Losing Our Religion
An Altar Call for Evangelical America
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発行者による作品情報
Former Southern Baptist pastor and Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore calls for repentance and renewal in American evangelicalism
American evangelical Christianity has lost its way. While the witness of the church before a watching world is diminished beyond recognition, congregations are torn apart over Donald Trump, Christian nationalism, racial injustice, sexual predation, disgraced leaders, and covered-up scandals. Left behind are millions of believers who counted on the church to be a place of belonging and hope. As greater and greater numbers of younger Americans bleed out from the church, even the most rooted evangelicals are wondering, “Can American Christianity survive?”
In Losing Our Religion, Russell Moore calls his fellow evangelical Christians to conversion over culture wars, to truth over tribalism, to the gospel over politics, to integrity over influence, and to renewal over nostalgia. With both prophetic honesty and pastoral love, Moore offers a word of counsel for how a new generation of disillusioned and exhausted believers can find a path forward after the crisis and confusion of the last several years. Believing the gospel is too important to leave it to hucksters and grifters, he shows how a Christian can avoid both cynicism and complicity in order to imagine a different, hopeful vision for the church.
The altar call of the old evangelical revivals was both a call to repentance and the offer of a new start. In the same way, this book invites unmoored and discouraged Christians to step out into an uncertain future, first by letting go of the kind of cultural, politicized, status quo Christianity that led us to this moment of reckoning. Only when we see how lost we are, we can find our way again. Only when we bury what’s dead can we experience life again. Only when we lose our religion can we be amazed by grace again.
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Moore (Onward), editor in chief of Christianity Today, calls on American evangelicals to "come to Jesus" by abandoning a cultural identity built on nationalism, racism, misogyny, and far-right politics. Formerly the president of the Southern Baptist Convention's public policy agency, Moore was chastised by other leaders for refusing to endorse Donald Trump in 2016 and speaking out about the sexual abuse crisis that rocked the denomination in 2019. Those experiences ultimately led to his own "reverse altar call" when he left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2021. Moore still identifies as "an evangelical after all," and calls for the evangelical movement's renewal, highlighting positive aspects of its deeply individualized sense of faith, or the notion "not only that... ‘Christ died for humanity,' but Jesus loves me; Jesus died for me." He refrains from offering a roadmap for reform, writing that the "frantic desire" to find a quick fix—"a movement, a curriculum, a funding strategy"—distracts. Instead, he views "genuine renewal" as a process that proceeds "soul by soul," and must begin with naming "what we have lost—our credibility, our authority, our identity, our stability" if "we are ever to find again." Moore's wake-up call takes clear-sighted stock of the state of evangelical Christianity while retaining measured hope for the future. This will buoy disillusioned hearts and minds.
