Signposts with Russell Moore

In this episode of Signposts, I sit down with one of my favorite writers, Marilynne Robinson. Professor Robinson is an accomplished novelist and essayist. She earned a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2005, and her work is celebrated both by readers and literary critics. On this episode, we enjoyed a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation that I’m sure you will enjoy.

I invite you to listen in on our conversation, and be sure to subscribe to receive future episodes of Signposts.

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Every parent faces challenges. Some are common, while others are unique. But one thing is certain, you wont always succeed.

In this episode of Signposts, I talk about the worst mistake I’ve made as a parent, so far. I also discuss what I’ve learned from that experience and offer some advice for current and future parents.

Listen above, and be sure to subscribe to get new episodes of Signposts as they are released.

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In this episode of Signposts, I sit down with my friend Michael Card for a conversation on the subject of fatherhood. Michael is an accomplished musician and songwriter, as well as a very competent theologian. Over the years I’ve learned a great deal from Michael’s life and music, especially on the subject we discuss together here.

I invite you to listen in on our conversation, and be sure to subscribe to receive future episodes of Signposts.

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A.I. and other emerging technologies are rapidly creating new opportunities and challenges in many areas of our lives. One of the most important questions raised by these technologies concerns their affect upon our understanding of sexuality.

In this episode of Signposts, I address these questions and think about how Christians should prepare now for a future defined by such novelty and innovation.

Listen above, and be sure to subscribe to get new episodes of Signposts as they are released.

The post Should you worry about sex robots? appeared first on Russell Moore.

I am asked about the Enneagram, and other types of personal assessments, all the time. I know that some of my listeners are skeptical of it, while others are real advocates.

In this episode of Signposts, I offer my perspective on the Enneagram and think through its benefits and drawbacks.

Listen above, and be sure to subscribe to get new episodes of Signposts as they are released.

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You will probably endure a midlife crisis, and it will most likely hit you harder than you expect. The good news is, there are things you can do to prepare.

In this episode of Signposts, I talk about how to prepare for your midlife crisis and what you might expect when it comes.

Listen above, and be sure to subscribe to get new episodes of Signposts as they are released.

Hello, this is Russell Moore, and you’re listening to Signposts: questions and conversations about faith, life, and culture. I work with a guy by the name of Dan Darling. You may listen to his program, read his stuff – it’s really, really, good stuff and he’s a great brilliant guy that I really enjoy working with. But his name is Darling, which means that there are all sorts of opportunities for people to sort of make jokes about that. Usually when he walks in the room I quote Conway Twitty – “Hello, Darling.” When I see him first thing in the morning, there are all sorts of iterations of that. I had a dream a few nights ago that there was something going on that was a Dan Darling dance party. And I remember waking up – “what in the world is that about?” And it wasn’t until I got into the office that I realized, “Oh, it’s Dan Darling’s 40th birthday on that day. So maybe that was sort of back there in my mind, and the way my unconscious interpreted that was a Dan Darling dance party.

He walked up to me that day and we were talking about his birthday, and he said, knowing that I had gone through the 40 boundary marker not too terribly long ago, he said, “Well, any words of counsel on turning 40?” And I said, “Yeah, it’s terrible and it’s all uphill from here. The next two years are going to be really, really bad, but it’s going to get better.” And he was like, “Well, thanks for the encouragement that you’ve given to me!” I was mostly joking, kind of joking, but not really. And here’s why I say that.

I know that if we kind of looked at the demographics of who listens to this program, probably most of you are very young. There are others of you who are older, probably not very many of you, who are right now having to face that question of a potential midlife crisis, to use the word – the phrase that is used often in our culture. But what I want to say to you is that you need to prepare. Right now, young man, young woman, college student, teenager, young married twenty-something, you need to prepare right now for your midlife crisis. And I want to say to those of you who are older people that you need to be preparing right now to help shepherd those younger than you through that time of midlife.

Now, the reason I say that is because there are some people who would suggest that there’s really no such thing as a midlife crisis. This is a 20th century psychobabble sort of term and there’s some truth to that. There are studies that can show you that the idea of a midlife crisis as a distinct, definable thing is largely that. And so I would have said if you had asked me about, you know, many years ago if you’d said, “Wel, are you going to ever be addressing the issue of a midlife crisis?” I probably would have laughed and said, “No, because a midlife crisis isn’t a real thing. It’s an excuse for immature guys to tool around in sports cars at best and at worst to split up their marriages with affairs and so forth and to blame it on midlife and midlife crisis.” I still think that’s true to some degree, but not entirely true.

And so just in the same way that there was a time when I would have made fun of the idea of, say, “the inner child” because it’s such a new age-y sort of trope that is used in some really, really bad ways. I don’t make fun of that anymore. And the reason for that is because after all of these years in ministry dealing with people on the outside and on the inside, one of the things I’ve learned is that childhood and adolescence really do keep showing up in our lives constantly. And that really shouldn’t surprise us as people who are Christians. When Jesus continually talks about becoming childlike and about the importance of the little ones, we ought to understand that and have some respect for that. And I also would never dismiss the idea of the midlife crisis.

Now in one sense, I would say don’t worry about midlife crisis because there’s an article in The Atlantic magazine not too long ago called The Real Roots of the Midlife Crisis that is really fascinating.  But this is being written here by Jonathan Rauch, and he says that when he turned, say, in his 30s and 40s, he said the fog of disappointment and self censure was there, but that sometime in his late 40s and early 50s that fog started to lift, he says, at first almost imperceptibly, then more distinctly and by now at 54 I feel as though I have emerged from a passage through something. And he goes on to say that he was told by an older man, a writer that he admired very much, the following: “Midlife crisis begins sometimes in your 40s when you look at your life and you think is this all, and it ends about 10 years later when you look at your life again and think actually this is pretty good.”

Now there’s research to back that up. There are studies that suggest that that what we face sort of in the middle of our lives is not so much a crisis, for most people anyway, as a U curve. If you just look at the sorts of attitudes that people have about their lives and about the the world, there seems to be a trough somewhere in the late 30s and early 40s, and then you’ll notice that that starts to go up and up and up once you get into the early 50s. And so as people age, actually, the sort of attitude that many people would assume – “The older you get, the ornery-er you get, or the sadder you get” – is just not true for most people.

And there are lots of reasons for that. I mean, there are hormone levels that fluctuate and dip during that time that takes some adjusting to. There’s also sort of natural life pressures. Many people at that time in their lives both have small kids and aging parents, and maybe are juggling and rearing their children, maintaining their careers, and caring for parents that either have a lot of needs now or potentially would at any point in the future. That’s a real thing.

Beyond that, though, is there is a very real sense that at some point in the middle of our lives, we really do have a crisis. And I’m not using that in the jargony, 20th century sort of way, but more along the lines of what Dante said when he talks about being in the woods, in the middle of life’s journey, which is something that almost everybody who writes or reflects on a midlife crisis will refer to that opening there of the Inferno.

Why is that a crisis? Well, I think it’s a crisis because… There’s a relatively new book that I think is insightful in many places, even though I disagree with some of the sociobiology throughout it, called Selfie, talking about the formation of the self in contemporary times. The book starts out talking about, of all things, suicide. And the author says that suicide can be predicted most often by levels of social perfectionism. My life has to meet these goals, and my life has to be these certain things, and then there’s a failure or a humiliation of that. And what this author goes on to say is that every suicide is a failed story. Because he argues that people live by essentially one of two stories. People in the West tend to live by the story that he calls the Aristotelian story, sort of the story that you would think of when you think of the old Greek epics. You’re you’re on an adventure, you’re conquering the obstacles that you have, and you’re sort of moving onward and upward through life. And eventually that story fails. You realize I haven’t succeeded in all the ways that I wanted to succeed.

Or, he says, people live by the Confucian story, as he calls it. He would say most people in the East tend to live by this story which is, I’m part of this community, I’m embedded within a community, and if I fail my community, if I fail my family, if I fail my village, if I fail my people, then my life is wrecked. I don’t, I’m not worth anything anymore. He’s of course using these as shorthand, and I think to some degree both of those stories tend to show up in all of our lives, different emphases in different places and cultures and with different people.

