The target demographic for this book is those that are, like Moore, in the culture of theological conservative evangelicalism that tends to also be politically conservative. I have some overlap, and my take is: if you fit in this group, I highly recommend it. Moore calls Christians to live biblically, and follow Jesus in valuing eternal kingdom over present power and showing kindness and
demonstrating the dignity of every human life. "The arc of history is long, but it bends to Jesus."
"...the biggest problem is not that we lost the culture war; it's that we never really had one....If the Bible Belt had held a truly 'radical' sort of religious vitality, we ought to see regions with higher church attendances strikingly out-of-step with the rest of the country when it comes to marital harmony, divorce rates, sexual mores, domestic violence, and so on. We're not the cultural warriors we think we are, unless we're fighting for the other side" (18).
"Every genuine culture war starts with friendly fire...A renewal of cultural witness starts where is started in Nazareth, a reconsideration of who we are."
"A study by one of research group suggested--to much press fanfare-- that a new 'progressive majority' is the face of American religious life. Religious progressives will soon outnumber religious conservatives, and this new 'moral majority' will be a liberal one, the interpretation went. My first question was, 'What is a progressive in this story line?' After all, William Jennings Bryan, the anti-Darwinist of Scopes trial infamy, was a progressive. But so was the biblical inerrantist Calvinist Charles Haddon Spurgeon" (20).
"The church is the embassy of the coming kingdom, not the fullness of that kingdom. Our mission is defined in terms of a gospel appeal to reconciliation now, not in the subjugation of our foes. That's why Jesus read the portion of the scroll about the year of God's favor, but did not read the wording immediately following, about the 'day of the vengeance of our God' (Isa. 61:2). There is a day of judgment, but the church warns of this judgment; the church does not carry it out (1 Cor. 5:12). That's because this time-between-the-times is defined by gospel invitation. As long as it is 'today' it is the 'day of salvation' (2 Cor. 6:2). The gospel itself gives us a vision of the kingdom in which the swords of the Spirit and of the state are keeps separate until the King himself appears to end this suspension of judgment and to make the nations his footstool" (66).
"The kingdom's advance is set in motion by the Galilean march out of the graveyard. We should then be the last people on earth to skulk back in fear or apathy. And we ought to be the last people on earth to uncritically laud any political leader or movement as though this were what we've been waiting for. We need leaders and allies, but we do not need a Messiah. That job is filled, and he's feeling fine. We are neither irrationally exuberant, nor fearfully isolated. We recognize that from Golgotha to Armageddon, there will be tumult--in our cultures, in our communities, and in our own psyches We groan against this, and work to hold back the consequences of the curse. But we do not despair, as those who are the losers in history might. We are the future kings and queens of the universe" (67).
"My denomination was founded back in the nineteenth century by those who advocated for human slavery, and who sought to keep their consciences and their ballots and their wallets away from a transcendent word that would speak against the sinful injustice of a regime of kidnapping, rape, and human beings wickedly deigning to buy and sell other human beings created in the image of God. Slavery, they argued (to their shame), was a 'political' issue that ought not distract the church from its mission: evangelism and discipleship. What such a move empowered was not just social injustice (which would have been bad enough), but also personal sin. When so-called 'simple gospel-peraching' churches in 1856 Alabama or 1925 Mississippi calls sinners to to repentance for fornicating and gambling but not for slaveholding or lynching, those churches may be many things but they are hardly non-political. By not addressing these issues, they are addressing them, by implicitly stating that they are not worthy of the moral scrutiny of the church, that they will not be items of report at the Judgment Seat of Christ. These churches, thus, bless the status quo...
"The truth is, the call to repentance is a necessary word in order to interrupt our headlong rush toward the way that seems right in our own eyes, a way that leads to death. That shows up in our private actions and our corporate decisions. It shows up in the systems we put in place to perpetuate our sin, so that we don't have to consciously think about such things" (99).
"The idea of aborting an unborn child or abusing a born child or starving an elderly person or torturing an enemy combatant or screaming at an immigrant family, these ought all to be so self-evidently wrong that a 'Sanctity of Human Life Sunday' ought to be unnecessary as 'Reality of Gravity Sunday'" (115).
"...the charge that the pro-life witness of the church is compromised if the church does not support extensive gun-control measures. Some ask, 'Is gun violence not a pro-life issue?' Of course, gun violence is a pro-life issue. Murder is evil and is a violation of the dignity of the person and the right to life. That said, what people mean typically when they speak of gun violence as a pro-life issue is not gun violence, directly, but about gun control measures. Many Christians and other pro-lifers support gun control measures, of course, and some support very extensive measures. But the gun control debate isn't between people who support the right to shoot innocent people and those who don't. It's instead a debate about what works in solving the common goal of ending violent behavior" (129). Emphasis mine, because I want everyone to hear and know these words!!
