Cultivating Freedom Through Attention in Contemporary Faith

In this episode, Russell Moore, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, joins Mark Labberton to discuss the seismic political, moral, cultural, and spiritual crises facing American evangelicalism and how to respond.

Reflecting on his own journey from the Southern Baptist Convention to his current role, Moore offers a candid and theologically rich diagnosis of a movement he describes as simultaneously fragmented, bored, and longing for renewal.

Drawing parallels to historical awakenings and moments of global upheaval, Moore challenges listeners to consider what faithful Christian witness looks like in a time of digital saturation, political idolatry, and ecclesial disillusionment. Together, they wrestle with how evangelical institutions can resist becoming co-opted by market forces or ideologies, and instead return to the soul of the gospel—Jesus himself.

Episode Highlights

“We simply want Jesus as revealed in scripture.” (Russell Moore)

“The good news is so clouded with distorted noise.” (Mark Labberton)

“You mistakenly think that the solution has to be at the same scale as the problem.” (Wendall Berry, cited by Russell Moore)

“Every person has to have an act of willful excommunication.” (Nicholas Carr, cited by Russell Moore)

“Christian Nationalism is like ‘Bizarro Evangelicalism’ … i f you can get external conformity, then you have righteousness.” (Russell Moore)

Karl Barth on Christian disillusionment during World War I: “We  we want to preach the gospel as though nothing has happened.” … “ He's saying the church is being co-opted and used by forces alien to it. And there have to be people who are free from that to actually appeal to the genuine gospel and to remind people that God is God.”

About Russell Moore

Russell Moore is Editor in Chief of Christianity Today and is the author of Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (Penguin Random House).

The Wall Street Journal has called Moore “vigorous, cheerful, and fiercely articulate.” He was named in 2017 to Politico Magazine’s list of top fifty influence-makers in Washington, and has been profiled by such publications as the New York Times, the Washington Post, TIME Magazine, **and the New Yorker.

An ordained Baptist minister, Moore served previously as President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and, before that, as the chief academic officer and dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he also taught theology and ethics.

Moore was a Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and currently serves on the board of the Becket Law and as a Senior Fellow with the Trinity Forum in Washington, D.C.

He also hosts the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show and is co-host of Christianity Today’s weekly news and analysis podcast, The Bulletin.

Russell was President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention from 2013 to 2021. Prior to that role, Moore served as provost and dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he also taught theology and ethics.

A native Mississippian, he and his wife Maria are the parents of five sons. They live in Nashville, where he teaches the Bible regularly at their congregation, Immanuel Church.

Show Notes

• Comparing Christianity Today and Fuller Theological Seminary
• Religious reconsiderations post-World War II
• “My grandfather was blown out of a tank by the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge and came back. He went an unbeliever, came back really feeling his mortality and, and searching for answers. And ended up at a revival meeting where he came to know Christ.”
• A false choice presented to Christians: “You had this false choice being presented to Christians … you either go with an ever narrowing, ever quarrelsome sort of group of fundamentalists or you liberalize.”
• Billy Graham and Martin Luther King, Jr.
• The recent history of Evangelical Christianity
• A Movement in Crisis: What is the state of Evangelicalism in America?
• Revival preachers and entrepreneurialism: a religious, market-driven reality
• “Lifelessness and deadness”
• “ I can't think of a single church that has split over Christology. Most of the arguments have to do with politics and, and related sort of cultural issues because that's what people really care about and what they really think often is important.”
• Tumult of the digital economy
• Alienation, dehumanization: “We can simultaneously think of ourselves as gods and as sets of data and algorithms.”
• Speed of change and life
• Teaching ethics: a final exam question students have never thought about
• How to prepare people for ethical problems and real-life challenges
• Mental health crisis: “high rates of depression and anxiety driven by a piece of glass that everybody carries in his or her pocket that can connect that person with all of the information in the entire world.”
• 100 years since the invention and use of the microphone
• No microphones, but extraordinary voices
• “The dials are askew, because the sound that evangelicalism is evoking in so many quadrants is a sound that is hostile and grading and brash and arrogant.”
• “The good news is so clouded with distorted noise.”
• Secularization
• How Evangelicalism appeals to people: End Times Prophecy, Marriage and Family Values, and Shocking Attention-Grabbing
• “Real life takes on the characteristics of the internet.”
• Wendall Berry: “You mistakenly think that the solution has to be at the same scale as the problem.”
• Can you give us some hope?
• “Hope that is seen is not hope. Instead, there's suffering that creates endurance. Endurance that creates character, character that creates hope, and hope does not put to shame.”
• Ezekiel and the valley of the dry bones
• What is the work of Christianity Today right now?
• Redefining who is “us.” Who is the “we” of Evangelicalism?
• “We simply want Jesus as revealed in scripture.”
• 2 Corinthians 4: “The glory of God reflected in the face of Jesus Christ.”
• Karl Barth and disillusionment during World War I: “We  we want to preach the gospel as though nothing has happened.” … “ He's saying the church is being co-opted and used by forces alien to it. And there have to be people who are free from that to actually appeal to the genuine gospel and to remind people that God is God.”
• How to cultivate freedom
• “One of the major challenges to a freedom is loss of attention.”
• “I have to be free from the constant whirl—and what he meant at the time was the radio, you know, which is nothing compared to what we have—because my attention is necessary for me to be able to serve and to give.”
• “Kingdom of God is like yeast.” Waiting, attention, and a longer view of time
• “How do you then hold onto this freedom that we're describing in a way of connected disconnectedness or disconnected connectedness or something?”
• Nicholas Carr: “Every person has to have an act of willful excommunication.”
• Revelation and the Book of Daniel: “Seal all this up for now. … Don’t worry about it.”
• Nebuchadnezzar demanding  that. Shadrach, Mishak, and Abednego bow down and worship the golden statue.
• Evangelical Pastors: Preaching the Bible versus advocating a political vision
• Galatians 1 and 2—Paul’s not yielding to false teachers in order to preserve the Gospel
• New Apostolic Reformation
• Christian Nationalism: “Bizarro Evangelicalism … i f you can get external conformity, then you have righteousness.”
• “Blood mysticism”
• Jonathan Rauch’s Cross Purposes
• Keeping guard up in conversations with disagreement
• “Simply asking for Christians to be who we say we are.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.