Russell Moore and the Fear of Defending One's People
Regimevangelicalism: the practice of employing the rhetoric, phraseology, and themes of the Christian religion in the service of the Regime’s political worldview.
Among the parties that benefit from the benching of Tucker Carlson are those who represent the ideology of the American Regime. This includes of course the media and commentary classes who, depending on the constituency they are tasked with communicating to, justify the American Ideology in the relevant framing.
For Russel Moore, a Regimevangelical extraordinaire, this means employing the rhetoric, phraseology, and themes of the Christian religion in the service of the Regime’s political worldview.
Moore used the occasion of Tucker’s cancellation to address one issue among several that his constituency is absolutely not allowed to disagree with him about: the moral imperative of accepting a multicultural, multi-ethnic society.
Before I really get started with his recent article for Christianity Today, we should note that the racial question is a peculiarly American dilemma in a more difficult way than in England and other countries of the West. The myths that constitute the postwar American nation are universalistic, abstract, and propositional in a way that most Americans have never been taught to question or think about critically. Well, here we sit in a demographic political crisis that is really forcing people to talk about it. Though uncomfortable, difficult, and emotionally-charged, the stakes have never been higher. Mediums of Regime ideology like Russell Moore have the upper hand.
Moore’s thesis is that American Christians should stop worrying about “The Great Replacement” as a referent to the collapse of European-sourced ethnic majorities in American and start worrying about the replacement of Evangelical Christians with a generation of those who don’t affiliate with any religion.
Who does he blame for this development? Shockingly, he blames those who are “sorting themselves into the wrong ‘us.’” That is, he appears, in textbook Regimevangelical polemic, to blame those who see themselves as casualties in a political-demographic revolution, for the secularization of the American people. What is so shocking about this, of course, is that there has been few voices louder than Moore’s in fighting for the secularization of American political institutions.
He writes the following
Every blood-and-soil form of fear-based identity politics thrives on defining us in terms of visceral categories like race, tribe, or nationality. This assumes a blatantly social Darwinian view of what human communities are or can be.
Speaking of fear based politics, Moore spent the opening lines of his piece associating Tucker’s reporting on ethnic trends with anti-Semitism, the Unite the Right incident in Charlottesville, and the promotion of “extreme voices” on Tucker’s show (no clue who he’s referring to).
Naturally, anyone well-versed in over a thousand years of Christian political theology in the West is going to chuckle at the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther, and all the others as having social Darwinist views of human communities; allegedly on the basis that they employ “visceral” (the realm of instinct and sentiment) categories in their approach to political problems. Imagine lecturing Edmund Burke, the spirit of traditional conservatism embodied, that his visceral defense of the British custom over against the ideological revolutions was Darwinist.
Let me be clear: there is absolutely nothing Darwinist about operating on your intuition and thinking politically in terms of what is good for you, your neighbor, and those to whom you belong. Or, in the words of that Super Darwinist C.S. Lewis:
I think love for one’s country means chiefly love for people who have a good deal in common with oneself (language, clothes, institutions) and in that is very like love of one’s family...or like love (in a strange place) for anyone who once lived in one’s home town.
But the crux of Moore’s article is in how it employs the standard, fake-pietist, modernist, Evangelicalism of the American milieu:
If “Christianity” for you is white and American, then it is not only out of step with the Bible; it is also precisely the kind of religion that almost every chapter of the New Testament explicitly repudiates as carnal and pagan.
I really want the reader to digest my argument here, because it applies to how the Evangelical leadership (and most American evangelicals that Moore loves to throw under the bus) thinks about the majority of political issues.
Here is the argument: The Regimevangelical strategy is to take categories of the Civil Kingdom and combat them with categories of the Spiritual Kingdom in order to participate in the undoing of older American political and cultural themes.
Whereas John Calvin was emphatic that “The spiritual kingdom of Christ and civil government are things very widely separated,” the evangelical confuses them, and obfuscates the lines in an attempt to use spiritual categories to distort civil priorities. There is a very long history of this in American evangelicalism.
Moore argues that “If the church is just another way for humans to protect their gene pools, then Jesus was a fraud from his first sermon onward (Luke 4:25–27).” Now that you have read the argument above, you know how to deal with this: Moore is arguing against some made-up boogyman that is teaching that the church is a means to protect a gene-pool. I wonder if this is fear-based polemics?
It’s easy to wonder what in the world Moore is talking about, until you realize his function within the Narrative Dissemination objectives of the American Regime. He is using the supra-ethnic character of the church to combat those who find relevance in ethnicity or culture as it relates to the civil kingdom. Call it a bait and switch. The plain fact of the matter is that Moore and others of his Evangelical ilk are not in line with the Magisterial Reformers or Luther in keeping separate God’s two kingdoms.
The Great Replacement is a means toward the transformation of American society culturally and sociologically. Moore refuses to recognize that man does live in two kingdoms and he has duties in each of these kingdoms. It is good for man to prioritize his heavenly destination, but it is wrong to neglect the natural one. It is good for man to fulfill his obligations toward his family, and by extension, his kin, his nation. To protect them, to honor his ancestors and to participate in communicating their desires and wisdom down to posterity. These are things that are required of a man and they have political and cultural relevance.
Moore ends by noting that the great replacement theory is bad for democracy, revealing that despite his pietist rhetoric about not being concerned about earthly things, he does care about the American ideology. This is one of the most important aspects of the Regime’s use of Christianity: it is to be used as a bludgeon against the political interests of the right, and as a justification for the ideological and narrative interests of the present political order.
Christianity is about eternal things when temporal concerns are expressed through traditionalist or Right Wing lens; and Christianity has relevance to temporal things when the temporal things are expressed through liberal or Left Wing lens.
Such is the nature of Regime propaganda and the Regimevangelicals that reinforce it.
Chesterton said once, I think, that the man who "loves mankind" also hates his neighbors. Moore wants a universal love, but will slander anyone who dares show genuine love to real people who live next door. It's a convenient theology for a cosmopolitan who loves to travel and speak.