LOSING OUR RELIGION: AN ALTAR CALL for EVANGELICAL AMERICA (audiobook) by Russell Moore

 

Published in 2023 by Penguin Audio in July of 2023.
Read by the author, Russell Moore.
Duration: 6 hours, 46 minutes.
Unabridged.

Russell Moore is currently a theologian for the magazine Christianity Today, but he is more famous for being one of the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) for the last 20 years - both as a professor and at the national level. He's also a prolific author and very media friendly. In many ways, Moore was the perfect media face for the Southern Baptist Convention - smart, likable, pleasant and often funny.

But, he butted heads on a variety of topics with the rest of the leadership. He was against gay conversion therapy and he wanted the SBC to listen to women who accused men in church leadership of sexual abuse. He especially wanted Southern Baptists to talk about racism and its complicity in upholding Jim Crow laws and distance themselves from Confederate symbols like the flag. 

The biggest thing they disagreed about and the thing that really pushed him out started in the summer of 2015 - Donald Trump. He could not bring himself to support a man who was so clearly not in sync with the values of Evangelical Christians. Evangelicals could live with all of the other points of disagreement over religious doctrine, but they could not live with disagreement over a political figure.

People who are familiar the 80s/90s band REM know the song "Losing My Religion." The title comes from a Southern phrase that means someone got so exasperated that they forgot their religious training and did the wrong thing. He uses that as a launching point to discussing the difference between religion and faith. This is a discussion that I appreciate as I have come to a new understanding of the relationship between my formal religion and my Christian faith in my own way in the last few years. 

The title works in two ways. Moore is discussing how he has dropped his formal ties to the Southern Baptist Convention, but he is also talking to how so many of its Evangelicals (and cultural Evangelicals who very rarely go to church but who are fighting the culture wars in its name every day) have moved away from the principles of their faith as part of a trade for political power.

I thought this was a thoughtful and serious discussion, but there was a bit in the middle that just lost my interest. It got a little too far into the Evangelical weeds for me. It came back and closed in a very strong way, but it means that I am rating it 4 stars out of 5. 

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: LOSING OUR RELIGION: AN ALTAR CALL for EVANGELICAL AMERICA by Russell Moore.