But to some degree, we’re defined by both of those things. More importantly, though, I would argue as a Christian that everybody is defined by that, not Aristotle or Confucius, but that Adam and Eve story of what it means to be created in the image of God. And so God created us with vocation, with calling – “subdue the earth, take dominion over it, cultivate it” – is the message that God gives to Adam and Eve, and flourish. Go out forward and fill the earth. We all have that sense of calling in that sense of vocation. We express it in different ways, and we all eventually recognize that that calling is frustrated.

So when God says to Adam, “You will bring bread from the earth but you will do so with the earth fighting you with thorns and thistles, you will give birth to the next generation and and cultivate and nurture the next generation. But you will do so with the pains that come with with childbirth and then the pains of that snake striking at the heel of your child.” We have that sense of frustration that is present there.

We all realize the things that in my teens and 20s and maybe early 30s that were all possibilities for me. So no matter how bad my life is, if you’re living a really rough life right now as a teenager, you’re going to be able to say to yourself, “This isn’t going to be this way forever. It’s going to get better.” And let me just say to you teenagers, it will. It will get better than than that. When you were in your 20s, even if you’re really frustrated with your love life, or you’re frustrated with your work life, you’ve got all of this possibility in front of you and you think, “Well, things can get better.”

But there comes a point where you start to realize, “Wait a minute, time’s running out. I don’t think it’s going to get any better with my love life or with my work life or with whatever goals that I have have set for myself or have been set for me by my culture, about my family, about my church, or whomever.” That’s a very real thing. I also think that added to that, there is often a sense of regret that shows up in people’s lives. People have a sense of when they start paying attention and start looking back on their lives, there often seems to be an accumulation of things that leave a sense of shame or of guilt.

So if you’re in a sort of hormonal whirlwind of adolescence or your early 20s, it’s kind of easy to fool yourself into thinking the things that I’m doing right now aren’t going to matter. They’re not permanent, and I’m not going to think about them because I won’t distract myself with something else. But that doesn’t hold. Eventually we start thinking about these things, and there is a sense of often a burden of regret. And so I think all the time of.. one are my favorite poets, Czesław Miłosz, he wrote a series of 12 things that he learned from someone in his life. And number 12 is the one that stays with me all the time. And it’s this: he says that he has learned that in our lives we should not succumb to despair because of our errors and our sins. For the past is never closed down and receives the meaning we give to it by our subsequent acts. That’s a really, really hard thing to believe. Even if you know it cognitively, to actually feel that.

So a lot of times when people will either say, “I’m going through a midlife crisis,” or when you can look at them objectively and say, “Wait a minute. I think this person is going through a midlife crisis.” What’s at the root of that? Now here’s why I want to talk to you 20 year olds right now, and to you 32 year olds right now, and tell you to pay attention to this right now and start preparing and cultivating for it, is because every single week just about I’m hearing about somebody in my orbit, Christian, often pastors, or church planners, or missionaries, or others who are extraordinarily gifted and doing great things for the kingdom all through their 20s and all through their 30s, and then somewhere in the late 30s, early 40s, mid 40s they hit a wall. And you’ll see it show up in all kinds of different ways. You’ll have people who will just be burned out and exhausted and say, “I’ve had it with ministry” and walk away even if that ministry is vocational, whether or not it’s service in a church.

I’ve seen other people who have sabotaged their entire lives with immoral behavior, or with substance abuse, or with all sorts of things going on in their lives. And you look at it and you say, “Why in the world would you risk everything that you’ve built with your ministry or your marriage or your kids or your reputation or all of those, why would you risk all of that for this? That is nothing. And often what I find, if you really spend time with people, what I find is often what was happening was itself a kind of suicide. People weren’t ending their lives, but they were ending their calling that they couldn’t escape and that they believed was crushing them. And this was the way they could do it. I’m not saying that that’s a conscious sort of decision, but it’s what was happening this way.

Often, I will hear people in the situation say, “Well, I was trying to get caught in alcoholism or affairs or whatever the situation is. Well, why is that? I think it comes down to really the two fundamental questions of what it means to live a life, and that’s identity and inheritance. If you listen to me for very long or or read anything that I’ve written, then you’ll notice these two things show up all the time. Because I think they’re critically important to our understanding of ourselves. Who am I? What does it mean to be made in the image of God? What does it mean to be loved by God? What does it mean to have an identity that is hidden in Christ? (Colossians 3) And then inheritance – what actually am I living for? What actually does it mean to live a good and successful life?

And so when those two things are confused, then often what I find are situations where sometimes even really good things can end up being crushing and sometimes even demonic. So I’ve known, for instance, men who will talk a great deal about being providers and protectors for their families. Good. That’s exactly right. I want to encourage that. Provide for your family, protect your family. But these days, I’m always listening when when someone talks about that to see whether or not that is someone who is binding up his entire identity in being a breadwinner, to use the cultural term, or being that strong fatherly presence in a home. Even a very good thing can be used as a weapon against someone.

I will often hear women who are talking to me about being committed to discipling other people within the church or committed to the cultivation of their families. Again, really, really good. But I want to listen and to see whether or not this woman has confused herself with her gift and whether she’s confused her future inheritance with her success. And I think that happens often with both men and women as they start to look around and they they see other people, and they start to say, “Well, wait a minute, maybe I’m falling behind, because I’m just not as good a mom as she is, or I’m not as good a dad as he is, or I don’t have the sort of marriage that they seemed to have, or I don’t seem to have the sort of success in my work as this person has, or I don’t have the same kind of fruit in my ministry as that person has.”

And in reality, if you think about it, that sort of comparison and internal doubt rooted in envy is something the scripture condemns. It is just an identity confusion and an inheritance confusion. There is always going to be somebody who is a better evangelist than you are, or teacher than you are, or father than you are, or a mother than you are, or husband or wife or whatever the specific calling that you’re thinking of right now. Someone is always going to be better at it. And not only that, you don’t even know people’s real stories usually, unless you’re seeing them internally. You’re only seeing what’s being displayed, and what’s being presented.

That can lead, when you combine it with those other factors that we were talking about earlier, and with a self that hasn’t been protected by gospel definition and gospel hope, that can lead to a really, really dangerous sort of a situation. So why you need to prepare for this now and why you need to prepare to prepare others for this now is really similar to puberty. And I’m a dad of five sons and had to have the get ready for puberty conversation. I don’t know how many times so far. And so what I try to do there is to say, “Hey, these things are going to happen to you. Don’t freak out, know ahead of time I’m telling you these are the changes that your body is going to have. And these are the changes that you’re going to have emotionally. These are the sorts of rocky things that you’re going to have to go through. The reason for it is to launch you out into something that God has designed to be to be really good.” That’s what it is.

One of my sons, one time I was talking about this said, “Well, when does it end?” We were talking specifically about sexual attraction, those sorts of issues. When does it end? My response was, “Well, I’ll let you know because it really doesn’t end,” and he teared up and said “Are you kidding? It doesn’t end?” Yeah, it doesn’t end in that way, but it ends the way you’re experiencing right now. You’re not going to always be going through these mood swings and pimple outbreaks and all of those sorts of things to prepare him ahead of time.

I think the same thing is true for these other stages of life because in some way or the other. We all live out our own personal book of Ecclesiastes. Now, think of what Ecclesiastes does. The preacher there is looking at his life and he says, “I thought that life consisted in wisdom and knowledge. And then I was exhausted by that. It doesn’t bring meaning in vanity. I thought it was pleasure seeking – not that. I thought it was wealth, thought it was power, or thought it was all of those things, and all of those things disappoint me and ultimately we’re all dead like a dog.” You could sum up the book of Ecclesiastes that way. So is that a crisis? Yeah, that’s a crisis, in the same way that in the same way that it’s a turning point.

But Ecclesiastes doesn’t end that way. Ecclesiastes says, “So remember your Creator, and remember your creator when in the days when you are young prepare yourself ahead of time for the fact that your idols are going to disappoint you at some point in your life. Whether it happens when you’re 40 or 50, or whether it happens much, much later on, prepare yourself for how am I going to go through a time when these things that are idols in my life that I don’t even recognize as idols start to disappoint me.”

