Moore and Dante on the state of the modern church
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Virgil and Dante encounter Ugolino and Ruggieri in this engraving by Gustave Dore
Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission recently shared an incisive, searing post regarding the current state of the church. Moore is responding to the results of a recent Gallup poll that showed church membership in the United States has fallen below 50% for the first time since demographers began collecting those data.
Data, as I am always at pains to point out to my students, are one thing. Figuring out why this has happened is another. This happens to be something I have a lot of thoughts about, but let’s stick to Moore. His searing and quite clearly pained critique—a voice crying in the wilderness—stems from the church’s failure to live up to its own ideals, to walk the walk. A not uncommon critique, but well expressed and coming from an authoritative voice.
But there was one passage near the beginning that stood out to me in particular. Writing of his own adolescent crisis of faith, a crisis rooted in the obvious mismatch between many Christians’ stated beliefs and their actions, particularly where politics and the culture war are concerned, Moore notes:
I heard prediction after prediction after prediction tying current events to Bible prophecy that was all “just about to happen.”
But nobody ever said, “Remember when I said ‘Gog and Magog’ of the Bible is the Soviet Union? I was wrong about that” or “Mikhail Gorbachev, I told you was probably the antichrist, but, my bad” or “Now that I also am using these supermarket scanners, maybe they’re not the Mark of the Beast after all.” These folks just moved on with the next confident assertions, as though the last never happened at all.
Moore only notes this in passing as he relates his own story and returns to the why of America’s decline in church membership, about which he has many sharply observed and compelling things to say. But this passage stood out to me in particular because it harmonizes with so much of my own life story.
I remember wondering as a kid where the Gog and Magog connection with Russia came from. It’s just not there in Revelation. But I never got a clear answer; it was simply a given that Gog and Magog were Russia. I was too young for the barcode freak-out, but I do remember the introduction of the BI-LO Bonus Card and the high dudgeon of a few when a handful of the cards happened to have 666 in the long number printed on the back. I wondered why, if the advent of the Mark of the Beast meant Jesus was coming back, we were trying to stop the Mark of the Beast. I heard the Onion article that generated the entire Harry Potter controversy read from the pulpit. And I remember very, very well the day my private Christian high school showed us an end times prophecy video in class, a video in which the preacher, building to what was meant to be a dramatic and chilling climax, noted that “the fasted growing currency in the world today is the German mark!” We watched this video in 2001, two years after Germany had officially switched from the Deutsche Mark to the Euro.
You can say that these are fringy or outside the norm. Certainly they do not reflect anything actually in the Bible. But as Moore goes on to argue, people lose their faith over this stuff—either because they infer from this nonsense that the entire Christian message is nonsense or because, like Moore, like myself, they believe so fervently in the truth that the nonsense creates an irresolvable tension within our belief. It’s even more discouraging if some well-meaning person takes you aside and tells you you’re just “thinking too much.” True story.
But we’ve been here before. After I read Moore’s post last week I pondered over it for a while and went on my way. But a few days later, three lines from Dante that have stuck with me for years came unbidden to my mind:
“Christ did not say to his first company:
‘Go, and preach idle stories to the world’;
but he gave them the teaching that is truth.”
The scene is heaven, the primum mobile, the outermost reaches of God’s creation, shortly before Dante moves into the presence of God himself. The speaker is Beatrice, Dante’s beloved, giving one of Paradiso’s many speeches on topics both temporal and eternal—because the two are intertwined. In the middle, she goes off on a rant against foolish earthly preachers and the damage they do. The fuller context, which I quote at length to make a point:
“…below [i.e. on earth], though not asleep, men dream,
speaking in good faith or in bad—the last,
however, merits greater blame and shame.
Below, you do not follow one sole path
as you philosophize—your love of show
and thought of it so carry you astray!
Yet even love of show is suffered here
with less disdain than the subordination
or the perversion of the Holy Scripture.
There, they devote no thought to how much blood
it costs to sow it in the world, to how
pleasing is he who—humbly—holds it fast.
Each one strives for display, elaborates
his own inventions; preachers speak at length
of these—meanwhile the Gospels do not speak.
One says that, to prevent the sun from reaching
below, the moon—when Christ was crucified—
moved back along the zodiac, so as
to interpose itself; who says so, lies—
for sunlight hid itself; not only Jews,
but Spaniards, Indians, too, saw that eclipse.
Such fables, shouted through the year from pulpits—
some here, some there—outnumber even all
the Lapos and Bindos Florence has;
so that the wretched sheep, in ignorance,
return from pasture, having fed on wind—
but to be blind to harm does not excuse them.
Christ did not say to his first company:
‘Go, and preach idle stories to the world’;
but he gave them the teaching that is truth,
and truth alone was sounded when they spoke;
and thus, to battle to enkindle faith,
the Gospels served them both as shield and lance.
But now men go to preach with jests and jeers,
and just as long as they can raise a laugh,
the cowl puffs up, and nothing more is asked.”
A familiar situation: pride, ostentation, cheeseball humor, dogmatism on topics where the Scriptures are silent, prioritization of pet theories over the Gospel, and pointless—and erroneous—scientific arguments. Who hasn’t heard the “NASA found Moses and Joshua’s missing day” myth at church at some point? (Here’s Answers in Genesis if you’re skeptical of Snopes.) And the results are the same: ignorant believers, “fed on wind.” And the ignorant are vulnerable to other, yet more dangerous winds.
Some people were surprised to learn that American Christians are so susceptible to conspiracy theories. I wasn’t.
It’s easy to despair over the situation the Gallup poll reveals, but both Moore and Dante point to possible solutions—indeed, the only solutions we can trust. Moore:
I came through it with my faith not just intact but deepened. That’s due, ultimately of course, to the grace of God. But, in terms of secondary causes, it’s due to the fact that I found a copy of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity on a bookstore shelf and, having read to the point of memorization The Chronicles of Narnia as a child, I recognized his name.
And it’s due to the fact that listening to Christian music led me to a Christian bookstore where I found, amidst all the kitsch, a copy of Christianity Today magazine, where I found columns by Philip Yancey and J.I. Packer and John Stott and Chuck Colson. These people seemed to take the reader seriously as someone who could think, and they seemed to be filled, not with anger and outrage and manipulation, but with what I recognized as the fruit of the Spirit—peace, joy, kindness, gentleness, self-control, etc. There seemed to be something there that bore witness to a Jesus who was not a means to an end but who was the Alpha and Omega of everything.
And Dante, as in that passage from Ephesians I linked to above, distills Moore’s insight into one word: truth. A casual relationship with the truth is perhaps the area in which American Christians have conformed most closely to the world and departed furthest from God, who, after all, is truth. For a terrifying word study, just search for “truth” in the Gospel of John and 1 John. Consider as well God’s attitude toward those who authoritatively make incorrect predictions.
A scrupulous attendance to whether things are true or not, whether it is convenient for us or not, must be a fundamental part (“the teaching that is truth” above is, in Dante’s Italian, verace fondamento) of any hoped for revival of the American church.
Read the entirety of Moore’s newsletter reflections on the Gallup poll and the state of American Christianity here. The long passage of Dante quoted above is from Paradiso, XXIX, ll. 82-117. The translation is Allen Mandelbaum’s, which you can read here.
