titanic liberal Harry Emerson Fosdick, some years ago.

The service that morning included all sorts of items that were almost parodies of progressive Christianity, the announcement that the Native American/Indigenous LGBTQIA Eco-Feminist Sunday School class (or something like that) would host a potluck in the fellowship hall, etc.

The guest preacher that morning was the chaplain for an abortion rights advocacy organization, and the message was from Acts 2/Joel 2 on the Spirit poured out on “all flesh.” I suppose I was expecting an egalitarian interpretation of “your daughters shall prophesy,” but that was too obvious to need mentioning here. Instead, the sermon applied the “all flesh” to “all the skin on your body” and the preacher said this included, of course, the reproductive flesh. And so, the freedom of the Spirit, he said, means “reproductive freedom.”

It’s easy to see the ridiculous leap from a biblical text to something quite, in my view, wicked. But this isn’t simply a temptation for a place as from-the-beginning “progressive” as Riverside Church, built as it was on Schleiermacher’s theology and Rockefeller’s money. The devil is always happy to see a “Christianity” that trades in the gospel for a cause, any cause. If progressing toward something that’s not Christianity won’t work, then conserving something that’s not Christianity will. The power of the air doesn’t mind, as long as the gospel is subdued, eclipsed, or erased.

Challies quotes “fundamentalist” J. Gresham Machen about “modernist” Fosdick: “The question is not whether Mr. Fosdick is winning men, but whether the thing to which he is winning them is Christianity.” That’s a warning to all of us, in every church in every age.

image credit: Tim Challies. 

 

 

 

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Relaunching This Site

The past year has been a blur for me, full of a move, a transition, and, at long last in keeping my promise to my kids, a dog. Here’s one new thing I’ve put off a little while, and I’m excited about: the new “Moore to the Point.”

Here’s what’s different. In the past, I’ve only put “finished product” here. This new site is going to be much less finished. I want to think along with you, and ask you to help me think through some things sometimes. These will often be more personal pieces, not restricted to the official sorts of things I might say over at ERLC.

On the new site, I’m going to want to talk about issues, about church, about the Bible, and about seeking first the kingdom. I also want to talk, personally, about family, books, film, opera, Opry.

So welcome to the new site. Let me know what you’d like to think through here together.

               
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Questions & Ethics: Should a parent attend their atheist daughter’s wedding?

Russell Moore counsels a Christian mother unsure if she should support her atheist daughter’s wedding. He talks about the importance of marriage for both Christians and non-Christians.

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Why Johnny Cash Still Matters

Today would be Johnny Cash’s 82nd birthday. Unlike many celebrities whose name dies out with the obituaries of their fan base, Cash continues to matter. And I think it matters that we understand why.

Cash remained—to the day of his death—a subject of almost morbid curiosity for a youth culture that knows nothing of “I Walk the Line.” At the 2003 awards show, 22-year-old pop sensation Justin Timberlake, beating Cash for the video award, demanded a recount. Why would twenty-something hedonists revere an old Baptist country singer from Arkansas?

In one sense, the Cash mystique was nothing new. For the whole length of his career, onlookers wondered what made him different from the rest of the Hollywood/Nashville celebrity axis. Much of it had to do with the “man in black” caricature he cultivated. Cash joked that fans would often say to him, “My father was in prison with you.” Of course, Cash never served any serious jail time at all, but he could never shake the image of a hardened criminal on the mend. People really seemed to think that he had “shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”

That’s probably because of just how authentic and evocative his songs of prison life were. “Folsom Prison Blues,” for instance, just seems to have been penned by someone lying on a jailhouse cot listening to a train whistle in the night: “There’s probably rich folks eating in a fancy dining car/ They’re probably drinking coffee and smoking big cigars/ Well, I know I had it coming/ I know I can’t be free/ But those people keep a’movin’, and that’s what tortures me.”

The prison imagery seemed real to Cash because, for him, it was real. He knew what it was like to be enslaved, enslaved to celebrity, to power, to drugs, to liquor, and to the breaking of his marriage vows. He was subject to, and submissive to, all the temptations the recording industry can parade before a man. He was a prisoner indeed, but to a penitentiary of his own soul. There was no corpse in Reno, but there was the very real guilt of a lifetime of the self-destructive idolatry of the ego.

