A Good Thing Happened When The New York Times Sat Down With A Baptist
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Unsplash photo by Priscilla Du Preez.
(OPINION) You can file this column in a manila folder labeled “Delayed Reactions.”
I realize it’s February, but I read a New York Times article on Christmas Eve that’s been rattling around in my brain ever since, like an earworm song you can’t shut off.
It hasn’t stayed in my head because it was controversial or made me hopping mad. Just the opposite. It was refreshing.
It was an example of what dialogue between church folks and the secular media can look like if people on both sides check their preconceptions, remain open and speak civilly. They might not form a merger, but they can come to know each other.
Russell Moore. Photo via russellmoore.com.
In “A Christmas Conversation About Christ,” Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristoff interviewed the Rev. Russell Moore, a former Southern Baptist Convention official who’s now editor of Christianity Today magazine.
Their Q&A conversation ranged from the virgin birth to the morality of wealth to legalized abortion.
Generally — and generalizing is something to avoid when we can — today’s Southern Baptist leaders tend to be more theologically and politically conservative than I am.
So one surprise for me was how often I found myself agreeing with Moore. Even when I disagreed with him, I was touched by his insight and candor.
Here’s an excerpt from the piece that’s typical:
Kristof: I teased you a moment ago, saying that Jesus seemed center-left. I was joking, but only a little. “Woe to you who are rich,” Jesus says. He advises a rich person to ‘sell everything you have and give to the poor’ and explains that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Sounds kind of lefty, doesn’t it?
Moore: Jesus was frustrating to the people around him — sometimes his own followers — because he wouldn’t “line up” with some political or nationalistic faction or the other. When people wanted to make him king, he withdrew to the mountains. That’s why he counted both tax collectors — collaborators with the Roman Empire — and zealots — those who wanted liberation from the empire — as his followers.
Evangelical Christians around the world can be found on almost every place on the political and ideological spectrum. Most secular people, when they think of evangelicals and politics, tend to think only of white American evangelicals, while ignoring Black and Hispanic and Asian American evangelicals, not to mention the majority of evangelicals who have never set foot in North America.
Jesus sounds “left” in some cases and “right” in others. That’s why when we really pay attention to what he’s saying, all of us will be uncomfortable at some point or another. He just refuses to be a “useful” political mascot for anybody.
Brother Moore nails it. I hear from people who assure me I can’t possibly be an evangelical minister, much less a Pentecostal, because I am, they say, well, so … reasonable. I explain that in real life, as opposed to media and political narratives, “evangelical” and “Pentecostal” are huge tents holding all manner of folks: conservative, liberal, educated, illiterate, White, Black, American, Chinese, ecstatic, catatonic.
Here’s something else I liked. Did you notice the tones of Kristof’s question and Moore’s answer?
Kristof is probing. He’s got serious intent, but he also jokes with Moore without sounding condescending. I get the sense he really wants to hear Moore’s answer. He’s trying to understand, not score points.
And Moore comes across as unoffendable. He freely acknowledges an uncomfortable truth: Ancient Jesus didn’t give a snap about fitting into anybody’s 21st century political camp. Moore sounds like a man secure in his faith, and with himself.
How refreshing! This is like, I don’t know, two grownups having a grownup conversation. No yelling. No finger-pointing. No owning each other. Kristof and Moore both are trying to explain and to learn.
Kristof asks whether Moore’s faith in God was shaken by intense criticism he incurred from some fellow Baptists after he criticized Donald Trump.
Moore responds, “As the novelist Walker Percy once said of a scandalously roguish television evangelist of his time, ‘Just because Jimmy Swaggart believes in God doesn’t mean God does not exist.’”
That’s too funny. (Plus I’m impressed with anybody who can extemporaneously drop a Walker Percy quote into a sentence.)
Kristof ends by asking what New York Times readers don’t get about evangelicals — and what the Times readers’ own blind spots are.
Moore replies: “Well, I’m a New York Times reader, too, but I get what you mean. The most important blind spot is perhaps missing why so many of us are drawn to faith in the first place. We really do believe the Gospel is Good News that answers the deepest longings of the human heart. I would just recommend that people read one of the Gospels with an open mind. Jesus loves New York Times readers, too.”
When we of disparate views actually talk with each other, and truly listen — as opposed to prejudging, sniffing dismissively or screaming — we tend to discover all manner of illuminating things about one another, and about ourselves.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was the Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He’s the author of four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.