I’m not a religious person so I have no particular theological ax to grind. But in America, religion has a gigantic influence over all of us whether we sign on to the belief system or not. So, in that sense this is everyone’s business.
This Peter Wehner piece in the Atlantic about the crisis in American Christendom is simply stunning. It starts off with a rundown on the latest scandal with the Southern Baptist Convention in which the former head, Russell Moore, resigned from the organization because of its tolerance for sexual abuse and racism.
Moore’s letter was leaked to Religion News Service (RNS) a few weeks after he resigned from the ERLC. And on June 1, Immanuel Nashville, a church not affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, announced that Moore would become its pastor in residence. Which means that one of the most important figures in the SBC has completely broken with the denomination he has been a part of for virtually his entire life.
Moore’s 4,000-word letter explains why.
His departure was not primarily prompted, as many people had assumed, by his role as an outspoken critic of Donald Trump, although that had clearly upset powerful members within the politically and theologically conservative denomination. Instead, the letter suggests, the breach was caused by the stands he had taken against sexual abuse within the SBC and on racial reconciliation, which had infuriated the executive committee. The chair of the executive committee at the time, Mike Stone, is now running for SBC president. According to RNS, “Supporters have touted Moore’s resignation as proof of Stone’s effectiveness as a leader.”
The organization is also full of unreconstructed white supremacists.
But it isn’t just the Southern Baptists:
[S]omething has gone awry; the revelations contained in Russell Moore’s letter were only the latest links in a disturbingly long chain of offenses. In 2019, the Houston Chronicle published a six-part series on abuse within SBC churches. One of America’s most prominent female evangelicals, Beth Moore (no relation to Russell), split with the SBC earlier this year, citing the “staggering” disorientation of seeing denominational leaders support Trump. She has also denounced the “demonic stronghold” of white supremacy and “the sexism & misogyny that is rampant in segments of the SBC.”
“There comes a time when you have to say, this is not who I am,” Beth Moore explained to RNS. “I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists.”
Yet the problems are hardly confined to the SBC. The Catholic Church has been rocked by horrifying sexual-abuse scandals. Earlier this year, an investigation found credible evidence that Ravi Zacharias, the revered evangelist who died last year, had been engaged in sexual misconduct spanning many years and several continents. The Ravi Zacharias International Ministries board apologized for its role in discrediting one of the women Zacharias exploited and later slandered. And Jerry Falwell Jr. was forced to resign as the president and chancellor of Liberty University, one of the largest evangelical universities in the world, after allegations of sexual misconduct.
But the issues go beyond matters of sexual misconduct and abuse. Christians appear more susceptible than non-Christians to embracing conspiracy theories; 31 percent of white evangelical Christian Republicans believe in the accuracy of the claim that “Donald Trump has been secretly fighting a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites.”
Partisan, cultural, and regional identities tend to shape religious identities. “In American pop-culture parlance, ‘evangelical’ now basically means whites who consider themselves religious and who vote Republican,” according to the Baylor University historian Thomas Kidd. In so many instances, cultural identity is completely dominant over faith; it is the prism through which faith is interpreted. “‘Evangelical’ used to denote people who claimed the high moral ground; now, in popular usage, the word is nearly synonymous with ‘hypocrite,’” Timothy Keller, one of the most influential evangelicals in the world, wrote in The New Yorker in 2017. I have heard from pastors in different parts of America who describe a “generational catastrophe” that is unfolding because of how disillusioned young people, including many young Christians, are by what they have seen.
One of the more incisive comments about the gap we often see between faith and works sticks with me today: that for too many people of the Christian faith, Jesus is a “hood ornament.” The man who told me that was Russell Moore. But a blistering phrase used by Jesus echoes most in my mind. He likened hypocritical religious leaders who abandon their calling and lead others astray to “whitewashed tombs,” which “look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.”
In their eagerness to defend their faith, many Christians refuse to look honestly at the crises American Christendom faces and the corruption within its ranks. They prefer to present to the world a spiritual Potemkin village, projecting an image of righteousness that hides some disturbing realities. There’s a desire to conceal the abuses and the wounds, the struggles and the failures, the harsh judgmentalism and craving to dominate and dehumanize others, the doubts and the dark sides. The viciousness of church politics can rival pretty much any other politics you can name; the difference is that the viciousness within churches is often cloaked in lofty spiritual language and euphemisms.
I don’t know what to say about this. My instinct is to say that it just a reflection of the deeper cultural rot we see in many of our institutions. But this is an extremely powerful faction in American life which claims to be moral arbiters in many different aspects of our personal and public lives. This hypocrisy and corruption is relevant, particularly since they have injected themselves so comprehensively into politics and are such important social institutions if we aren’t really dealing with a chicken and egg situation.
Maybe these institutions aren’t so much reflections of an ever decadent and corrupt society — maybe society is a reflection of these decadent and corrupt institutions?
*None of this is an indictment of every adherent of these faiths. Obviously, there are many good people among them. But their religious leadership leaves a lot to be desired and far to many followers have lost their way as well. The worship of Donald Trump has shown just how thin the attachment to Biblical teachings has become.