Donald Trump winning the 2024 election has a lot of figures in Big Eva lamenting over the state of the country, but the most pretentious response goes to Russell Moore. After playing a significant role in liberalizing the Southern Baptist Convention, Moore is now the EIC of Christianity Today, a theologically liberal outlet. He wrote “How to Get Through the Next Four Years.”
The nonstop news cycle and drama won’t be some unforeseen circumstance. It’s what the American people voted for. The theory that people would want to “turn the page” on all that, offered by Vice President Kamala Harris, proved false. Turns out most people liked the drama just fine. So here we go.
If it was not obvious that Russell Moore was a Kamala Harris supporter, it should be by now. Russell Moore is clearly butthurt by Kamala Harris’s massive defeat, where she underperformed even Hillary Clinton. Russell Moore fantasizes about Kamala Harris offering Americans a professional and sedate brand of politics that she neither campaigned on nor was capable of delivering. At the end of the day, Americans will take the mean tweets because the ineptitude of the Biden Administration was too much.
I have very little to say that I haven’t already said, very little to write that I haven’t already written, and there are very few people who think like I do. I can’t control that. But neither can you. As a matter of fact, there is very little any of us can do to control the next four years—with a news cycle that will be, like the last near-decade, all Trump, all the time.
Russell Moore tacitly admits that he does not represent Evangelicals or a significant portion of the population. Russell Moore eventually dives into his broader point which is about Americans not taking politics seriously.
The passivity of Americans in their own civic order is always a problem. The word woke—before it became associated with identity politics—spoke to the sense of waking people from their slumber about injustice. The opposite of passivity, though, is often not responsibility or engagement. Sometimes it’s a kind of passivity that feels like “doing something.”
Moore pretends the word “woke” was suddenly coopted by politics when it was always a Cultural Marxist term of awakening.
The stakes are too high for us to see our country as a reality television show. You can’t opt out of the country, but you can opt out of the show. In some ways, you get there by subtraction. Don’t rely on social media for your news, for instance. Don’t fall into the trap of every-ten-minute hits of dopamine about how your side is losing something or winning something.
But maybe an even more important factor is not subtraction but addition. You are meant to have a life of drama and adventure and excitement. Politics—of the left, right, or center—can’t deliver it. News cycles can’t replicate it.
Russell Moore doesn’t make any serious suggestions in a “how-to” article. Rather, Moore argues that Christians should care but stop being informed on the latest current events. From there he just gives the reader basic truisms about the Christian life and what Christians do. It’s not particularly helpful, and would be considered a “Jesus juke” if Russell Moore knew who Jesus was.
Moore concludes “The news cycle will be crazy for the next four years. You don’t have to be.” Yet the opposite is true right now. Although big things are happening, the news cycle is more sane than it has been for America in a long time. Those who have not been lifelong Democrat operatives like Russell Moore understand this.
One Response
What Russel Moore fails to realize, as he talks about giving up ten minute sound bites on X, or other platforms. What Moore fails to realize, is the media has been propping up an establishment with lies for a very long time. For many of us, we began waking up to that after the fall out from the Iraq War. Then we saw TARP, then what happened with the ACA, the Tea party all the way to Russia Russia Russia. The American people, and Christians are tired of being lied to and expecfted to vote party lines. That’s what this election was about for a lot of us.
The disengagement with society that Moore preaches, is no different than the isolationist policies toward the world before WWI and WWII drew us into them, except this is our nation, we ought to be interested and care what they are doing.