I had a church that was looking at a potential pastor and the person on the Pastor Search Committee was talking to me because I was a recommendation for this person. He said, “Now he hit a very difficult time in his life and said that he was exhausted and he was tapped out and he had to make all sorts of adjustments in his life. Should we be worried about that?” And I said, “That’s the very reason why you ought to call that guy as your pastor. Because he didn’t hit that point of disappointment or exhaustion or whatever and seek out affairs or substance abuse or cynicism and hardening. Instead, he really used it as a crisis. And he didn’t waste that crisis. He said, “Let me go back to first principles and figure out who God is to me. Let me figure out who I am in terms of the good news of the Gospel. And let me reorient and correct my life.” That’s what discipleship is.

And so this sort of crisis, if we mean turning point, may be really quiet for you. And you know it is for me and I have never had a really dramatic sense of “Oh well, my life is completely falling apart.” There is just more of a sense of, “Wait a minute, what’s happening here.” And maybe because I have a friend who was talking about all of these guys just doing really crazy, risky things. His wife asked him, “Well, what are they, why are they doing this?” And he said, “Well, I think they’re hitting midlife and they want to sort of prove I’ve still got it.” And she said, “Are you going to do that?” And he said, “I don’t think so, because I never had it for ever.” You know, being pursued by by women or whatever the issue was, I think there’s a sense in which that can be a blessing to realize you’re not looking nostalgically back at something in the past, if that’s the case for you.

But it is going to be the case that you are going to have a time when you’re doing all of the things that you’re supposed to be doing, and you’re going to hit some point of a turning point when you start to realize some things. And what I realized at that point was a number of things. One of them was I’m just not going to be everybody that people need me to be. God’s given me a certain calling, God’s given me certain responsibilities. And that’s what I have to do. And I can’t be everything to everybody. And secondly, to realize people are crazy. People are crazy. We assume when we’re very young that the people that are grownups are all grown up and mature and reasonable and rational and eventually we’re going to get there. They’re not.

You end up with a situation where people, the older they get, are often in the middle of the very same sorts of things that they were in the middle of as a teenager or twenty-something or thirty-something. And they’re just as internally unsure of what’s going on. They just know how to perform and how to act, often. So you have to learn those things, and then also know where your vulnerabilities are. And my vulnerability that I learned, as I kind of came through that middle of life’s passage was it no matter how theologically orthodox I am at root, I’m basically a Pelagian. I basically assume, unless I’m constantly fighting it with the gospel and with repentance, that I have to perform, I have to be the best at fill in the blank. And if I’m not, that God is angry with me. And what I had to learn at that point was that I spent all of my ministry up to that point on the Bible tells me so, and that’s good and true and I need to continue that, but I need to spend more time with Jesus loves me. Not just at the theological level, but at the visceral level in order to bring about peace. And so if you look and you see people, sometimes people that you’ve even admired a lot, who as they age become trapped with carnality and juvenility and anger or whatever.

Look at that. Have compassion, don’t have judgment, have compassion, but say I don’t want that to happen to me. And prepare yourself so that as you do age, you’re able to learn the lessons of the stories of your life as you look backwards, so that you’re able to say “Ah, there it is. Okay, I recognize that. I’ve seen that before. I’ve seen that in my life before, I’ve seen that in other people before, I recognize and I know what this is,” and then prepare people for those changes in life.

That’s what Jesus does. He tells the disciples ahead of time, “We’re going to Jerusalem, and I’m going to the cross. I’m telling you ahead of time that you’re going to have persecution, and the world is going to hate you, so that you will know that when that happens that I haven’t abandoned you.” Prepare yourself now to say, “I may reach a turning point. I may reach a really difficult time. I’m not going to make any rash decisions in that time. I’m not going to give up hope that I’m going to use this as a positive time to recognize I am not whatever my gifts are. I am not whatever my expectations are.” And when your idols start to disappoint, you rejoice that is God showing you where they are not to crush you, but to welcome you into a fuller experience of him and of grace. Prepare yourself for midlife if you’re not there yet. And if you’re past it, prepare somebody else and teach them. “Jesus loves me, this I know.”

That’s Russell Moore, in my 40s but not really in mid-life, cause we have trillions and trillions and trillions of years yet to go.

The post How should I prepare for a midlife crisis? appeared first on Russell Moore.

These are common questions aimed at the pro-life movement. In fact, one of the most frequent criticisms of the pro-life movement is that those who hold such views only care about ending abortion.

In this episode of Signposts, I address these questions and offer my perspective on the pro-life movement by thinking about what it means to fight for justice and human dignity.

Listen above, and be sure to subscribe to get new episodes of Signposts as they are released.

Hello, this Russell Moore and you’re listening to Signposts: questions and conversations about faith, life, and culture. If you have listened to me for very long, you’ve probably heard me tell the story of one of my earliest memories because in some ways I think it shaped the way that I view almost everything else in my life. And it was a time when I was, I don’t know, five or six years old. I was in Sunday school. We had a guest teacher that day, and in our little Southern Baptist Sunday School class, as in almost all of them, the way that it it worked was you had a little envelope and you would put your name on it and you would mark whether you’re present, whether or not you were going to attend the worship service, whether or not you’d read your Bible daily, whether or not you shared the gospel with somebody, and your offering.

And so my parents would often give me a quarter or a nickel or something to put in the offering envelope, and I had a quarter in there. And you know, as kids of that age will do, I was sort of playing with the quarter because for whatever reason they didn’t take up the envelopes until the end of that day. And so I was playing with the quarter, and I put the quarter in my mouth. And the lady who was teaching that day was rightly upset about that. She didn’t want me to choke on the quarter. But what she did was to come up and say, “Now you don’t want to put that coin in your mouth, because you don’t know where that coin has been. And for all you know a colored man may have held that coin.”

Now, this was long past the days of Jim Crow Mississippi. This was not during the times when people would have been seeing images on their screen of people being beaten in the streets. But what was underlying that comment was a much, much larger worldview of white supremacy, and as I’ll often say when I talk about that story, I don’t know if it’s my memory playing tricks on me but it seems to me as though right after that comment, she gathered us up together to say “Let’s sing ‘Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.'” Whether whether I’m conflating some other memories or not, we did sing that all the time, and I was starting to conclude that those two things did not go together.

You cannot be pro-missions and racially bigoted. Those two things can’t go together. You can’t be pro-missions and white supremacist. If in fact God has created a church made up of every tribe, tongue, nation, and language, then to prize my ethnicity as somehow being better than yours – much less to oppress with evil those of other ethnicities is the contradiction of the Gospel. So what many people in the civil rights movement and elsewhere were doing with churches that were trapped in that culture was to come in and say, “Wait a minute. If you believe in missions, then you have to believe in racial justice and racial reconciliation. Because the very impetus behind missions also ought to teach you about the impartiality of God and about the universal human imaging of God. If the Gospel is offered to everyone, if the church is made up of people from everywhere, then that means that you cannot be a white supremacist without exchanging the spirit for the flesh and exchanging the gospel for an anti-gospel.”

Now, the reason I bring that up is because every year we will gather a big group of evangelical Christians together, usually around the March for Life, and we talk about issues of human dignity and about the image of God. And one thing I’ve noticed happening there is that you’ll have two, for lack of a better word, tribes of evangelicals that sometimes will be there. And I’ll just for lack of a better word say pro-family people and pro-justice people, not saying the pro-life people aren’t pro-justice and the pro-justice people aren’t pro-family, but that’s sort of the emphasis that would be in those churches. And what I’ve noticed is that sometimes the pro-family people will say, “You know in my church I can talk about abortion, because people sort of politically and culturally are opposed to abortion, but I can’t talk about race without causing an uproar, or I can’t talk about sexual abuse of women without creating an uproar.”

And at the same time I’ll often have the sort of pro-justice evangelicals who will say, “You know, in my church or my setting it’s very easy for me to talk about racism and human trafficking and caring for the poor, but I can’t talk about the unborn because there will be a backlash happening for people in the congregation about the unborn.” And both of these groups people are saying “Now, we want to be consistent. We want to follow Jesus and we want to talk about dignity of human life.”

