Russell Moore Gaslights Christians Engaging in Culture War as Having ‘Anxiety-Fueled Rage’

In Russell Moore’s new essay published by Christianity Today, the progressive rag known for giving a platform to every weird and liberally insidious bent, he engages in a particularly nasty bit of gaslighting, both by characterizing Christians engaging and fighting the culture war as being a bunch of scared, angry, fearful children, as well as mocking the idea that there’s even a war to be fought.

His thesis is simple, if not stupid. Culture wars are fought by those scared of being humiliated, but because Jesus was humiliated on the cross, we don’t have to concern ourselves with those battles anymore. He explains:

James Davison Hunter warned over a decade ago that much of American evangelical “culture war” engagement was based in a heightened sense of “ressentiment.” He said this went beyond resentment to include a combination of anger, envy, hate, rage, and revenge—in which a sense of injury and anxiety become key to the group’s identity.

Often, this sort of anxiety-fueled rage and revenge is bound up not with the fear of specific policy outcome but with a more primal fear more akin to middle school: the fear of humiliation. It feels like a kind of death—the kind that leaves one exposed and ridiculed by the outside world.

Here Moore completely does away with the notion that there is anything good, noble or worthy of pushing back on the tide that threatens to engulf us. We’re living in a world that is grooming our children into LGBTQ insanity and pushing the notion that men are women and women are men, and if you say men aren’t women you hate scient you racist bigot, and need to be canceled and fired from your job.

For Moore, this battle is not a righteous one for the souls and lives of our children. It is not done out of kindness, desire for peace, hope for truth, or an earnest love for neighbor- being against the world for the sake of the world- but rather the result of self-hatred and insecurity, all without merit. The meaning is simple: If you’re pushing against the tide, there is something wrong with you.

“It was no coincidence that Jerry Falwell Sr. named his political movement the Moral Majority. Hearkening back to Richard Nixon’s “silent majority,” the idea was that most Americans wanted the same values as conservative evangelicals but were stymied by coastal liberal elites who were able to rule over the wishes of most people.

Often, the most contentious aspects of American life center on the question “Who is trying to take America away from us?”—whether that be immigrant caravans overwhelming the border, the concept of American elites developing a global pandemic to control the population with vaccines, or the rhetoric of Satan-worshiping pedophile rings at the highest levels of government.

Here is where Moore’s advanced his bad faith argument. Rather than giving legitimate examples of progressives and leftists trying to impose their demonic values on society- the sexual grooming of school children, the blurring of God’s created order, the entrenchment of abortion, the proliferation of transvalues in media, the imposition of racial identity politics- all acts contributing to America losing its soul- he uses the dumbest possible examples.

He conjures up conspiracy theories about Q-Anon pedophile rings and Illuminati billionaires releasing the coronavirus virus on purpose, demonstrating he really has no idea what the battle is even about. He’s not addressing what is actually happening, but rather some leftist fantasy and caricature of anyone to the right of him politically and spiritually that he’s bought into.

It’s so patently dishonest, but it’s also what we’ve come to expect of our smug BigEva overlords.

h/t to Capstone Report for the story. See their commentary here.

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