No images? Click here Hello fellow wayfarers, Why your easy conscience might not be a sign that you’re in step with the Spirit…What’s deficient about “Christian worldviews”…How Charlie Brown’s bad luck and Arthur Brooks’ midlife crisis might be just what we need to find happiness in this awful time…what I learned when infertility stopped…This is this week’s Moore to the Point. How Consciences Adjust to Injustice A friend of mine, an African-American pastor, asked me this week to help him understand, “for real,” why so many white evangelicals are scared to address the issues related to race. The question was a good one, given the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd in recent weeks, and also because of what he meant by the question. He is not asking about the sort of vapid social-media expectation that everyone should have a “take” on everything immediately or be vilified for “not caring.” As a matter of fact, he was kind of asking about the opposite. He was asking about the sort of white Christians he knows who opine on virtually everything, usually in strikingly moral terms, often with warnings about the darkness of the times before us, giving their viewpoints on everything in news, usually in strikingly partisan terms that are “from a Christian worldview.” And then, when the subject turns to race, are suddenly vague and abstract and ambivalent and nuanced. He asked why that was, and that’s a good question. I thought about that question as I re-read an essay from the early 1960s by sociologist Peter Berger about why white evangelical churches in the South were, almost universally, accommodating of Jim Crow, even when led by pastors who should have had the biblical and moral formation to know better. Berger looked at studies that showed that the longer a pastor had served his church the less likely he was to support desegregation or even to speak to the moral issues related to segregation. There was an inverse relationship between whether the church was in a building program or a membership drive for whether the pastors and leaders were willing to speak to any “unpopular moral imperatives.” This did not take, Berger argued, “direct economic sanctions of the ‘shut up or get out’ variety,” although sometimes that happened (fact check: sometimes they still do). Usually though, Berger wrote, the pressures were psychological and far less visible. Churches were like any other institution, he contended, concerned to raise up leaders who were in step with whatever the social and cultural ecosystem is. This means, he noted, that most institutions want to cultivate those who have “an ability to get along with all sorts of people above and below oneself in a hierarchy” along with “the willingness to submerge one’s own strong views or, even better, not to have any.” This sort of cultivation and years and years of what it takes to “succeed” with those sorts of expectations means that, over time, one comes to see one’s own society—whatever that is—as fundamentally good. That’s why, he argued, most of the leaders of the sort that Martin Luther King Jr. wrote to in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” did not feel themselves to be hypocrites. The conformity with the “culture” was not all of the sudden, in the sense of, “I have to say what I don’t believe, or not say what I do believe, or I’m going to lose my position or my influence or my standing or whatever.” Almost always, the conformity happened bit by bit along the way such that it was not even noticed. It wasn’t that these leaders, for the most part, knew that they were silencing key passages of Scripture—for instance, Galatians 3, Ephesians 2-3, the whole books of Romans and James—but rather that they didn’t notice at all what they didn’t notice as important. They didn’t see that what they categorized as “biblical” issues and “moral” issues, and what they sidelined as “social” issues and “distraction” issues neatly lined up with what it took to remain in the good graces of the society in which they lived. “In this way, conflict is avoided and even the possibility of conflict rarely emerges into consciousness,” Berger wrote. “Ministers may then be perfectly sincere when they maintain that they have always acted in accordance with their conscience. The social forces of the situation have already taken care that this conscience will be so formed as to remain innocuous.” This ought to rattle us—because it’s not an historical artifact about people in a particular context in the past, nor is it about one set of issues in the present. This is about the dangers, in every era since the collapse in Eden, of the fallen human heart. This is not just the pull of some people, but, in different ways and with different cunning strategies, the pull of all of us. This is precisely what the Apostle Paul is talking about when he wrote: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom. 12:2). This is not about contrasting a “Christian worldview” with a “secular worldview,” as though these were about contrasting ways of objectively weighing data. Paul wrote this in the context of not data but lived experience: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to the Lord, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1). Moreover, looking at the way that consciences—even professing “Christian” consciences—can adjust themselves to all sorts of atrocities and injustices—from slavery to lynching to Hitler’s Reich and on and on and on—do not mean that we should conclude that, therefore, this is just the “way things are.” To do so would be the same as to conclude that since, in every era, everyone is tempted to personal sin and since, also in every era, one can find Christian hypocrites, who hide their sin while saying the opposite, we should just give up on pursuing holiness because it’s a losing battle. God forbid. The Scripture tells us that the minute we think we have triumphed over sin that we “deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us” (1 Jn. 1:8). And yet, the Scripture also says, “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide you