Russell Moore, Exhibit One in Ingratiation of Gospel Hipsterness

Do not hate your instinct to restrict Islam in the United States.  You should dandle that in your mind like the ambulation of a lozenge in your mouth.  At the 2016 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the SBC, intelligence shames common sense for the cool guys at school.

As I write this post, I go to the Russell Moore twitter page for a very typical sample from him.

I am on a beautiful, sunny beach, poring over Brexit returns on my phone. Something is wrong with me.

— Russell Moore (@drmoore) June 24, 2016

Modern evangelicalism promotes such sycophantic navel gazing.

If I were to evaluate based on my observation of Moore, I would see the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commision as the division of pandering for the Southern Baptist Convention.  Moore has the not very difficult task of finding a way to present the SBC in the most politically and theologically correct fashion, left leaning and effeminate.   To the beavis giddiness of his culturally relevant fanboys, his zeal for the Southern Baptist house erupts on the old right with its regional twang.  He saves his indignation for gay reception refusals, confederate flag waving, and Muslim mosque opposition.   With no shame, he retweets, "This week, we talk with hip-hop duo @socialclubmsfts." This constitutes a new kind of courage, one that chooses to "stand" where it's obvious he'll receive the greatest amount of applause.

I don't believe the Muslim mosque issue in the video above correlates to either a Baptist distinctive or the gospel. Baptists support freedom of religion, but Islam is a difficult decision, contrary to Moore's pandering.   It's not a Baptist distinctive to support Mosque building.   Moore received a lot of publicity for this answer.  I saw references to it all over.  I watched the second half of his answer at least ten times.  I still don't know what he's talking about.  It was biblical and theological gibberish.  I can only interpret the crowd as cheering for expert political fawning.  They remind me of the crowds at a Bernie or Hillary rally.

Moore said, "the bigger issue is that we've been called to the gospel of Jesus Christ."  I can only guess here.   Regulating Mosque building undermines the gospel, and fully tolerating Mosque building promotes the gospel?

A mosque in your neighborhood might mean people are there plotting violence where you live. People blown up by a bomb can't be saved any more.  I've noticed that.  I can't preach the gospel to strewn body parts.  You have to be able to breathe to hear the gospel.  If you try to preach the gospel at a mosque in the United States, several mosque adherents will threaten your life.  If they kill you while you preach to them, you can't preach the gospel to anyone any more.  I can find a crowd of saved people, ones who preach the gospel every week, who would clap loud and long for this paragraph.

A greater enemy of the gospel in the SBC is its hunger for relevance.  The gospel and its real effects are replaced by the pretend Christianity of which Moore speaks.  The gospel doesn't need designer glass frames.  It doesn't need the perfect stance on mosques and their construction.