Moore went on to describe the strain this trend has put on the faith of many young evangelicals, saying, “And so, often what I’m doing is spending all day talking faithful evangelical young people out of walking away from the church, at the same time that you have people who haven’t been in a church since vacation Bible school but think they’re evangelical because of their political beliefs.”
Todd responded by saying that he has heard from a number of acquaintances that “it’s because of Bill Clinton that I decided I should accept Donald Trump,” alluding to the fact that many Christians use Clinton’s sexual scandal as justification for supporting political candidates independent of their morals.
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Moore replied, “I think that there’s a reasonable argument that many of my fellow evangelical Christians made and make that they were voting for the lesser of two evils, that they were voting for Supreme Court appointments, but they weren’t voting for the rest of it. And in the cases where people actually did that and then wanted to hold the president accountable for his moral failings in other areas, that’s reasonable enough.”
“The problem is when we get into this idea that whatever the tactics of ‘the other side’ [are] should be the tactics that we adopt. I think that’s a really social darwinian form of thinking about how we engage with our neighbors,” Moore added. “And I think we ought to have a distinctive witness, one that’s characterized by something quite different from all that.”
When asked for his thoughts on former president Donald Trump’s recent claim that he had done more for Christianity, evangelicals, or “religion itself,” Moore said, “You know, I think that’s the tragic part about the past several years. If I heard that in 2015…I think I would have been outraged all day. I would have flinched immediately when hearing it. [But] I wasn’t really even surprised.”
Moore went on to say, “And I think that’s part of the problem right now: the coarsening and the trivialization of rhetoric in American life. We’re getting used to it.”
Moore on the Rise of Christian Nationalism Around the Globe
Todd then asked Moore about Christian nationalism and its growth within the broader movement of evangelicalism in America.
“I’m not sure that Christian nationalism is a helpful term, just because I have heard it used correctly about people who want to use God as a totem for kind of a white identity politics. I’ve also heard people use Christian nationalism to describe Christians who simply are engaged in the civic arena. That’s not an appropriate use of the term,” Moore said.
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Moore went on to describe how misuse of the term ‘Christian nationalism’ is actually contributing to the problem.