SOLA Social Media Manager Aaron Lee spoke with Russell Moore, an evangelical writer, preacher and President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
Watch their conversation on IGTV or YouTube. Listen on Spotify or Podcasts. Below are transcribed excerpts of their conversation, lightly edited for easier reading.
Aaron Lee: In a recent interview with Collin Hansen from The Gospel Coalition, you said you spend a lot of time talking to young people who love Jesus. They’re about to walk away [from their faith], and you want to tell them, “Jesus is worth following. Don’t confuse Jesus with whatever you have seen or experienced around you who claim the name of Jesus.” I work in youth ministry. Can you give some advice to those who do work with the youth, maybe even on a weekly basis, and how we can help with that cynicism?
Russell Moore: I started in youth ministry, and some of the happiest years of my life were as a youth pastor. They also were formative for everything else. If you learn how to do youth ministry, you could do everything else because it’s the same reality. People don’t change as they get older in those respects. So I often tell people it’s the same stuff I was dealing with. Who’s mad at who because he’s sitting next to so and so, whose parents are upset about somebody’s form not getting notarized… The issues change, but it’s the same psychological and spiritual dynamics at work.
I have this conversation at least once a day with someone who is in a state of deep spiritual crisis. It’s not about the cognitive content of Christianity. I do sometimes, but I don’t deal a lot with people who are saying, “I can’t believe that the resurrection happened” or “[I can’t believe] the virgin birth happened” or something like that. It’s usually people who have seen things within the church or within so-called Christianity, that causes this. And I really resonate with that, because that was the situation I was in when I was 15.
And thankfully, even though he was dead, C. S. Lewis was able to walk me through that through his writings. So that’s the major burden I have in my life. If there’s one thing that I want to do, it’s that.
For those 15-year-old kids, and whether they’re 15, or 65, or 35, or 20, they are in that same situation I was in at 15. We were watching and thinking, “Well, does this mean that Christianity is not true? Or that Christianity is not for me?”
So if somebody rejects Jesus because they hear Jesus and they understand what it is that he’s calling them to, and [then] they say, “I don’t want to pay that cost,” Okay, I’m not happy about that. But it’s an even worse tragedy when somebody never actually hears what Jesus is calling or they don’t believe that Jesus is calling them because they’ve seen some representation of Jesus that isn’t true.
Aaron Lee: In that same interview, you mentioned that Bible quoting — not Bible reading and Bible shaping — could be a problem. How would you recommend those of us who are online and especially the youth who do spend time online, to combat that problem?
Russell Moore: I was quoting from a little book that came out, I think it was last year, called A Concise Guide to the New Testament. That first chapter is where he talked about the difference between Bible quoting and Bible reading. As soon as I read that, I said, “That is exactly what I see happening all the time.”
[It’s] where people think they know the Bible. It differs tribe by tribe, and so there are some people who know life principles, and they know where to go in the Bible to find those and [so] they think they know the Bible. Other people know systematic theology, but really what they know is a kind of systematic theology in terms of answering controversies that they’re interested in — Calvinism, Arminianism, or egalitarianism, complementarianism, whatever. But that’s very different from actually reading the Bible and being in the world of the Bible.
What reading does is it takes your attention out of even the act of reading and you become absorbed into it. That becomes really hard when there are constant distractions. Also, there’s a kind of reading that you can learn from reading online, which is good. But you can learn a kind of reading there, which is skimming for major points. That’s helpful if you’re just reading an article to see, “Do I care about this?” But it doesn’t work well with reading the Bible. And so just give yourself the practice and habit of reading the Bible.
There’s a friend of mine, Jonathan Rogers, who teaches writing, and he puts out this great weekly newsletter on writing called “The Habit.” He was talking about his friend Andy who had another friend in the hospital with encephalitis. When Andy and his friend [usually] met, they would always do this sort of clap, snap, and high five. But the friend, when he had this medical situation, he couldn’t remember anything. He couldn’t remember where he was or anything.
But when Andy visited him in the hospital room and got up to go to the restroom, the friend just out of instinct, high fived him, snapped, and clapped. And Johnathan was telling Andy’s story to make the point: There’s so much of our lives that come about through that kind of habit where it’s not that you’re thinking, “I’m learning this, so that I will be able to do ‘whatever’.” It’s the habits that you’re building in.
So most of what is changing you and [how you are] reading the Bible are things you don’t know are changing you. You don’t know that you need them. And maybe you don’t need them now, but you will later on.
Aaron Lee: You wrote on January 20: Inauguration Day in a Time of Crisis. You said that we need to watch the way we pray and that watching how we pray can tell us what we really think or feel about a situation. How can we pray for these types of political things that you often speak about when they seem so large and far away from our nitty-gritty, day-to-day lives?