the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13). The same is true when it comes to freeing one’s conscience from its adjustment to whatever evil one’s culture or subculture calls “good” at the moment (or, even more likely, just doesn’t speak of, at all). That calls for more than just “knowing the issues.” That calls for what Berger wrote of in his day as a personal decision: This decision is for Jesus Christ, not for the religious institution,” he wrote. “Indeed, the decision for the religious institution can be a flight from the decision that is demanded. But perhaps a prior decision is called for—that is the decision to follow the truth wherever it may lead, to attempt at all times to be an authentic human being, to refuse easy consolations, and to risk the loneliness of saying ‘no!’ to that which is socially established.” But that hard path can bring freedom, and even, in the long run, peace. “If God is truth, he will not leave alone the one who passionately desires truth,” Berger wrote. “In the end, Christian truth and human integrity cannot be contradictory.” Good News: You Are Doomed Of late, Arthur Brooks, the polymath former president of the American Enterprise Institute, has been writing extensively about cognitive decline and getting ahead of one’s eventual and inevitable slide into a dimming of one’s gifts and talents and then death. What’s odd about all this is that Arthur Brooks is not all that old, hitting squarely in the center of what most people would call “middle age.” When I had a friend in his early fifties who was talking about retirement, I knew he was depressed (he was). But Brooks does not seem depressed. In fact, he seems positively cheery. As a matter of fact, he seems almost ebullient as he tells Millennials and Generation Z people to plan right now for their eventual collapse, which, he says, will come sooner than one thinks. This does not seem to be the reassuring content we need in the middle of a global pandemic, when our world’s leaders seem to be buffoons, and when the social fabric seems to be falling apart. But maybe it is. In The Atlantic, Brooks takes on the ideas of people like bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel who want to die in their early seventies, in order to keep from what they fear to be a debilitated quality of life later on. The problem with this, Brooks writes, is that such people are morbidly afraid of death, partly because they associate life with their abilities and “life’s work.” The way to get beyond all of that, Brooks argues, is not to deny death but to embrace its inevitability—and, before that, the coming irrelevance of one’s “legacy.” In this, Brooks quotes an old Japanese tale about samurai warriors who would raze villages and kill people wherever they went. When they came to a monastery, most of the monks fled for their lives, except for the old abbot. The samurai leader, brandishing his sword, said to the abbot, “Don’t you see that I am the sort of man who could run through you without batting an eye?” The monk replied, calmly, “Don’t you see that I am a man who could be run through without batting an eye?” For whatever reason, this parable—and Brooks’ happiness-through-pessimism thesis—made me think of Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown never won the attention of the little red-haired girl. He never got anything other than a rock in his Trick or Treat bag. And, of course, he never got to kick that football. That’s not his weakness, essayist Chuck Klosterman asserts, but his superpower. “Charlie Brown knows he’s doomed,” Klosterman writes. “He absolutely knows it. But a little part of his mind always suggests, ‘Maybe not this time, though.’ That glimmer of hope is his Achilles’ heel. It’s also the attribute that makes him so imminently relatable. The joke is not that Charlie Brown is hopeless. The joke is that Charlie Brown knows he’s hopeless, but he doesn’t trust the infallibility of his own insecurity. If he’s always wrong about everything, perhaps he’s wrong about this too.” So the key to the meaning of this character’s life is his pessimism about his pessimism? Good grief! Yes, literally, just that: good grief. Why is Jesus so relatively decaffeinated, when everyone around him seems almost always to be in a state of either panic or rage? Is this because he was “visualizing a peaceful future”? No. Jesus was, from the onset of his ministry, headed straight toward Jerusalem, toward the cross. When his disciples asked him not to speak of such things, he did anyway. He considered himself a crucifixion from the very beginning, and entrusted his life to his Father. You and I are joined to the life of Christ. That means that his life is our life; his death our death; his future our future. That’s why the New Testament spends so much time telling us to “reckon” ourselves dead to the world and alive unto God. That means that, as the Apostle Paul wrote to us: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Col. 3:2-4). That’s not just a legal accounting (although it is that), but a real and present and mysterious and ongoing union. You are joined to Jesus as a head to a body, as a branch to a vine. By the Spirit, his life is coursing through you, and you are enfolded in the plotline that is his life. That means that you can rest through tumult, and laugh through danger. But this is not because you are in denial of your reality. The Spirit also prompts us to “groan inwardly” as we see the wreckage of a broken cosmos all around us (Rom. 8:22-23). In fact, the Spirit helps us sometimes to cry out even in groanings too deep for words (Rom. 8:26). That sort of grieving isn’t the pessimism of the cynic, but the brokenheartedness of the crucified. It leads us not to give up, or to rage in primal scream, but to cry out “Abba, Father!” (Rom. 8:15). The answer isn’t numbness or cynicism or happy-talk but something far deeper. The sort of pessimism we need is not really that of Charlie Brown or the Zen Buddhists—caught up in a comic strip karmic cycle of continually falling as the football is ripped away. Instead what we need is the sort