By Jeff Brumley
Russell Moore has been making the rounds of national media outlets, telling his secular interviewers of the collapse of the Bible Belt and how it is bad for America but good for the church.
Moore, president of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, made a splash with those comments in an Aug. 16 Wall Street Journal article in which he said “we are no longer the moral majority. We are a prophetic minority.”
The article does not say if he is referring to the SBC, to a wider conservative Christian movement or to American Christianity as a whole.
But the topic arose again in an NPR interview aired Wednesday in which Russell explained to host Jeremy Hobson that Christianity is, at last, separating itself from the culture.
He told Hobson, “It’s very good for a church to live up to what the Bible has called us to be all along, which is a counter-cultural reality that points to the kingdom of God, not just the values around us.”
The downside, Moore added, is that Bible Belt values “held some bad things back” in the society — “just in the sense of family stability, the sense of encouraging some good, moral standards in some ways.”
Moore conceded that conservative Christians can no longer assume societal and political support for their view of marriage. But the church must continue to push for the one-man, one-woman definition because it provides stability to families.
But no longer being the majority voice, Moore added, means recognizing they must “speak prophetically” to the culture inside and outside the church.