Now, this is important because there’s always a conversation going on about whether or not you ought to use the word “pro-life” only to talk about abortion. So only talk about abortion, only concentrate on that if you’re talking about the word “pro-life.” Now, there’s a sense in which the impetus behind that I get and I agree with. So for instance, there are people who will say “Well, unless you are opposed to the death penalty, then you can’t oppose abortion. You can’t be pro-life.” Now, there are good reasons, we’ve talked about them on this program before. There are good reasons why people oppose the death penalty. And I think there are there are very good arguments against capital punishment. I, at least theoretically, think the death penalty is consistent with life, because in scripture I think there’s a question of whether or not a state ever has the legitimate authority to take human life. If you believe that Romans 13 means that war can ever be justified, then you do believe in the death penalty at least in those cases. That’s what’s happening – the state is wielding the sword against evildoers.

So there’s a difference between people who would say, “We cannot take innocent human life and there cannot be vigilante justice against human life,” and people who would say “I think there’s sometimes a legitimate state authority in the taking of human life.” Okay, so in that sense people who say, “Well, until you talk about the death penalty you can’t talk about abortion.” I don’t agree with that at all.

Now, what I would say, though, if someone said to me “I’m pro-life and I’m for the death penalty. And the reason for the death penalty is because prisoners are scum. Let’s kill them.” I would say, “You’re not pro-life. If if the reason that you want to kill prisoners is because you think their lives have no meaning and you take a sense of joy – ‘Let’s fry them’ – out of killing prisoners, then that is coming from a disregard and disrespect for human life.” Now we can then argue about whether or not the death penalty is ever allowable for certain very, very constrained circumstances. But that’s not the same thing as someone saying, “Let’s vengefully lash out and take the lives of prisoners.” In that sense I agree with the people who are really reluctant to ever use pro-life anywhere else.

Also I would agree when it applies to this sort of argument that would say “Well, yes there is abortion. But until we have addressed all the full spectrum of issues then we shouldn’t really talk about abortion.” And that happens a lot. I mean, I knew a pastor one time that I knew to be pro-choice on abortion, supportive of legal abortion, who when talking about abortion in his church said, “You know, you hear a lot of conversation about abortion these days, and if we would just teach our teenagers sexual morality we wouldn’t have to worry about abortion.” And people said, “Amen.” What they didn’t know was that what he meant by that was “Just concentrate on teaching them sexual morality, then you won’t have the need for abortion but let’s keep abortion legal,” which they would have never agreed to at all.

An opposition to abortion is necessary for the pro-life movement, for the pro-life cause, as the threshold. Without opposition to abortion, there is no pro-life movement. Because what we have happening is widespread disregard and legal and cultural ways of keeping unborn children not just invisible to us but dehumanized. When they’re not persons and they’re not our neighbor, they don’t bear rights. And so to be pro-life we have to say, “Vulnerable unborn children and their moms are created in the image of God and ought to be protected and should not have their lives taken away from them.”

So when we’re talking about the issue of pro-life, we have to say “Okay, well why do we oppose abortion?” If the reason that we oppose abortion is only for political advocacy groups, then we really don’t have a pro-life movement at all. We just have a little legislative agenda that somebody has. But instead, what the pro-life movement is doing is saying, “We have a we have a political problem, meaning a governmental problem, a judicial problem that we need to address as citizens. Behind that, we also have a cultural problem where we have to ask ‘Who are these children and why is this happening? Why do we devalue people like this? Why do we have disposable people in our mindset in the contemporary era? And how do we speak to that?'” So we’re hitting both the governmental and the cultural moral fabric here at the same time.

It’s the same way my friend Mike Gerson used to put it when he was a speechwriter for George W. Bush, that “unborn children should be protected by law and welcomed in life.” Both of those two things – welcoming children and protecting them by law. So in that sense, we already are concerned with and talking about more than just abortion when we say the word pro-life. Even almost everybody who would say, “Let’s not talk about anything but abortion when we talk about pro-life,” because we are recognizing that when we’re dealing with, for instance, a physician assisted suicide and euthanasia. What are you dealing with? You’re dealing with a disregard for human life and the intrinsic worth of human life. When we’re talking about embryo research or the destruction of embryos after in vitro fertilization. It’s not a clinical abortion, but what is it? It’s the destruction of human life. And what we’re saying is that from conception to natural death, every human being bears the image of God and ought be treated as such.

So that is already present that when we when we say that we are pro-life and pro-woman, we care about the unborn child and we care about his or her mother, which all of the pro-life movement virtually would say. Not only that, but the pro-life movement actually at the grassroots level lives that out better than almost anybody that I know or any movement that I’ve ever seen. If you look around at pregnancy resource centers, for instance, around the country what you’ll find is more often than not, most of the time, these are places that are actually doing ground zero hands on ministry with the poor and the vulnerable. They’re there helping women in crisis, not simply in terms of making the decision of whether or not to abort and and seeking to persuade them not to abort, but also saying “We can help you with – if you want to place your child for adoption, we can help you to do that. If you need childcare, we can help you with that. If you need job training, we can help you with that. If you’re afraid to go home, we can find protection and sanctuary for you. Why? Why do we do that? Because we recognize that the unborn child and his or her mother both bear the image of God.

And we also recognize that the mentality behind the abortion movement is a mentality that sees people and people’s worth in terms of power, and that wherever that mindset is present you are going to have some manifestation of an abortion culture. Jesus does this all the time when he comes in and says, “Okay, you know that you shall not commit adultery. But you can’t cordon that off and say, ‘Well, I’m going to live my life consumed with lust and covetousness, but I’m just not going to physically act on adultery.'” Jesus says “No no no.” The root of this is deeper than that. He says, “You can’t consistently say, ‘Oh well, I’m obeying the law of God and whatever I would give to my parents to support them in their old age, I’m giving to God,'” which is what he says the religious leaders are doing.

What the pro-life movement is saying is, “If you believe in human dignity, then you believe in human dignity. If every person is created in the image of God then every person is created in the image of God.” Which means that we’re constantly asking ourselves, “Who are the people that we don’t want to think about? In the same way that an abortion culture says, “Let’s just not think about unborn children. Let’s call them clinical words and try to try to find some way to erase them from our minds.” Where is that tendency showing up in us?

So we will say to some people, hey, you believe in the dignity of unborn children and rightly so. So therefore care about their moms. Welcome the pregnant teenager into your church and minister to her. You believe that the unborn child bears the image of God and rightly so, and you want to protect the life of that unborn child and rightly so. Therefore, care about people in your neighborhoods who are racially different from you, that maybe the people around you would say, “They don’t matter, don’t care about them.” You care about the dignity of human life and the value and the worth of human life, and you understand and you know that there’s more to life than the pursuit of the orgasm, as the sexual revolution would tell us, therefore care about what’s going on with a pornography industry that is destroying the lives of women and communicating a false vision of sexuality that actually contributes to the abortion mindset.

We’re constantly asking not just, “Is this particular act wrong?,” although we say that specifically, but we’re saying, “Why is that particular act wrong?” That particular act is wrong because human beings are not God and we do not have the power of life or death over other human beings. We have not been given dominion over one another. If we don’t understand that, then we’re going to follow the exact same path that lead us to the abortion movement in the first place.

There’s a reason why most evangelical Protestants were nowhere to be found at Roe vs.Wade, with some notable exceptions. And where they were was often on the other side, on the pro-abortion side of the equation. Well why? It’s because you had people who would talk about image of God, they would talk about family stability and sexual morality and all of those sorts of things but they would not, they were not equipped to see how that applies to the unborn child. They averted their eyes from that. In order for evangelicals to be ready to speak a prophetic word against Roe vs. Wade, they had to have a theology of human life and they didn’t for the most part.