It was through the quiet friendships of men such as Billy Graham that Cash found an alternative to the vanity of shifting celebrity. He found freedom from guilt and the authenticity of the truth in a crucified and resurrected Christ. And he immediately identified with another self-obsessed celebrity of another era: Saul of Tarsus. He even authored a surprisingly good biography of the apostle, with the insight of one who knows what it is like to see the grace of Jesus through one’s own guilt as a “chief of sinners.”

Even as a Christian, Cash was different. He sang at Billy Graham crusades and wrote for Evangelical audiences, but he never quite fit the prevailing saccharine mood of pop Evangelicalism. Nor did he fit the trivialization of cultural Christianity so persistent in the country music industry, as Grand Old Opry stars effortlessly moved back and forth between songs about the glories of honky-tonk women and songs about the mercies of the Old Rugged Cross.

To be sure, Cash’s Christian testimony is a mixed bag. In his later years, he took out an ad in an industry magazine, with a photograph of himself extending a middle finger to music executives. And yet there is something in the Cash appeal to the youth generation that Christians would do well to emulate.

Other Christian celebrities tried—and failed—to reach youth culture by feigning teenage street language or aping pop culture trends. How successful, after all, was Pat Boone’s embarrassing attempt at heavy metal—complete with a leather outfit and a spiked dog collar?

Cash always seemed to connect. When other Christian celebrities tried to down-play sin and condemnation in favor of upbeat messages about how much better life is with Jesus, Cash sang about the tyranny of guilt and the certainty of coming judgment. An angst-ridden youth culture may not have fully comprehended guilt, but they understood pain. And, somehow, they sensed Cash was for real.

The face of Johnny Cash reminded this generation that he has tasted everything the youth cultures of multiple decades have to offer—and found there a way that leads to death. In a culture that idolizes the hormonal surges of youth, Cash reminds the young of what pop culture doesn’t want them to know: “It is appointed to man once to die, and after this the judgment.” His creviced face and blurring eyes remind them that there is not enough Botox in all of Hollywood to revive a corpse.

Cash wasn’t trying to be an evangelist—and his fellow Bible-belt Evangelicals knew it. But he was able to reach youth culture in a way the rest of us often can’t, precisely because he refused to sugarcoat or “market” the gospel in the “language” of today’s teenagers.

One of Cash’s final songs was also one of his best, an eerie tune based on the Book of Revelation. His haunting voice, filled with the tremors of approaching hoof-beats, sang the challenge: “The hairs on your arms will all stand up/ At the terror of each sip and each sup./ Will you partake of that last offered cup?/ Or disappear into the potter’s ground/ When the Man comes around?”

Cash’s young fans (and his old ones too) may not have known what he was talking about, but they sensed that he did. They recognized in Cash a sinner like them, but a sinner who mourned the tragedy of his past and found peace in One who bore terrors that make Folsom Prison pale in comparison.

A version of this article originally ran on February 25, 2013.

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On Weddings and Conscience: Are Christians Hypocrites?

Today Kirsten Powers and Jonathan Merritt wrote an article for the Daily Beast accusing conservative Christians of hypocrisy and unchristian behavior for suggesting that some persons’ consciences won’t allow them to use their creative gifts to help celebrate same-sex weddings. Since I was a key example of this hypocrisy, I’ll respond to that charge.

At issue is a response I made, reposted this week over at the Gospel Coalition, helping a Christian wedding photographer think through whether he ought to work for a same-sex wedding. In the photographer’s question, he grapples with the question of how his conscience ought to play in this decision not only as it relates to weddings of people who, for all he knows, might be involved in all sorts of unbiblical behavior. Powers and Merritt suggest if he refuses to photograph one “unbiblical wedding,” he ought to “refuse to photograph them all.”

As a matter of fact, they say, to do anything else is to be “seen as a hypocrite” and to “heap shame on the gospel.” More specifically, they point to my advice that the photographer doesn’t have a moral obligation to ferret out the circumstances behind every wedding he shoots. I am telling him, they say, to do something “wrong” as long as he doesn’t investigate the background. “Apparently, ignorance is bliss.”

This sort of sarcastic response could just as easily apply to the biblical text at the root of our conversation: the Apostle Paul’s teaching on the conscience in the context of the marketplace in Corinth. Paul tells the believers there that they have no obligation to investigate whether the meat set before them was sacrificed to idols. If something’s put before you, Paul says, eat it to the glory of God, no questions asked.