Russell Moore: Well, often they are far away. What you have to do is to ask, “Where are my specific vulnerabilities?” and shore that up in terms of the way that you pray. So if you’re the sort of person who’s given to political idolatry, then you probably need to spend much less time praying about those things and move on to praying about your life and your immediate context. And if you’re the kind of person who is more vulnerable on the other side, to apathy, to giving more attention and time to pray.
Jesus tells us specifically to pray for your enemies. I don’t think that political leaders are enemies, at least in our context. But if we’re to pray for enemies, we certainly are to pray for those who disagree with us.
So what I recommended [in the article] is if you’re the kind of person who is a supporter of President Biden, maybe focus your prayers on your ability to see where President Biden might be wrong and to be willing to stand on that. If you’re somebody who’s an opponent of President Biden — you don’t like him, you didn’t vote for him — then you spend your time praying more for President Biden to be successful in every good thing and to have wisdom and discernment.
Sometimes, and this happens wherever somebody is politically, there’s almost a disappointment if the person does the right thing. There was a situation where I was working with somebody who was actually changing his mind on an issue that really mattered. And someone else in the coalition said, “Oh, well, we don’t want that to happen, because he’s one of our opponents.” If God changes his mind then he’s one of our allies! But that’s not the way that the thinking went, and that’s not the way that the thinking often goes in American life. It’s not just with the big Presidential level; that’s often the case just in interpersonal relationships.
Aaron Lee: You take reader questions in your newsletter. A recent reader question was What to Do with a Family Split Apart Over Politics? Do you think politics will continue to impact our lives in this way where it’s so divisive, like this? And also for you personally? How do you keep going and being motivated to work in this climate?
Russell Moore: Well, I think that I don’t pay a lot of attention to the climate. I’m aware of the climate and trying to speak into the climate. But I’m trying to be in it a little bit, but not of it. I think that takes almost a willingness to go in and then come out, which is what Jesus teaches us to do by example. He engages, withdraws, engages, withdraws. I think that’s an important principle.
I do think that it’s going to continue to be divisive for a couple of reasons. One, it’s been made a religion/spectator sport. So people when they’re dealing with politics, they aren’t really talking about politics. It’s not, “Here a set of issues that I believe in.” It’s instead, “This is my identity as part of this hive.” Even more than that is, “This is my identity as not part of that hive.” So there’s what Paul called an “an unhealthy craving for controversy” [1 Tim. 6:4] behind that.
If it’s not politics, it’ll move to something else, but the same dynamic will be there because you’ve got a perfect storm of a loss of religious identity combined with social media. People feel like they have to commit themselves wholeheartedly to personalities or to tribes in such a way that they’re then committed to that. It becomes this video game.
I think that’s going to be the case for a while, but I’m hopeful that there’s a limit to it because it’s ultimately exhausting. It’s not a happy life for someone. So there comes an exhaustion point, and the question is: What happens after the exhaustion?
I’ve seen that in the lives of a lot of people. I’ve seen some people that were my students years ago and I thought, “These guys are never going to make it in ministry because they’re always trying to be in the middle of some controversy.” Some of those people did end up becoming that kind of person, but most of them matured out of it, and you would never know that that was the case.
Aaron Lee: You spoke on mob mentality, and that was the main meat of your most recent newsletter, “Walk Away from the Mob.” You wrote that “sometimes the mob to which one is drawn is a social media hive, or a school yard of bullies, tormenting a student who doesn’t fit in there. Sometimes it can be a religious body, seeking to shame a victim of abuse or two signs when he speaks for her.” But I do want to speak about that social media hive, which you mentioned earlier. How do you see that impacting Christian churches and ministries on the internet? And what should we do, therefore, to work against that? If we can at all?
Russell Moore: Part of it is to model something else. That’s important. You don’t have to be in the middle of every controversy. And actually, it’s the same advice that I give to people who are thinking whether they should run for public office: The people who least want to be in public office should be those who are doing it, and the people who really want to be in public office should be the people who don’t. I think it’s healthier that way.
The same thing is the case when it comes to controversy. The people who engage in controversy have to be the people who don’t love controversy. In the same way, you want a general leading you into war who doesn’t love war. That’s part of it, and just modeling that.
I talk to pastors all the time and other ministry leaders. As one pastor said to me, “I look at what my people post on Facebook, and I think I’m a failure.” And I said, “Well, no, you’re not a failure. You just are able to see sort of all this stuff in a way that you wouldn’t have been able to see it in some other generation of the church.” But also to say, you really can’t change that immediately. That’s something that’s got to change over a long period of time of sanctification. People [need to] know that they can step away from some aspects of social media or even just choose a form of social media that doesn’t appeal to their worst aspects.
For instance, Twitter is depressing to me. I don’t read things about me on Twitter, but it’s depressing just because I see people acting in ways that I don’t really want to know. It’s more helpful for me to love them if I don’t see that part of them. But Instagram is not a problem for me. It is a problem for some people. If some people have that as their vulnerability (they tend to get envious), then maybe you shouldn’t be on Instagram. Maybe you should be on Twitter instead. So you just have to know where your weak points are.