So if you’re in the 19th century, and you’re speaking about human dignity, you have to talk about slavery. If you ignore it, if you’re talking about human dignity and the sanctity of human life in 1845, and you’re talking about murders in the population, and you’re talking about all sorts of suffering around the world, but you don’t talk about human slavery, then you have no moral credibility and you are missing the huge presenting issue there of an assault upon human dignity and freedom. Now, that doesn’t mean though that slavery is cordoned off all by itself as though if you just get rid of slavery then you don’t have the other things to address. No, you have to get rid of slavery. That’s key. That’s threshold. But you also have to deal with the way that that slavery mindset shows up in the oppression of people of color in all sorts of ways – toward Jim Crow, toward voting rights, toward lynchings, toward all of these these other manifestations of that kind of idolatry. That is necessary to being pro-human, pro-freedom, and pro-life. What’s at the root of this?

This is what Jesus is getting at when in Luke 10 he talks about the man who was beaten on the side of the road and how the Samaritan is the one, after the priest and the Levite have passed by, the Samaritan is the one who stops and cares for him. Jesus says, “Go and do likewise.” And he asks the lawyer who’s asking him the question, “Now, which one was the one that obeyed the law of God in loving his neighbor?” And the answer was, “Well, the one that showed him mercy,” but he didn’t want to go there. He didn’t want to think about the Samaritans, because they’re the people that don’t matter in his view. And so he wanted to ask the question, “Well, who is my neighbor. I’m going to obey the command, love God and love my neighbor, but who is my neighbor?” And Jesus takes him exactly where he does not want to go. Matthew 25, the judgment scene, when Jesus is separating the sheep from the goats he does so in terms of people who are largely invisible to those who are being questioned. When Jesus says to those who are being condemned, “I was in prison, and you did not visit me. I was naked, and you did not clothe me. I was hungry, and you did not feed me,” their response is, “When did we do that? We didn’t see that at all.”

When the rich man in Jesus’s account is seen in torment, it’s because Lazarus – poor, covered in sores, licked by dogs, seen as irrelevant and shameful, not even really a part of this story. That attitude of invisibility toward Lazarus is what actually led this man toward hell. So when we’re asking “Who is my neighbor?” The answer is those who are bearing the image of God and are vulnerable and hurting and in front of us, and often the people that we don’t want to acknowledge at all.

Now, why don’t we? Well, there are all sorts of reasons, but one of the reasons is the tendency toward a herd mentality. In John 12, John tells us about people who, hearing Jesus teach, they didn’t commit themselves to Jesus because they were afraid that they would be put out of the synagogues, that they would they would lose their place in the tribe. And the reason for that, John says, is because they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God. There’s a fallen human tendency to say, “What is my herd, and what is my tribe? And so let me just adapt myself completely to that herd and to that tribe.”

And so you may have the pro-justice people who will say, “My tribe cares, rightly, about the poor, cares about racial justice, cares about sex trafficking, and cares about a global hunger, but let’s just not talk about abortion.” What? Why? Because they love the glory that comes from man. Or they love the security of being part of the group, more than the question of what it means to follow Jesus.

The same thing is true with a person who’s pro, for lack of a better word, pro-values, pro-family, who would say “I care about the unborn, I’m going to talk about the unborn, because everybody around me in my base, if you will, they agree with me about that. And so I can continue to talk about that and can be seen as having great courage or great insight, even though I’m not really teaching or leading, I’m just saying what it is they already believe and repeating back to them. But I won’t talk about the “Who is my neighbor?” question when it applies to say, race, or to say, the disabled or to say, the elderly person with Alzheimer’s who is being ignored or in some cases around the world is actually being killed.

Well, that’s not teaching one another, and that’s not actually standing up for human life. That’s just standing up for whatever the political values are of the group that you’re with at the time. And what that actually means is that what we’re saying is that your visibility to us is based upon your power. The power that comes with whether or not a majority of the people around me right now want to talk about you. That’s Planned Parenthood. That that not only isn’t an alternative to the pro-abortion mindset, that is a pro-abortion mindset. If unborn children are useful to you, so you talk about abortion, then you’re not really talking about abortion. You’re just using these unborn children. And if racial relations and racial reconciliation and racial justice is useful to you in your particular tribe, but you don’t want to talk about unborn children, then it’s not the human dignity that you care about, it’s again, the power of whether or not the tribe or the majority will confer personhood upon those they want to see as invisible. The pro-life movement has said, and rightly so, “People aren’t useful. People bear dignity and value and worth.”

And we train ourselves for whether or not we’re going to recognize that or not in a variety of ways. So actually even if we want to limit the discussion only to abortion, our children are watching us. When we say “Every human being bears the image of God. Every human being bears dignity,” our children are watching and saying “Okay, does that apply to the stripper who’s being trafficked down the street?” If she shows up in your church, do you see her? Does that apply to the guy who has AIDS and wants to hear the gospel? Does that apply to the child with cognitive disabilities who is yelling in the middle of the worship service? Or are you going to say “Those people are not useful to me, those people disrupt what it is that we want to do, therefore we’re going to ignore them and move them to the side.” If they see and learn that lesson then do not be surprised when in the fullness of time, an unborn child becomes less than useful and they fall right into the hands of the abortion clinic.

Now, does that mean that we have to share a comprehensive program on everything in order to be a pro-life movement? Of course not. Even if you narrow it to simply the question of the preborn, we don’t share a comprehensive program on everything. We have all sorts of emphases, and some people would say, “Well, let’s start with dealing with late term abortion legally and politically.” Other people would say, “Let’s start with waiting periods and education of women when it comes to abortion.” Some people would say “Anything less than starting out with an affirmation that unborn children are persons under the Constitution, anything else is not good enough.” Those sorts of debates are happening all the time, even with the all or nothing people, there’s debates over whether or not we need a constitutional amendment or whether or not the 14th Amendment already includes children as persons, and therefore we ought to simply have the government proclaim that.

All of those those conversations go on, and they also take place within the life and the ministry of the church. Being pro-life, pro-woman, pro-baby doesn’t necessarily tell you exactly what your ministry is going to look like. Some churches, God has gifted and given both the gifting and the calling to emphasize foster care. Some, international adoption. Some, pregnancy resource centers. All are a variety of different ways that God has done that. The issue is, “Do you care about the lives that bear the image of God, and are you willing to see them and to minister to them in the way that that God has called you to do?” That’s critically important because the caricature out there is, Well, pro-life people they care about, they believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth, as Barney Frank says. That’s not true. As I said before, that’s not what’s going on all over the country but it can’t be. It can’t be.

To care about human life doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily going to agree on what healthcare system model ought to look like, but it does mean that we agree that sick people matter. It doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily going to agree on what sorts of affirmative action programs we ought to have in our colleges and universities, but it has to mean that we understand and know that black lives matter, black people matter. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we agree on how many immigrants ought to come into the country every year, but it has to mean that the lives of immigrants and strangers and sojourners matter to God and ought to matter to us. So we can’t be the people who say these people are parasites. We have to say, “These are people created in the image of God.”

If the majority decides who a person is, then that’s called pro-abortion, regardless of whether or not you call yourself pro-life or not. So if we’re going to combat that, we can’t say “Well I’m pro-life,” or “I’m pro-justice.” We have to say “We’re pro-life, we’re pro-justice, we’re pro-family, we’re pro-vulnerable, we’re pro-Jesus.” And our question cannot be “Well, who then is my neighbor?” The pro-life movement can only go forward by saying, “The life of every person is bound up in the question of who God is, and therefore matters.”

This is Russell Moore, and you’re listening to Signposts.

The post What does it mean to be “pro-life”? appeared first on Russell Moore.

I am asked these questions all the time, usually by Christians who are concerned that these labels no longer accurately define or describe who they are and what they believe.

In this episode of Signposts, I talk about these questions and offer my own perspective on the status and future of evangelical Christianity in the United States.

Listen above, and be sure to subscribe to get new episodes of Signposts as they are released.

Hello, this is Russell Moore, and you’re listening to Signposts – questions about faith, life, and culture. Matter of fact, this is Signpost’s rebirth. This is the new relaunch of Signposts, and today I want to talk about a question that I get so often that I’m frankly starting to get tired of it. It’s the question of whether or not we ought to give up on the word “evangelical,” or whether we ought to give up on evangelicalism itself as a movement. Now here’s why I think this actually is an important question, and it’s about more than just names and titles and categories. I often, when I hear people talking about my hometown I know when someone pronounces it “Biloxi” that this is someone who has no idea what the town is, and they’re simply reading a word off of a page. I even had someone say to me one time, when they were talking to me about, “Now you’re from Biloxi, Mississippi.” I said, “No, I’m from Biloxi Mississippi. It’s pronounced Biloxi.” And the response was, “Well, whatever, it doesn’t matter.” Well, it does matter to me, because if you’re naming it something other than what it actually is, then it’s telling me that you don’t know it, you don’t understand it.