But, the Spirit says through the Apostle, if the food is advertised as sacrificed to idols, abstain from it for the sake of the consciences around you (1 Cor. 8:7-9). I suppose the first-century Daily Beast could have sarcastically dismissed this with “ignorance is bliss.”

The article quotes me telling the photographer that he need not investigate the background of every wedding he performs, but they do not quote the next sentence: “But when there is an obvious deviation from the biblical reality, sacrifice the business for the conscience, your own and those of the ones in your orbit who would be confused.”

Here’s why this matters. The photographer has, in most cases, no ability or authority to find out the sorts of things a pastor or church elders would about a marrying couple. Most evangelical Christians, this one included, believe there are circumstances in which it is biblically moral for a divorced person to remarry. And all Christians—regardless of what we think about a church’s responsibility—think that marriages between otherwise qualified unbelieving men and women are good things, grounded in a creation ordinance.

It’s possible, of course, that the man and woman who’ve contracted with a wedding singer are just marrying to get a green card. It’s possible that they don’t plan to be faithful to one another. It’s possible that she’s already married to three other men. It’s possible that their love is just a reality show stunt. Or, to take us back to Corinth, it’s possible the blushing bride is the groom’s ex-stepmother. But unless the photographer has a reason to think this, he needn’t hire a private investigator or ask for birth certificates and court papers to make sure it’s not.

In the case of a same-sex marriage, the marriage is obviously wrong, in every case. There are no circumstances in which a man and a man or a woman and a woman can be morally involved in a sexual union (I have no reason to assume that Powers and Merritt disagree with apostolic Christianity on this point. If so, they should make that clear).

Now, the question at hand was one of pastoral counsel. How should a Christian think about his own decision about whether to use his creative gifts in a way that might, he believes, celebrate something he believes will result in eternal harm to others. I recognize there are some blurry lines at some of these points. But what isn’t blurry is the question of state coercion.

It’s of no harm to anyone else if Kirsten Powers and Jonathan Merritt (both of whom I love) think me to be a hypocrite. It’s fine for the Daily Beast to ridicule the sexual ethic of the historic Christian church, represented confessionally across the divide of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy. It’s quite another thing for the state to coerce persons through fines and penalties and licenses to use their creative gifts to support weddings they believe to be sinful.

That’s broader than just homosexuality. I don’t want wedding singers forced to use their lyrics and voices to tell us how great it is that Herod and Herodias or Henry VIII and fill-in-the-blank wife’s name are soul-mates.

This article maintains that there are no circumstances in which the Bible “calls Christians to deny services to people who are engaging in behavior they believe violates the teachings of Christianity regarding marriage.” Really?

Does that apply only to the morality of marriage? Should a Christian (or Muslim or Orthodox Jewish or feminist New Age) web designer be compelled to develop a site platform for a legal pornography company?

Now, again, we might debate the best ways to see to it that consciences are protected by law and in the courts. But acting as though those concerned about such things are the reincarnation of Jim Crow is unworthy of this discussion. Moreover, the implications for conscience protection are broad and long-lasting. This isn’t just a tit-for-tat Internet discussion. The lives and livelihoods of real people are on the line, all because they won’t render unto Caesar (or to Mammon) that which they believe belongs to God.

And we might disagree about what sort of pastoral counsel should be given as a Christian seeks to live out his or her life in the marketplace, but in order to do so we’ll have to deal with what the Bible teaches about our responsibility both to love our neighbors and to testify to what we believe to be true: That they, and we, will face a God who has revealed himself in our consciences and in the Scriptures. We might disagree on whether or when to bake the cake, but surely we ought to agree that it’s worth at least asking the question of whether and when the icing on the cake might imply, “Hath God said . . .?” (Gen. 3:1)

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Questions & Ethics: Should Christians bake wedding cakes for weddings about which they disagree?

Russell Moore addresses the question: Should Christians bake wedding cakes for weddings about which they disagree? When is the right time to object and when is the time to humbly serve in Christ’s name? And what should the law say about these situations of conscience?

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Russell Moore discusses his view of Russian government propaganda, abortions and the change in Russian adoption laws.

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Questions & Ethics: How do you deliver a eulogy for a non-believer?

Russell Moore offers advice for delivering a eulogy for a non-believer. He encourages ministers to take the opportunity to deliver the message of salvation and the gospel. 

 

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