of pessimism that Walker Percy wrote about when he said there’s a difference between a “non-suicide” and an “ex-suicide.” The “ex-suicide,” he argued, has already come to terms with the darkness in his life, and has decided to live anyway, to see everything from that point onward as sheer gift. These are scary times, and they may get scarier yet. But I know this: if you are in Christ, the worst thing that can happen to you is not in your future but in your past. You have already lived through it. You were crucified, under the judgment of God, outside the gates of Jerusalem. And here you stand—united to the resurrected Christ. That means that no matter what happens to you—you cannot ultimately be hurt. That’s the sort of losing by which we win, the sort of gloom through which we hope. Good news: you’re doomed. Even better news: the worst years of your life are behind you. Best news of all: the best years of your life are seated at the right hand of God, and he’s feeling fine. A Miracle Turns Fifteen After years of miscarriage after miscarriage, the doctors told us Maria and me that we would never be able to have a child carried to term. We grieved over that, made peace with it, and went on a quest that ended up in a Russian courtroom, where we adopted our first two sons. And then, sometime in 2004, Maria told me she was pregnant. We actually grieved, knowing that we would be going through another awful miscarriage. In time, she showed signs of having had a miscarriage, and went to the doctor for a follow-up appointment. Doing the ultrasound, the doctor said, “Wait…what’s this? There’s a heartbeat here.” Even then, we grieved, thinking that the miscarriage was certain to happen, just hadn’t ended yet. But the months went by and by, and the heartbeats kept coming, until, somewhere around the eighth month, I started thinking he might actually be coming. And he did. We named him Samuel, for obvious reasons. “I am the woman who was standing here in your presence, praying to the Lord,” Hannah said to Eli. “For this child I prayed, and the Lord has granted me my petition that I made to him” (1 Sam. 1:26-27). We asked for him from the Lord and—after years of what we thought were delays—the Lord heard. If not for the delay, we would never have ended up with our oldest two sons. And, if not for the delay, I would have been an awful father to all of my five sons. I would have taken them for granted. I would have seen them as expected life milestones, rather than very fragile gifts. The answered prayer was not the only gift; the delay was too. Today Samuel Moore turns fifteen. I cannot adequately convey how much I love this kid, and how proud I am of him. This past year, he went with me when I had to speak in England and France, and we traveled all over the place together. As I watch Samuel today, it’s hard to believe—he’s fifteen. I think about how much happened in my own life, at that age, that reset the trajectory of my whole life. How, at fifteen, I learned to seek out a God who seemed hidden, to trust that even in the silences of eternity, I was heard by a Father who loved me. And I’m reminded of how—fifteen years ago—I learned that again. It makes me wonder how many other things in my life, that seem to be dead-ends and unanswered prayers, are really just the stirrings of a life I had forgotten that I had asked for, the stirrings of a life waiting to be born. Quote of the Moment: “The test of faith is consistency—not the fanatic consistency by which one repudiates the influence of knowledge, but rather a consistency between principle and behavior. A man’s behavior should be the creature of his principles, not the creature of his circumstances.” — Wendell Berry
Reader Notes and Questions: I’ve got a lot of great questions and notes from all of you, so much so that I’m going to start doing a separate newsletter to talk about them, starting this Thursday. First up will be questions about assurance of salvation, why I don’t watch movies with Jesus in them, and other really interesting topics. Look for that in your inbox. And be sure to send me your questions or comments; I love getting them. The Ranking: Favorite Books on Civil Rights Movement History 1. The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is , ed. Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck 2. Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait 3. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community 4. David L. Chappell, Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow 5. John M. Perkins, Let Justice Roll Down 6. Charles Marsh, The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South 7. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time Currently Reading Christopher Beha, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts: A Novel Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence: A Novel Karl Jaspers, Plato and Augustine Curt Thompson, The Soul of Shame: Retelling the Stories We Believe About Ourselves Loretta Lynn with Patsy Lynn Russell, Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust: My Friendship with Patsy Cline Currently Listening Wes King, “We Thought You’d Be Here” Cat Stevens, “Father and Son” Conway Twitty, “That’s My Job” Michael Card, “Nathan’s Song” Brad Paisley, “Letter to Me” Alison Krauss, “Baby Mine” Andrew Peterson, “Lay Me Down” The Carter Family, “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” Phil Vassar, “Don’t Miss Your Life” This week on the Russell Moore Podcast, I will post my address to the 2020 Just Gospel conference, “Community Is Not Enough: Tribalism, the Gospel, and the Freedom to Stand Alone.” We will look at sin and guilt and shame in Genesis 3, at Outlaw Country and how to reclaim your life on “The Cross & the Jukebox.” And, of course, every day, I will talk about books on Instagram on our “Reading in Exile” series. If there’s something you’d like to converse about, or if you just want to say “hey,” please email me here. If you have a friend who might like this, please forward it along, and if you’ve gotten this from a friend, please subscribe! Onward, Russell Moore |