The irony of Russell Moore

A comfortable office is no place from which to cast aspersions on fellow believers

There may have been a time (and I stress may) when Russell Moore was a productive contributor to the Christian conversation on moral and social issues, biblical interpretation, and theological engagement in general. That time has long since passed, as made painfully obvious by his recent screed in Christianity Today, the once respectable magazine of which he now serves as editor (after a brief and unremarkable stint as its “public theologian”). Moore waxes indignant about a recent observation from “someone,” a cowardly, passive aggressive reference to Christian writer and internet host Allie Beth Stuckey, that “the least of these” to whom Jesus refers in Matthew 25:31-46 are those who have suffered for their proclamation of the Gospel, not to the poor in general. Striking a particularly low and slanderous blow, Moore insinuates that Stuckey (although he doesn’t use her name) is acting in a manner akin to “a 20th century German soldier.”

The Christian obligation to care for the downtrodden and the marginalized is clear enough throughout the Scriptures but, as Stuckey correctly points out, the passage in question has nothing to do with that. Granted, it has been misinterpreted and misapplied for that purpose over the years (particularly since the innovations of the Social Gospel took hold in the mainline churches in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) but the weight of the evidence from the history of biblical interpretation, going all the way back to the Church Fathers, suggests that “the least of these my brothers” should be understood as a reference to Jesus’s followers.

Perhaps Moore is not as skilled in the field of biblical exegesis and interpretive history as one should expect of the editor of a major Christian periodical but that does not excuse the cowardly manner in which he attacks a fellow believer. Is he too lazy to identify the person whose observation he is critiquing? Or has he simply become so comfortable in his swanky office that he considers such a person beneath the dignity of acknowledging by name? I tend to think it is the latter if, for no other reason, to marvel at the irony of the situation.

Russell Moore and others of his ilk represent a particular class of Christian elitism that is far more elitist that Christian. Those of us in the hinterlands will derisively call them “Big Eva” or the “Evangelical Industrial Complex.” They live in the rarified air of social respectability that only comes to those Christians who willingly abdicate their responsibility of engaging a depraved culture with the radical claims of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. They reserve their harshest critiques not for the cultured despisers of the faith but for the cultural warriors who take the faith seriously. Hence, the scathing scoldings from the pages of Christianity Today whenever “someone” engages the culture in a way that wanders far afield of the approved script.

The irony is that Moore and company revel in pointing the Pharisaic finger at any and every Christian whom they judge to have fallen short in caring for “the least of these” while they enjoy the benefits of endless grants from endowments and wealthy foundations, not to mention state of the art technology for blasting their elite brand of Christianity lite into homes, schools, and churches around the world. They have long forgotten that the entire New Testament was originally written, copied, distributed, read in public worship, and zealously protected from government confiscation by people who were beaten, tortured, imprisoned, denied basic necessities (food, shelter, clothing), and scorned by “respectable” society as miscreants, deadbeats, and the scum of the earth. They were, in every sense of the term, “the least of these” in the eyes of the world.

To the King of kings and Lord of lords, however, they were—and still are—his true brothers and sisters.