I think that’s one of the reasons why many of us (and I say us) are irked sometimes when we see the word “evangelical” being used in some really broad and often weird and sometimes even gospel-denying kinds of ways out there in the broader culture. A couple years ago, I wrote a piece in The Washington Post that said that I find myself not using the word “evangelical” very often anymore and instead using “Gospel Christian” when people ask me about my religious affiliation and who I am. And the reason for that is because often now, when people in the larger world use the word “evangelical,” what they’re doing is talking about mostly simply a political category. They’re talking about white evangelicals, rarely talking about evangelicals of color, and they’re talking about a caricature of evangelicals, either that’s just kind of a voting bloc – a group of people that are just kind of like cicadas that go into dormancy between Iowa caucuses every four years, or evangelical in terms of the most buffoonish sorts of representatives of evangelicalism that might be out there on television or or on the internet.

Now, why that’s important is because there is a sense out there among many people that I deal with all the time – some of you, I know that many of you who listen to this program aren’t Christians yet, and sometimes the biggest skepticism that many people have is “Well, is Christianity, and particularly evangelical Christianity, about something else? Are you talking about Jesus just so you can get me to sign up with some movement, or so that I can behave the way that you want me to behave, or so I can buy the products that you want me to buy?” Those sorts of questions. That’s a problem, that’s an important issue that we ought to face.

The other is that often when I see the word “evangelical” being used, it’s being used in a way that is on the one hand really, really narrow – talking about white evangelicals who share the same sorts of subculture, on the other hand, really, really broadly – including, for instance, prosperity gospel hucksters out there in the world that that are being claimed as evangelical Christians. And one of the ways that this came home to me in recent years was I was having a conversation with someone who is a prosperity Gospel, health-and-wealth “Christian” – and I use “Christian” in quotes here – but who was advocating all of this really, really aberrant theology, but at the same time was really upset about my denomination and my denomination’s publishing house particularly, because of the stands that they had taken on sexuality. And it didn’t make sense to me at first, because I thought “Now wait a minute, this is somebody who is a culture-warring sort of person that isn’t at all, I would think, wanting to embrace these progressive, revisionist ideas of sexuality.” Until, in the conversation, it finally started to dawn on me that this person wants to make sure that evangelicalism is not defined theologically in such a way that it would exclude the kind of product that they’re selling. I think that’s exactly what we ought to do.

So when we come to this question of “evangelical,” you see it in the newspaper, you read it on the internet, people are talking about it in your community, and someone says to you, “Are you an evangelical, are you an evangelical Christian?” Does that really matter? Well, on the one hand, no, it doesn’t matter very much because evangelical in and of itself isn’t really a Biblical word, and not only that, but very few people actually in their daily lives, I think, refer to themselves or think of themselves as evangelical. LifeWay research did a study not long ago that said there are far more people who call themselves evangelical than actually believe what one would consider to be evangelical doctrines. I know that’s true. I suspect that’s quite true. I also think though that the reverse is true – that there are many people who are evangelical Christians who don’t call themselves that you ask them “What’s your religion?,” or “What’s your faith tradition?” “I’m a Christian” or “I’m a Methodist” or “I’m non-denominational” they might say. Or “I’m born again, I believe the gospel.” I think there are all sorts of ways that people respond to that, and the answers start to narrow down when you start asking “What kind of Christian are you” or “What kind of Methodist are you? or “What kind of Presbyterian are you?” Then often “evangelical” will come forward as as a modifier.

So in one sense it’s not important, but in another sense I think it makes a huge difference. That’s especially true when we’re talking about the ways that we cooperate together as gospel Christians, as evangelicals. How do we identify the boundaries and the center of that sort of cooperation? And by that I mean cooperation in terms of things as broad as global missions, and as narrow as specific college campus ministry. I was on a campus not long ago, and it was the same story that I have faced on college campuses all over the country, where there there was a a group, a evangelical fellowship, on that campus that had to stop using the word evangelical even though they had used it for, I don’t know, 50 years. But they had to change because they’re trying to do evangelism, and when they’re talking to unbelievers what they find is that when they say “evangelical,” an unbeliever hears something very, very different than the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the authority of the Bible, and the necessity of personal faith in Christ. They hear a specific cultural or political program. And that was impeding the evangelism and admissions thrust of that organization, and of many others that are wrestling with this and trying to figure out how to describe themselves.

Now, some people would say “Well, evangelicalism has always just been sort of cultural resentment and white identity, and those sorts of things.” Ross Douthat sort of made this argument in his column in The New York Times a couple of months ago, when he said “I’m not sure we actually have an evangelical crisis, because it could be that evangelicalism just has always been the caricature that people have of it and always will be.” I don’t believe that. I think if we look at what evangelicalism means in terms of the word itself and in terms of the movement, it’s, as Tim Keller pointed out in The New Yorker, “a renewal movement” within the church. It goes back to the revivals of George Whitefield and John Wesley and others who established, culturally established, or in some cases state established, and said “You must be born again, remember the words that Jesus gave to Nicodemus, ‘Unless a man is born again he will not inherit the kingdom of God,'” That renewal movement continues to Billy Graham, who if you’ll remember, when he’s preaching “You must be born again, you must be of the New Birth,” he’s preaching to people who were largely culturally Christian and largely, as he begins in the 1950s, a people who would share sort of homogeneous American values about life and working and family, and Billy Graham is saying “That is not good enough, you cannot simply reform yourself, you must be regenerated by the Holy Spirit of God.” That’s the gift that evangelicalism brings as an emphasis. Carl F. H. Henry, same thing. Coming in and saying “Evangelicals ought to be the people who are constantly standing up and saying ‘the gospel, the gospel, the gospel.”

So Evangelical is a good word to show the continuity of all of these different renewal movements that really are connected to one another historically and in the present. But also it’s a good word, because it’s rooted in the word for Gospel, the word for for good news, and that’s something that we really do not want to give up. As much as I’m uncomfortable sometimes with the word evangelical in the current context, we shouldn’t hastily give the word up. For one thing, the sorts of caricatures of evangelicalism that we see around us as a strictly kind of cultural phenomenon are really old and aren’t going to last. As I’ve been trying to argue for years, cultural Christianity is sick and dying. People do not increasingly just go down demographically, and look, people do not feel the need to identify themselves nominally with the church or with Christianity in order to be seen as good people.

Now at one level, that really ought to be a terrifying reality for us. Again, going back to Ross Douthat, I’m always very often reminded of what Ross said to sort of secular progressives, “You were worried about the religious right, just wait until you see the post religious right.” But we’re starting to see that around the world right now, where you have groups and movements on the right and on the left that have no pretense to Christian norms whatsoever. They care about Christianity only in terms of not something else, so that Christianity is just another way of saying Western Civilization, but there’s no commitment to the authority of the Bible, there’s no commitment to the New Birth, the teachings of Jesus and dicipleship and bearing the cross, and to the Holy Spirit. That is a terrifying thing in terms of a cultural movement.

On the other hand though, that is actually good news for the church and for the people of God. Because the way that the gospel goes forward is not through sameness with the culture around us. The way the Gospel goes forward is through distinction. And so when we think about evangelicalism, and we think about what does it usually mean when evangelicals themselves have said the word evangelical, it means commitment to the truthfulness and the authority of the Bible, commitment to the need for personal faith and repentance, commitment to the cross of Jesus Christ as the climax of all of creation and the place from which flows redemption. It’s a commitment to personal evangelism and to missions. Those things are still going to be here. There are some people who would say, “Well, evangelicalism isn’t even going to last.” Well, I think evangelicalism, whatever you call it, is going to last because the Gospel lasts, and because the church is always going to need that movement within it saying “Remember you cannot stand before God except through the mediation of Jesus Christ. Remember the gospel.”

