Donald Trump's election as president caught progressive elites off-guard. Those people don't live in the real world. Or, at least they don't live between western Virginia and Nevada.
Sadly, as progressives have infiltrated every segment of American society – including and especially the evangelical community – we are witnessing the weakening of our religious communities, which now aid and abet the political left.
One such evangelical leader is Dr. Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
Trump's election no doubt stunned Moore, who spent 2016 bashing the New York real estate developer and political novice. Moore himself is anything but a political novice, having worked as a young staffer for a Mississippi congressman back in the day. In fact, Moore's perch at the ERLC is the perfect cover for a political operative intent on helping America continue her leftward drift.
Trump, though, put some brakes on that. Moore's loathing of Trump (and his supporters, scores of whom pay Moore's salary) had some unintended consequences when Hillary Clinton lost. Moore, like all arrogant elites, never thought anyone would be president in 2017 but the progressive radical Clinton. All of a sudden, Moore's nastiness was on full display, after months of blogging and speaking out against Trump. Too many conservatives in the pews were sick of Moore's silence on Obama and shouting about Trump.
After the election, it became known that some high-profile SBC pastors were none too pleased with Moore's political activism, and they threatened to withhold funding, the lifeblood of agencies like the ERLC, with its multi-millions annually.
The negative publicity was something Moore never expected, as he was too busy penning op-eds for his new friends at the New York Times and the Washington Post.
So Moore got slapped down publicly. One could sense his seething that anyone would question the unsolicited wisdom he foisted on the unwashed masses. Several reports had Moore being essentially called on the carpet.
What happened then was quite fascinating. Russell Moore was never in serious jeopardy (he has too many friends in high places), but a guy like Moore doesn't change his spots. He just shape-shifts into a seemingly more tolerant guy. Publicly, Moore has been far quieter since January. He even penned a fawning column in which he asked for prayer for the new president.
Please.
All he did was suppress his tendency to pontificate on all the ills of the right. Moore went quiet, no doubt a tough pill for him to swallow. After all, it's apparent Russell Moore loves to be heard, whether from a podium, or from a column or ego-boosting book (none of Moore's tedious tomes – "Onward" – will remind anyone of Twain, or even a remainder table's worst offerings at B&N).
His relative quiet was no doubt choreographed and coordinated from within his denomination's power structures. Not hearing from Moore much at all is like Christmas in spring, but of course he can't turn it off completely. In his bid to convince the conservative community that it is a racist, xenophobic community of intellectual bottom-feeders, Moore just can't stop altogether. In a recent piece from his website, he laments the knowledge Google can gather from those who search the Web:
I expected to find bleak news on the pornography front. And there is some of that. What I found more disturbing, though, is the way digital data tell us just where we are in this country on issues of race. The "n-word" is searched at alarming rates. Searches for jokes using the racist slur can be predicted: anytime African-Americans are in the news. The search for these jokes spikes 30 percent on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Now, you understand, Russell Moore is not calling out racist comedians who use these foul words. He's not spotlighting the odious things said about conservatives by minority progressives. No, he's tattooing the mark of Cain on the foreheads of millions of people who cling to their guns and religion. Without real evidence, Moore wants to convince everyone that the conservative community in America is plagued with systemic racism.
This is simply not true. But progressives need their narratives. They have nothing else.
Russell Moore's moralizing will rarely take risks. If it did, he'd spend a lot of time highlighting Barack Obama's corrosive radicalism, or he'd demand that Dems in Congress cease halting the work of restoring America.
He won't do that, though. For Russell Moore is simply keeping the powder dry, until the cultural winds blow his direction again. He'll lay low for a time, until pastors like Jack Graham leave the scene and are replaced wholesale by the Levi Luskos of the world, who are the progressive sorts change agents like Obama and Oprah love to use as props.
Moore himself is a prop, as when he grinned at photo ops with Obama. Don't look for him to pose with Trump anytime soon.
When the next progressive president emerges and needs the support and cover of progressive evangelicals, it will be Moore of the same.