"When I served, as a very young man, as an intern and then campaign aide to a United States congressman (who was an is strongly pro-life), our only real disagreements came over mandated family medical leave and foreign aid. I was for both, and he was opposed to both. I thought family medical leave, for example, would help to ensure that mothers would be better able to keep their babies, and thus discourage abortion. He thought legislating this federally would prevent small businesses form employing as many people. The single mother I was worried about would, he was afraid, be laid off from her job and be just as vulnerable to the abortion-mongers. I disagreed with him (and I still think I was right), but our disagreement wasn't about the value of human life. We had a difference on the prudential means to get to a common goal" (130). Once again, this almost moves me to tears to just see this articulated. I so wish that the two sides of the political aisle could see this, and stop demonizing the other side!
"We might disagree on the basis of prudence about what specific policies should be in place to balance border security with compassion for the immigrants among us, but pro-life people have no option to respond with loathing or disgust at persons made in the image of God" (132). This is followed by a nice reminder that "No matter how important the United States of America is, there will come a day when the United States will no longer exist" (132).
"Church/state separation does not mean the division of religious people from citizenship. Citizens come to decision-making, and culture-makers come to culture-making, with their consciences formed somewhere by something. A Buddhist may point to his Buddhist principles of the destructiveness of the unrestrained appetites in her reasons why she is concerned about environmental policy. And a Christian is well within the bounds of public discourse to point to the Bible as the reason why she cares about human dignity enough to oppose racially-discriminatory voter suppression or a lowering of penalties for child pornography. Church/state separation means that the church does not bear Caesar's sword in enforcing the gospel, and that Caesar's sword is not to be wielded against the free consciences of persons made in the image of God" (143). I can't help but be reminded of Adventures in Odyssey's summary of this, which, to my recollection, taught that the founding fathers, in all their Christian liberty expression love, created separation between church and state only so that the state couldn't run the church. I love Moore's perspective that it goes both ways. And I can't help but think of DLM, who wrote a book with a similar cover about American Christianity and kind of about how disillusioned she is with it, and came across to me as very confused, and I wonder if she'd been raised in a Christianity like this, would things be more cohesive and whole, less fractured and in need of healing?
"The police power of the state is set up to maintain public safety and order according to the principles of public justice. Everywhere in the New Testament, the mission of confronting personal sin is given to the church, not to the state. Even in the worst case of sexual immorality, the ultimate step is excommunication, not the setting up of a police state to execute (1 Cor. 5:1-13).
"Any and every sin leads to personal death and judgment, but not every sin is a matter of public injustice. Murder is a personal sin against God and neighbor, yes, but is also an act of injustice and violence in the public sphere, in a way that anger in one's heart against a neighbor is not. Is adultery in the interest of the state? In some ways, 'Yes,' if the state is assigned to determine who is responsible for the breakup of a marriage covenant, in the divvying up of household resources, or in the determining of child custody. But the state has no interest in punishing adultery in terms of its effects on the moral or eschatological well-being of the adulterer. The state is incompetent to judge such things" (144).
"Christians should fight for the liberty of Muslims to be Muslims, to worship in mosques and to freely seek to persuade others that the Koran is the true revelation of God. This isn't because we believe Islamic claims, but precisely because we don't. If we really believe the gospel is the power of God unto salvation, we don't need bureaucrats to herd people into cowering before it" (145)
"Family issues can prompt some of the most heated 'culture wars' in any society for a couple of reasons. First, they are perhaps the most persona....Furthermore, family issues become more heated because we, naturally, wnt to protect our children form forces we believe will harm them. This can lead to a sort of seething resentment, when are compare mores we believe are going in a bad direction with the vision of the Bible, or, for that matter, just the neighborhood in which we grew up. If we believe, though, in the sovereignty of God, then we believe that we were not born at this time, and in this culture, by accident. If we belong to Christ, then this is our assigned mission field. To rail against the culture is to say to God that we are entitled to a better mission field than the one he has given us. At the same time, if we simply dissolve into the culture around us, or refuse to leave untroubled the questions the culture deems too sensitive to ask, we are not on mission at all" (181).
"Jesus demonstrated that the gospel does not come for those who are sexually 'pure' or with family 'values,' but to the broken sinners, as every last one of us, except him, are. The people who disagree with us on family issues--whether same-sex marriage or cohabitation or monogamy or any other issue--aren't part of some conspiracy, as though they were cartoon super-villains plotting in a lair. They are, like all of us, seeking a way that seems right to them. We ought to love those who disagree with us, including those who see us as bigots. They are not our enemies. This means we ought to stand for Christian conviction, and also avoid ridicule or hostility toward those who disagree" (182).
"We ought also to be those who see family issues as more than sexual issues (though not less than this). If we care about families, rather than just protecting our families, then we will care aobut everything that pulls families apart...[examples of abused women and children, immigrant families]" (183).