So where does that leave us with the word evangelical? On the one hand, as I said, I’m tired of talking about this because I’m asked about it so often, and what I want to say is really there are deeper issues here that we ought to get at, the very root sort of questions about what it means to be Gospel people. That’s more important than what people think about when they hear the branding of the word evangelical. But it is a little disconcerting, because I’m afraid that if we’re not careful what happened to the word evangelist might happen to the word evangelical. Now, there’s a difference, because evangelist and evangelism, of course, are directly Biblical words. “Do the work of an evangelist.” But coming out of the the scandals of television evangelists in the 1980s, what I found was that there there were a lot of people, especially people under a certain age, who became very reluctant to use the word evangelism or evangelist. Even people who actually were evangelists, whether just in terms of having the gift of evangelism, or people who were actually vocationally evangelists, they were reluctant to use the word because they knew if they said it what what people would hear is “someone is fleecing you for money, someone who’s living a hypocritical moral life,” and those sorts of questions. Well, evangelist and evangelism are words we shouldn’t abandon to the hucksters, and evangelicalism isn’t something that we should abandon to cultural Christianity.

Now there are some words that just don’t mean the same thing that they used to mean. Billy Graham, who we mentioned earlier, came to the forefront through “Crusades.” Not many people use the word crusade right now, even Campus Crusade for Christ is “Cru.” Why? Because when people hear the word “crusade,” they typically aren’t thinking of what Billy Graham meant of a concerted spiritual warfare effort, they think the Crusades which which is not something that is a positive sort of association. So the word crusade is occasionally used, not much, that’s not that really much of a loss.

The word fundamentalist, if you think about the way fundamentalist used to be the shorthand for people who were Christians and who believed the basics, the fundamentals, the foundation points of the Christian faith. So if you asked someone in 1925, “Are you a fundamentalist?,” and if she said yes, what she’s saying to you is that she believes in the inerrancy of scripture, she believes that Jesus was was physically raised from the dead, bodily raised from the dead, she believes that Jesus will will return at the Second Coming, those foundational fundamentals of the faith. She believes in the Virgin Birth, those sorts of creedal questions that were coming under assault at the time. Now, and really starting sometime in the 1940s or so, fundamentalist started to be in many people’s minds – most people’s minds – shorthand for something else. So fundamentalist started to mean, in many contexts, well that you believe the King James Version is the only accurate translation of scripture in English, or you believe that pre-tribulation Rapture, or a dispensational reading of scripture is necessary, or certain sorts of codes about how long somebody’s hair should be, or what kind of clothes somebody should wear. And so people largely stopped using the word fundamentalist, and that became even more the case when we saw the rise of Islamic fundamentalism around the world, and fundamentalist started to mean to people “someone who is potentially violent.”

I don’t usually say that I am a fundamentalist, because although I do believe in the fundamentals of the faith, that’s not what most people are asking me. I can remember one time when I used the word for myself, and it was when I was in a really, really liberal gathering of people who were committed to the name “Christian” and they were asking me all of these questions about where I was, and where I stood, and I finally I said, “Look, what you need to understand is that I’m a fundamentalist.” What I meant was, what what I knew they would understand, is that I actually believe the Bible is true. I actually do think Jonah was swallowed by a fish. I actually think Isaiah wrote Isaiah. Those sorts of questions. But in almost every other situation, I wouldn’t use it because the shorthand doesn’t work for what I mean.

Well, evangelical is just shorthand. It’s a way of communicating really quickly what it is, what stream of professing Christianity that we’re in. So I don’t think we should give it up, at least not now. But I think we ought to use the word like a missionary. We all are missionaries, we’ve all been commissioned by Christ and sent forward. So we communicate with the shorthand, but we explain what the shorthand is. So for instance, I am an orthodox Christian, and what I mean by that is that I believe in classical Christian orthodoxy – the Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian Creed and so forth. And so I may very well, in a shorthand sort of way, say “I’m an orthodox Christian.” I wouldn’t do that, though, if I were in Greece or in Russia. If I did, I would make sure that I was saying “I’m a small o orthodox Christian,” because in those contexts, when people hear that you’re orthodox they assume you mean “I’m part of the Greek Orthodox Church, or part of the Russian Orthodox Church. I believe in the doctrines of Eastern Orthodoxy,” Not what you mean – small o orthodox. In the same way, I’m a catholic Christian, but with a small c. When we’re reciting the Apostles Creed about the Holy Catholic church, or talking about the historic marks of the church is one Holy Catholic and Apostolic, I believe that. I believe the church is universal, the literal meaning of catholic. I believe that God’s people are unified, but I almost never would describe myself as a catholic, because what the average person would assume is that one means I’m a Roman Catholic, I agree with the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, or I’m in submission to the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, which of course isn’t true.

The same thing has been the case over and over and over again throughout history. There was a time when, if someone is asking, “Are you a Lutheran?,” what they mean is “Do you agree with Martin Luther about the necessity of the reform of the church, and about justification through faith alone?” If that’s what someone meant, then I would be like, “Yeah, I’m a Lutheran, I’m with him on those things.” Typically now, what people mean is “Are you part of the Lutheran Church, are you part of the Lutheran movement?” There was a time when people would use the word Anabaptist, not just to apply to the groups that we know see as Anabaptists, but speaking of anybody who practices believer’s baptism. A re-baptizer, the word literally means, which was a slur that people just eventually adopted. It was shorthand, it worked sometimes, it didn’t work other times.

Same thing would be true with “I’m a Protestant Christian.” But if I’m in Northern Ireland, I’m going to explain what I mean when I say, “I’m a Protestant.” What I mean is not that I’m associated with some cultural faction within that country, what I mean is that I agree with the reformers about sola scriptura and justification through faith, and those reformational doctrines. But you know, the exact same thing is true, really, with the word “Christian.” When you say, I’m a Christian, you have to explain what you mean. Because if you’re sitting on a plane, and you simply say to someone “Are you a Christian?,” and the person says “Yes,” that really doesn’t tell you very much. If someone is defining Christian as “Well, I’m an American,” or “I was baptized when I was a baby and I’ve never given any thought to it again,” or “My parents belong to the Episcopal Church,” or however it is they’re defining Christian. What you have to say is, “Are you someone who has repented of sin, and placed your personal trust in Jesus Christ crucified and raised from the dead?” Those are the sorts of questions that you’re going to be asking. The shorthand has to be explained.

Same thing, I think, is true with the word evangelical. Now, what’s going to be critically important, though, is that those of us who are going to be evangelical insist upon the gospel as foundational to our use of the term. You can’t control what anybody else does, you can’t control what your neighbors think when they think evangelical, you can’t control what television commentators mean when they say evangelical, but you can explain what the gospel means, and what it means to be a Gospel Christian, an evangelical Christian.

So, I’m willing to work with all sorts of people on all sorts of things. I’ll work with Latter Day Saints, I’ll work with orthodox Jews, I’ll work with all sorts of groups of people, people who have no religious faith whatsoever. And I would even join a group that was, say, Citizens Against Abortion, or say, Citizens Against Human Trafficking, and so forth with those people. I wouldn’t join a group that was Christians fill-in-the-blank, because that would confuse what I mean when I say Christian in a way that is overheard by people who are asking, “What does it mean to be a Christian?” I would never be associated in terms of evangelical with, for instance, prosperity gospel teachers, who I don’t recognize as evangelical or as Christians. Health-and-wealth prosperity gospel, in all of its iterations, is not Christianity. It’s a different gospel, it’s a Cananite fertility religion that sends people to hell. It’s Baalism. I’m not going to accept that.

But at the same time, I’m not ready to give up the word evangelical. Evangelicalism will persist because the Gospel persists, and as a good evangelical, Martin Luther, might have put it: “Let goods and kindred go, the shorthand words also, the words they may confound, our hope is onward bound, His Kingdom is forever.” That’s loosely interpreted from the German. So, let’s keep the word evangelical as long as we can, but more importantly, let’s be evangelical. Let’s keep the Gospel.

This is Russell Moore, an evangelical Christian (not as seen on TV). Let me know what sorts of questions you have, and conversations you’d like to have on Signposts.

