Russell Moore is at it again — this time calling fellow evangelicals to account for their gallows humor about immigrants.
In his latest Christianity Today newsletter, the former Southern Baptist ethics leader chides evangelicals for excusing their inhumanity toward immigrants by claiming they’re “just joking.” It not funny, he says.
“There’s a kind of moral laundering that can enable us to imagine it’s all Venezuelan gang members in these detention camps, rather than the 4-year-old we taught to memorize John 3:16 at vacation Bible school this summer,” he writes.
Russell Moore
“Just for a moment, let’s forget the policy disputes — how many people should be allowed in and how. Suppose you want zero immigration to the United States or wherever you live. Suppose you can make the case that the Bible’s command to care for the sojourner doesn’t apply. Suppose, even, that you set aside what happens to these vulnerable people — some of whom, in the case of the Haitians and others, have every reason to believe gang violence will now kill them. Even if you are OK with all that, why would you ever find it entertaining?”
He cites the Trump administration’s efforts to post social media memes making fun of immigrants and even now creating a video game on the White House website where players can chase and imprison immigrants. And he writes of the absurdity of Vice President JD Vance’s false claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs.
The Trump administration has tapped into a segment of the MAGA universe that “doesn’t need any conscience soothing,” he sats. “For these people, the fact that most people would be shocked by a country with our history posting images of Black men shackled in chains is exactly what makes those posts funny — like the edgy stage comic who ‘goes there’ with something that makes half the crowd wince.”
Then he gives a warning: “What we learn to laugh at disciples us. It trains our consciences to enjoy and not to recoil from what once would have shocked us. A lie becomes a joke which becomes a meme which becomes a game which becomes just the way things are. When cruelty and degradation are funny, something has happened to us. Something breaks, something not easily bound back up. We can laugh our way to hell.”
Moore used to be a go-to leader in the Southern Baptist Convention. He fell out of favor in 2016, though, when he said Donald Trump was morally unfit to hold the office of president. Then he fell more out of favor when he took the side of clergy sexual abuse victims who said the SBC needed to reform its ways.
That led to his 2021 resignation as president of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which landed him at Christianity Today as editor in chief. More recently, he stepped aside to become editor at large as the venerable evangelical magazine took a sharper turn to the right.
Now, Moore warns that “Trump-Era Laughter at Immigrant Suffering Is Deforming Our Souls.”
Over on X, where conservatives speak freely, Moore’s latest column has drawn both praise and damnation. Among the critiques:
- “Russell Moore engages in selective outrage, and dresses it up as ‘Christianity’ when it’s just standard leftism. He might as well be James Talarico.”
- “Dirtbag democrat false convert Russell Moore is once again attacking patriots — notice he never says one thing critical about democrats.”