Increasingly, in this sort of American culture, it is not just that we are divided about what we value about the way things should be, but what we are allowed to say about the way things actually are. Now, notice, what I wrote here is not what we see about the way things are, but what we are allowed to say. This is because we live in a time in which “truth” is seen as a means to tribal belonging, rather than a reality that exists outside of us…. Our passions and experiences and intuitions often warp the way we see things, especially the most important things, which is why we need grace. People are going to have—from now till the Apocalypse—arguments about what is true and what is false, what is real and what is fake. Our problem now, though, is that, increasingly, we are called not just to argue about what is true, but to say things that we know to be false, just to prove that we are part of the tribe to which we belong.  

Excerpt from Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America by Russell Moore, Penguin Random House LLC, USA, 2023 (p. 69).

Note: This excerpt is taken from “Chapter Two: Losing Our Authority” in which Russell Moore addresses the radicalization of many evangelicals, following the controversies regarding the global COVID-19 pandemic and the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

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Russell Moore is an evangelical Christian theologian and ordained minister. He is Editor in Chief of Christianity Today and previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (2013-2021). Prior to that role, Moore served as provost and dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he also taught theology and ethics.