The post Should We Give Up On Evangelicalism? appeared first on Russell Moore.

I’m excited to announce that my podcast, Signposts, will soon be returning in a fresh new format that I hope you’ll enjoy.

I’ll continue to deal with questions ranging from theology to ethics to culture and much more. I’ll also be inviting guests from all corners of society to join me on the program. In conversation with these leaders, we’ll get to hear their stories and explore some of the moments and ideas that have shaped their lives.

This season of Signposts will officially kick off on April 6, and we’ll be releasing two new episodes each month. I really look forward to thinking through important questions and sharing these conversations with you, and I hope you’ll join me.

The post Introducing My Updated Podcast appeared first on Russell Moore.

In this episode of Signposts, I talk about my approach to writing. From keeping track of ideas, to writing books and articles, this podcast offers you a look at the whole process. You can find the full transcript and links to subscribe below.

We’re about to take a little break here in the summer here on Signposts. I’m going to take a few weeks as I’m writing a book to really concentrate and give my attention to this book. As I was thinking about that, one of my colleagues said, “You should talk about on Signposts how it is that you write.” And I have to be honest, I’m really reluctant to do that because I said “Nobody cares how I write, first of all, and second of all I certainly don’t commend to anybody else my particular way of writing.” But he said, “There may be some people who can benefit from that as they’re thinking about how to write for themselves.” And maybe so.

Because you are probably going to be called upon to write something at some point in your life. It may not be that you’re a writer, but you may have to write a loved one’s obituary. Or you may have to write a letter to a child or a family member. All of us are going to have to put down on paper or on the screen our thoughts at some point. Some people just do it much more extensively than other people do it.

So here’s kind of the process I go through. And again, I don’t commend it to anybody at all. This is just the way that I work. What I wish I could say to you is that I sit down and make out an elaborate outline, and then have note cards in front of me, and I go through each of note cards. That’s not how I work. What I have to do is spend a lot of time, first of all, reading in whatever area I’m going to be writing in, and then a lot of time just processing that. So just thinking. A lot of the most important writing time for me actually is not in front of the screen, it’s walking in the woods. Because that’s when I’m thinking through “Okay but what about this, and what about that, what about this idea, and what about that idea,” and sort of churning as I’m thinking through this. And for me, exercising – especially sort of meandering free exercising – is what helps to put all of that together for me.

I also like to keep with me a little notebook because there will always be those moments where something will just flash. I’ll be reading in Scripture devotionally and something will hit me – “I haven’t considered that, that’s important for whatever this thing is I’m writing.” Or I may be sitting in a wedding somewhere and something hits me. So I want to have something that I can quickly jot something down about whatever it is that I’m thinking. Then just continue to churn and continue to think about these things. Then when I sit down to write what I typically want to do is to spend some time balancing writing what’s down on the page, usually these days in my study at home, with sort of pacing around the floor. So if you watched me – I would never want any one watching me. I have a couple of friends who will sit there and write while they’ve got people around them. That would be disastrous for me, because I just jump up and pace around the room, sit down and write a little bit more, jump up and pace around the room some more. It’s a really sort of neurotic thing to watch that I wouldn’t want anybody to see.

But as I’m writing things down, I have to have huge periods of solitude interrupted by short bursts of community. So what I need to do is to talk about what it is that I’m writing about, not all the way through, but in certain little bursts. So I’ll gather a group of friends together and just say “Hey, this is what I’m thinking about. Does this make sense?” Or I’ll call my friend David Prince on the phone and say “Hey, what do you think about…” and just start talking about what it is that I’m writing. Or my wife and I might go for a walk and I might talk to her about what I’m thinking through. That helps me to break out a little bit of the solitude in order to test out ideas. But I have to have this solitude.

So, often when I was at Southern Seminary I would drive down to Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky, the place where Thomas Merton was a monk, and I would go there because I could just wander in the woods completely silent and quiet there. I could think things through, and then I could come back into the Abbey and write down the sorts of outlines of things that I thought about. I may be there all day and then get in the car and drive back and I’ve got the time driving also then. So usually it is better for me, it’s better time spent if I would take however long it took to drive to Gethsemane Abby, all day there, and however much time it took to come back. Even if I didn’t put anything on the page that whole day, that’s not a day lost because it’s all then uploading. And then I come home and I’m able to write.

It’s also true for me that I can’t write little dribbling out amounts in any sort of continuous way. So if I’m writing a book, I just can’t write a paragraph on a plane and then another paragraph in between meetings. I’ve got to write continuously and the flow of thought really can’t be broken away or interrupted. Now, you may be different. And it may be that the way that you write is best in terms of just planning out “I’m going to write a paragraph every morning” or whatever. If so, good for you. I wish I could do that but that’s not the way that I operate. That’s not the way that I do things.

That’s different when I’m writing a book from when I’m writing a short article like a blog post or something. In that case, what I need is a dose of adrenaline. So what I need is for something to either make me angry or make me really, really happy where I just simply have to express it. I was telling that to a friend one time and he said “Really? Angry? Because almost none of your writing seems angry to me.” And I said “Well, that’s because the anger for me is a sense of provocation. It’s not what I then use to actually write the article.” So I may become really angry or grieved about something, but then I’m going to work through “Yeah, but why would somebody do this? Why would somebody hold to that view?” And then when the adrenaline hits I usually just sit down and just write the blog post altogether, in sometimes just a few minutes. But because it’s all there – whatever’s in the background has been fueled up with the adrenaline and then there it is.

The other kind of writing though that I find really beneficial is something that you’ll never see. It’s something that actually I heard recommended by a podcast host, Brian Koppelman, who is a filmwriter and producer and he hosts a podcast that I love called “The Moment.” And he recommended something called morning pages. As a matter of fact, he just mentioned “morning pages” one time on the program. And I didn’t even know what it was, so I Googled it. And I found out that morning pages is something recommended by this book “The Artist’s Way” which I then ordered and read. I don’t endorse everything or even most of what’s in that book. A lot of it is really New Age-y and sort of spiritually therapeutic sort of stuff. But there’s some really helpful stuff in there too that you can sieve out.

And one of those things was the idea of morning pages. And basically what it is that you get up first thing in the morning and you write 3 pages that no one is ever going to see, that you’re not going to look at at least for a long period of time. Where you can make all the mistakes and errors and you can just “stream-of-consciousness” write. And at first I thought, “That is going to be a total waste of time.” But I did it, and it was really helpful to me. Because when I would sit down first thing after waking up and just start writing, and not know where I’m going to go, I could find out some of the things that were actually burdening me at the time. Maybe some of the things that God was working on in my life. And so in doing that, I’ve kind of been able to find things to have more gratitude about. I’ve found some some sins to repent of. There are some things that I thought that I had forgiven, that when I’m doing these morning pages I realize “Wait a minute, if I’m still talking about this in this stream of consciousness way, then maybe I haven’t forgiven this.” All sorts of things have sort of come out of that, and it just kind of primes my brain to be able to think through other things during the day.

Again, what’s key to me is the idea that nobody is going to see this, I’m not going to look at this, so it doesn’t have to be perfect. Because perfection or the idea of perfection is what scares me from writing. And I think that’s true for a lot of people. It causes you to procrastinate because you think “I should wait until I can write this perfectly.” You’re not going to write this perfectly, there’s no way to write this perfectly, and you’re not even going to go back and look at it again. That’s important for me.

And then also, no one’s going to see it. You know, sometimes when I’m keeping a journal I’ve always got in the back of my mind “My kids are going to one day be reading this,” and I want to sort of put my best foot forward for my kids. This does away with the temptation toward that kind of performance or that kind of mask. Now obviously, I’ve got the notebook on my desk, and I could drop dead of a heart attack today and my kids could read the morning pages. But that’s not what’s in your mind as you’re doing it. So that’s helpful for me, and may be something that you enjoy or something that you don’t, but it has proven to be a source and a catalyst for a lot of things that I have later written about or preached about or talked about later on.

We’re going to take a few weeks off here on Signposts, and then we’ll be back coming into the fall with many new episodes of Signposts, including some things I’m really excited about right now that I’ll tell you about later. So have a good time, have a good summer, and we’ll reconnect afterwards.

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