Russell Moore, Baptist Leader Who Shunned Trump, Splits the Faithful
When Donald Trump signed an executive order on religious liberty last month, he was surrounded in the White House Rose Garden by religious figures—Catholics, orthodox Jews, Sikhs and a host of evangelical Christians.
One prominent evangelical was conspicuously missing: Russell Moore, the public face and chief lobbyist of the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination.
Mr. Moore’s absence was a sign of the rift between him and the new administration, and hinted at a rupture within the Southern Baptist Convention itself that is challenging Mr. Moore’s leadership and potentially pushing the powerful, conservative institution off the political course he set.
As Southern Baptists head into their annual meeting on Tuesday, Mr. Moore, 45 years old, is at the center of a generational struggle over the denomination’s future. The outcome could determine whether Southern Baptists continue to be a leading conservative voice in cultural disputes over abortion and gay rights—and whether evangelical Christians remain a reliably Republican voting bloc.
For the past four years, as head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public-policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Mr. Moore has tried to lead evangelicals in a new direction.
He hosted a conference to bring together Baptists with gay-rights leaders. He said white evangelicals must do more to combat racial injustice. Most notably, he argued that evangelicals must avoid being in lockstep with one party, and he criticized the priorities of the “religious right”—including many Southern Baptists who backed Mr. Trump for president.
“2016 has destroyed evangelical credibility,” Mr. Moore wrote last October on Twitter . The post linked to an opinion piece he had written in the Washington Post, which called evangelical leaders’ enthusiastic support for Mr. Trump “a scandal and a disgrace.”
His approach won him support among a younger, more racially diverse generation of evangelicals who are more suspicious than their parents of political parties.
(snip)
Dozens of pastors have openly criticized Mr. Moore since the election. Some have withheld funding for the national denomination in protest. Dozens more churches have left the denomination altogether, some citing Mr. Moore’s and other denomination officials’ support for Muslims who want to build a mosque in Bernards Township, N.J.
Mr. Moore’s board of trustees—the only entity that can fire him—issued an unusual endorsement of him in March in an attempt to quell the unrest. But Mr. Moore has no access to Mr. Trump, fueling questions about how effectively he can do his job. Some Southern Baptists are talking about eliminating the public-policy group he leads at the annual meeting.
More..
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russell-moore-baptist-leader-who-shunned-trump-splits-his-church-1497022212
= new reply since forum marked as read
