NASHVILLE (BP) — A Southern Baptist ethicist and a conservative television talk show host agree there are reasons for optimism despite America’s cultural decay.
Russell D. Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, and Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” show, pointed to signs of hope in American society during a conversation on faith and culture Tuesday (Sept. 16) at Nashville’s Lipscomb University. Erick Erickson, editor-in-chief of RedState.com and a conservative radio show host, moderated the discussion.
One reason for hope, Moore and Scarborough said, is what is happening in evangelical churches.
“I’m telling you, there are people who are on fire for Jesus Christ in New York City and around this country,” Scarborough said.
“But you’ve got to have the right message. We have the right message. People are not hungry for this message,” he said, “they’re starving to death for this message.”
Moore said this is happening “all over the place” in America.
When this is evident in a church, he said, it is one that is sharply different from the rest of culture in terms of the Gospel of Jesus.
It is not, however, “a congregation that’s trying to wall itself off from the rest of the culture, protect itself from the culture,” Moore said. “It gives you the freedom to be able to stand up and say, ‘We’re going to say something right now that is shocking, that you may consider to be ridiculous, but let’s lay this on the table, and here it is.'”
This is especially true among millennials, adults generally in their 20s and early 30s, Scarborough and Moore said.
Scarborough said his oldest son, in his mid-20s, and others his age “see the excesses in culture; they see the grossness in culture.”
“Our kids have been confronted with that earlier. … But it’s pushed them to essential truth earlier. So, I’m optimistic. … I think as Christians, I think as conservatives, I think as Americans … we ought to be optimistic.”
Moore said evangelicals in their 20s and 30s are not becoming more liberal, despite the frequent portrayal in mainstream media.
“… I think what most people see when they look from the outside is they say, ‘See, these younger evangelicals, they don’t care about abortion or marriage anymore; they care about serving the poor and orphan care and human trafficking and those sorts of things,'” Moore said. “The younger evangelicals who are actually concerned about human trafficking and serving the poor and orphan care … are also really concerned about abortion. … They’re also really concerned about family structure, because they see what that does to people that they’re ministering to.”
The title of the public conversation was “Crazy Never Wins,” a term Scarborough has used to describe the extremes and shrillness of politics and public debate, especially by his party, the Republicans. Before joining MSNBC, Scarborough had been a three-term Republican congressman from Florida, 1995-2001.
Erickson asked if “crazy” is winning on the issues of same-sex marriage and transgenderism.
Moore said he is “short-term pessimistic but longer-term much more optimistic” regarding today’s sexual revolution.
“… I’m not despondent about this issue because I think there’s only so far that the sexual revolution can go before it burns everything over …,” Moore said. In the long term, “there’s an opportunity for evangelicals to talk about why do we believe the things that we believe, not in an angry, belligerent sort of way.”
Scarborough told Erickson, “I think the champions of same-sex marriage have been anything but crazy. I think they’ve been cold. I think they’ve been calculating. I think they’ve learned their mistakes in the past. I think they’ve learned to put a mainstream face on something. … And they’ve actually made the mainstream look crazy.”
Of evangelicals, Moore said, “[I]n some ways we’re too crazy. In other ways, we’re not crazy enough.”
Evangelicals “often try to normalize Christianity” by talking about values and morals while not getting to Christ and His Gospel as the heart of Christianity, Moore said.
“Instead, we fill it in with this sense that people will really believe us if we’re just angrier than everybody else,” Moore said. As a result, Americans hear people who “are scared. They don’t hear the quiet confidence of someone who believes” in the Gospel.
Many Americans “not only don’t believe in the things that we believe in, they don’t want the life that we’re presenting to them, and they think we’re crazy,” Moore said, adding this gives evangelicals an opportunity “to articulate first principles, articulate things we have assumed.”
“Crazy doesn’t win, but normal doesn’t save,” Moore said. “And so I think we have to be the sort of people who are not screaming at the culture around us and losing our temper and trying to [deal] in the most outrageous antics we can, but we need to be the people who are willing to be strange, which means we are not forming our lives around what the outside culture deems to be important right now. … I think we have a danger of being crazy. We have a danger of being normal. We have to have a distinctive word to say.”
