Today I read a post that a friend, Daniel McDonald shared. It was a recap of a lecture by Russel Moore, a Southern Baptist pastor, on the state of the religious right and the influence of the church in modern culture.

The article had some important thoughts that I want to try and recapture for you.Rod Dreher wrote the original post and I want to credit him for much of the commentary.

Dreher wrote that the heart of Moore’s message was if the Religious Right is to be saved, it will have to put aside the emotionally cheap theatrics and the politics, and walk through the wardrobe towards a more theologically serious, C.S. Lewis-style Christianity. I loved this passage:

Even if one concedes that demagogic populism is morally acceptable (and I don’t), others can quite simply do demagogic populism more effectively in a postChristianizing America. What we have to offer is more akin to the abbot in the dystopian novel A Canticle for Leibowitz who in seeking to persuade a woman not to euthanize her child, ultimately realizes that the most important thing he could say is “I, a priest of God, adjure thee.” When, as he puts it, God’s priest was overruled by Caesar’s traffic cop, the narrator tells us, “Never to him had Christ’s kingship seemed more distant.” In an age suspicious of all authority outside of the self, the appeal to a word that carries transcendent authority can be just distinctive enough to be heard, even when not immediately embraced. This is the difference Kierkegaard makes between a genius and an apostle, one sent with a word that is not his own.

Moore is contending that the best way to influence the culture for Christ is to stop trying to “influence the culture for Christ”, but rather to be deeply and thoughtfully Christian, and to allow your countercultural life to be your testimony.

Moore states that we need public arguments. We need philosophical persuasion. We need political organizing. But behind that, we must have consciences formed by a prophetic word of “Thus saith the Lord.”

I could not agree more (no pun intended). I have maintained that one of the great problems with the modern church is that we do not theologize enough. We need a theology that impacts our practice. We need orthodoxy but also orthopraxy.

Dreher points out that Martin Luther King, Jr. did not simply speak to the passions of his followers but to the consciences of his detractors and to the consciences of those on the sidelines, overhearing it all. Behind that was a coherent set of ideas, grounded in the Bible and the Declaration of Independence.

So, on November 9, rather than slitting your wrists, moving away, or beginning to attack the newly elected President, let us focus on living in a society in which our culture was not the dominant culture and rather than responding in anger, surprise, or fear – let’s listen to the call of the Good News to live out the Kingdom of God in the place and the time that God has put us. God has great things He will do in us and through us!