“Religion Is Responsibility, Or It Is Nothing At All”

"That’s me in the spotlight, losing my religion…”

Moore said that, at its heart, this weariness comes from trying to reconcile the Bible's instructions for how to behave with the former president's allegedly criminal activities, not to mention his long history of alleged sexual harassment and infidelity. 

"I’m hearing every day from evangelical Christians who are exhausted and almost in despair over the state of American Christianity," he told the publication. "They know something has gone terribly wrong but they are losing hope that anything could be different." 

Moore went on to add that he believes "Trump to be a unique threat, both to American institutions and to the church’s witness." 

Moore is also publishing a new book called "Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America" that examines Trump's role in reshaping evangelical morality, which he believes has been detrimental to the faith. 

"While the witness of the church before a watching world is diminished beyond recognition, congregations are torn apart over Donald Trump, Christian nationalism, racial injustice, sexual predation, disgraced leaders, and covered-up scandals," reads the book's description. "Left behind are millions of believers who counted on the church to be a place of belonging and hope."

I’m usually sympathetic to people who lose their congregation to cranks and bullies. The two churches I served in my brief but unspectacular pastoral career are both gone now. One shuttered entirely, the other gave way to an entirely new congregation in the same denomination. Partly that was due to me: losing a pastor tends to open wounds, not heal them. Mostly the situations were due to fights and fissures present long before I got there.

But to cringe and cry that you counted on the church “to be a place of belonging and hope”? And what did you do to make that possible? Show up every Sunday? Smile? Dress nicely? I still sympathize with people I knew who weren’t there to fight the bullies. And why should they? Church is a volunteer organization, and fighting for what you think is right is what the bullies were doing, aside from being the antithesis of Christianity. Fighting, I mean, like the bullies did. But “religion is responsiblity, or it is nothing at all.” If the church is going to be a place of belonging and hope, you have to make it one.

Dr. Moore puts it in terms of the church against the world. Well, the bullies are the world; you have an obligation to assert the interests of the church against the bullies. Jesus gave you the method in Matthew: confront them privately; if that doesn’t work, confront them with a few others; if that fails, confront them before the congregation. And if the community rejects what you think is the message of Christ, knock the dust of that place off your feet and move on.

Yes, that sounds like a recipe for self-righteousness; but you do this with humility. Every bully I ever encountered in church did it with self-righteousness and arrogance. I tried to counter them with humility, and I freely admit I wasn’t humble enough. I couldn’t win anyway, and I did move on. Not happily, and not assured of the rightness of my cause. In the end, I was right; but it’s not a price I paid willingly, or would want to pay again.

But if you want a place of belonging and hope, you have to make it one.