"And one of the greatest threats to the family is poverty. We can argue about whether unstable families lead to poverty, or poverty to unstable families, but we ought to recognize that the two go together. Whatever our views on welfare reforms or on the right amount of the minimum wage, we should recognize how much economic hardship is present for single mothers trying to provide for their families in the absence of men who have died, or have left, or are imprisoned. These families should not be demonized to score political points. Again, we may not always agree on what economic policies will lead to family flourishing; there will not always be a clear 'Thus saith the Lord.' But shouldn't we at least have a church injecting a moral consideration into such debates, so that we recognize that we are not green eyeshade-wearing accountants measuring out dollars and cents, but that we must also take into consideration costs on human lives and families?
"At the same time, we shouldn't pretend that our gospel ministry means simply addressing 'spiritual' issues while avoiding issues of marriage and family. The gospel went forward with a call to repentance from all sin, including sexual and family sins, and the instructions for how to live in this newness of life included a word on reordering sexuality, marriage relationships, extended family, the rearing of children. We must be just as definitive, whatever the social or political or even legal cost.
"And we should do so as those who recognize that, in the short-term, we have lost the culture war on sexual and family issues...So be it. Long-term, though, we ought to stand by our conviction that marriage and family are resilient precisely because they are embedded into the fabric of creation and thus cannot be upended by cultural mores or by court decrees. The sexual revolution, if we're right about the universe, cannot keep its promises. Unhinged sexual utopianism can only go so far before it leaves the round around it burned over, like every other utopianism. We need to be ready, after all that, to point a light toward older paths, toward water that can satisfy" (184, emphases mine).
Moore describes the Parks & Recreation episode where Leslie Knope teaches sexual education to seniors, and depicts the Christian view as at once prudish, judgmental, and ignorant. Moore says that he did stop watching partway through that episode, and that obviously, he disagrees with the viewpoint that was being expressed. "But that's not why I shut of the television. I don't mind hearing other viewpoints, and I'm not afraid of them...I turned it off because I was bored. This program was presenting a viewpoint with the kind of smug assurance of rightness that simply caricatured, unfairly, the views I hold. My point is not that this was rude to me. The point is that they weren't talking to me at all. The story wasn't intended to engage an alternative position, and to show why it fails to measure up. Instead, the program was meant to cause people who already held such views to nod their heads in affirmation at the morons who oppose good common sense, and to feel much better about their moral and intellectual superiority... Now, in this case, that's fine. There are more people who hold to the view articulated in this program than those who hold to my views, and the program wasn't trying to win an argument anyway. They were reveling in an argument already won.
"I'm not worried about television comedies. I didn't want a boycott or a campaign against them. I was provoked, though, to think about how often we, as the Body of Christ, do the same thing. We can caricature our detractors' positions in the grossest terms, in order to help reassure us that those who oppose us out there are particularly stupid or peculiarly wicked, and we can get 'Amens' from our side. But that's preachiness, not preaching, and there's a difference.
"Jesus' preaching took clear stands, with sharp edges. But Jesus never turned the sword of the Spirif into a security blanket for the already convinced" (198).
"Many of the ideologies and practices and policies we must confront are indeed deadly. But we aren't preaching to those in bondage to such dangers if we simply repeat slogans...Our opponents, are not...conspiratorially plotting the downfall of the good and the true. They believe themselves to be following the right way. Only when we speak to their consciences can we get to where people are, as we all once were, hiding from God" (199).
"When unbelievers hear a canned, caricatured picture of their views, they recognize what I recognized in that television show. They conclude that we don't wish to convince them or even to talk to them, simply to soothe the psychologies of our partisans. Preachy propaganda doesn't arrest the conscience" (199).
"The worst thing that can possibly happen to us has already happened: we're dead. We were crucified at Skull Place, under the wrath of God. And the best thing that could happen to us has already happened; we're alive, in Christ, and our future is seated at the right hand of God, and he's feeling just fine. Jesus is marching onward, with us or without us, and if the gates of hell cannot hold him back, why on earth would we be panicked by Hollywood or Capitol Hill? Times may grow dark indeed, but times have always been dark, since the insurrection of Eden. Nonetheless, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not, the darkness will not, the darkness cannot overcome it. The arc of history is long, but is bends toward Jesus" (204).
"We want not simply to convey truth claims, but to do so with the northern Galilean accent that makes demons squeal and chains fall. Kindness isn't surrender. Gentleness isn't passivity. Kindness and gentleness, when rooted in gospel conviction, that's war" (205).
I was positively delighted by Moore's count of being encouraged by a mentor that "Of course, there is hope for the next generation of the church. But the leaders of the next generation might not be coming from the Christian subculture. They are probably still pagans" (206).
"Persistence itself is no sign of fidelity" (211).
"...Jesus never promised the triumph of the American church. He promised the triumph of the church" (215).
"Sin is not neatly marked out in silos marked 'personal' and 'social.'"
did he talk about the NT being written to people without power? but we are "more like the Pilates"??
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