What’s behind the concern of David French and the rage of Russell Moore?
Readers of American Reformer are no doubt aware of the recent national interest in the version of Christian Nationalism being exported from Moscow, Idaho. Over the last several months, the eyes of the nation have repeatedly turned to this tiny town in northern Idaho, with resulting debates over immigration and American identity, patriarchy and the 19th Amendment, and the role of Christians in society.
One of the more interesting aspects of the debates about Christian Nationalism is the way in which secular outlets have often shown themselves to be more charitable and curious toward the Moscow project than evangelical critics. As one example, note the discussion around CNN’s segment on Doug Wilson and company. While the seven-minute segment was clearly framed according to CNN’s journalistic interests and perspective, Pamela Brown did at least attempt to allow us to speak for ourselves. And, after the initial viral interest in the story, CNN released a much larger portion of Brown’s interview with Pastor Wilson. All in all, not a bad showing for a mainstream liberal media company (anything to boost the ratings).
Contrast that with the reaction from mainstream evangelicals. David French used his New York Times newsletter to blast Wilson’s “ocean of ignorant, malicious, and unchristian commentary, calling him “cruel and extreme” and, like Donald Trump, “a profane and authoritarian man who…delights in personal attacks.”
But French’s language paled in comparison to his friend Russell Moore. Commenting on the CNN interview on Christianity Today’s podcast The Bulletin, Moore describes his anger over what he heard from Wilson, multiple times emphasizing how enraging it was for Wilson to represent Christians on the national stage. Moore claimed that lurking behind Wilson’s rhetoric and rise is “a dark and non-Christian view of who God is and who Jesus is” and “weird, unexplorable psychological stuff about women.” Men who get into Doug Wilson stuff “do not become responsible, faithful men. They become losers who…blame women for their own lack of responsibility.” According to Moore and his co-hosts, Wilson gives the impression that black people “don’t belong” in America “with equal rights,” spouting “misogynistic stuff and pro-slavery stuff” because he has a “cruel hierarchical model” of society. Ultimately, Moore argues, Wilson’s arguments are “insidious” and “Satanic,” “a denial of the gospel of Jesus Christ” flowing from “the spirit of…antichrist.”
My question is: what’s behind the concern of David French and the rage of Russell Moore? It would be easy to chalk some of it up to envy and jealousy; Wilson’s ascendancy and notoriety come at a time when more and more evangelicals are turning away from voices like French and Moore.
But beyond any individual vices, behind the vitriol and animosity of French and Moore is a fundamentally different vision for the role of evangelicals in society. For years, Russell Moore has been advancing a vision of evangelicals as “the prophetic minority” in society. His 2013 inaugural address as the head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention said “Good riddance” to the Bible Belt.
The Bible Belt is collapsing. The world of nominal, cultural Christianity that took the American dream and added Jesus to it in order to say “You can have everything you’ve ever wanted and heaven too” is soon to be gone. Good riddance.
In Moore’s vision, evangelicals will be increasingly marginalized in a post-Christian society, called to prophetically testify to God’s truth, but with little expectation of reversing the secular descent. Evangelical marginalization may be bad for America (presumably because of the celebration of vice and the destruction caused by high-handed rebellion), but “the death of cultural Christianity is good news for the church.”
Over the last decade, both French and Moore have undergone some significant shifts, especially as it relates to theology and culture. Twenty years ago, Moore celebrated “patriarchal complementarianism” and “soft patriarchy,” decrying the influence of Beth Moore. It’s almost impossible to imagine him doing so today. 2018 David French boldly proclaimed that he would never use false pronouns for trannies; 2025 David French is doing precisely that.
But despite these cultural shifts, something has remained constant for French and Moore: American society is and must remain formally secular, and evangelicals must accept their role at the children’s table of American society. In other words, French and Moore basically view themselves as custodians of the evangelical ghetto. After all, even a secular society needs some religious sanction, some presence of something divine. And French and Moore are prepared to baptize the pluralism of secular America, and do whatever they can to keep evangelicals on the reservation, in the ghetto, ensuring that no one does anything crazy (such as try to reverse the progressive slide into the abyss).
In this regard, we see a sharp contrast between the public role that French and Moore play in relation to their co-religionists and someone like the Roman Catholic Ross Douthat. I recall someone once contrasting French and Douthat (both of whom write for the New York Times) in this way: Douthat seems to view his role as explaining Roman Catholic beliefs, practices, and priorities to a secular audience. “I know you think the Catholic view of X is crazy and bigoted; let me try to help you understand it.” French, on the other hand, seems to view his role as denouncing the “bad” kind of evangelical and thereby validating the progressive fear of and hostility toward evangelicals in general. “I know that you think that evangelicals are hateful and bigoted; let me assure you that you are correct.” In that sense, he’s an agent of the progressive gaze (not to mention the progressive gayz).
Moore’s vision of conservatism is essentially as an ineffective obstacle to progressivism. Citing National Review’s inaugural promise to “stand athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’”, Moore argues that the “gains” of cultural conservatism “are never going to be on the same ledger as those of progressivism, since so many of these gains are going to be about impeding the speed with which bad things happen.” That’s the most we conservative evangelicals can hope for—policing the progressive speed limit as they drive America over the cliff.
This differing vision of the role of evangelicals in America accounts, I think, for French’s concern and Moore’s rage at Doug Wilson (and the Moscow project more broadly). Because fundamental to the Moscow Mood is the notion that Christians should “assume the center.” That is, rather than retreating into a defensive crouch by accepting permanent “prophetic” marginalization in a secular society, we insist that Christ is Lord now, and that everyone ought to live in light of that fact. As the Secretary of Defense put it, “All of Christ for all of life.”
This vision is still prophetic; it stands against the abortion genocide, state-sanctioned sodomy, and the gross injustices of our sexually demented age (not to mention the state-enabled invasion of our country and the corruption endemic to Washington). The difference is that we are budgeting for the possibility that the king of Nineveh and his people might repent of their wickedness and turn back to God (and unlike Jonah, we would not be disappointed by this fact).
More than that, we’re willing to speak clearly into the microphone when asked straightforward questions. If the media wants to make Doug Wilson the spokesman for Christian Nationalism, then Doug is happy to oblige.
We know that the media is going to ask about the sharp edges of Christian doctrine and its application to society. They’re going to ask about repealing the 19th Amendment. And this is not because we’re making “Repeal the 19th” our slogan; as Doug Wilson and Toby Sumpter have both written, that sort of question is 128th on our list, and we’re happy to have our wives double our vote each election.
No, asking about the 19th Amendment is the media’s way of scaring normies away from big bad Christian Nationalism. But normies just watched the entire media, political, and medical establishment torch its credibility by locking down society and trying to trans the kids. Some of them might be more open to different ideas, like the kind that helped to establish our nation. And so if we’re asked, we’re willing to answer, without apologetic hemming and hawing.
(Incidentally, the reaction from some evangelicals to even raising the question of repealing the 19th was very telling. Some evangelicals are apparently more theonomic than many of the reconstructionists. For them, the line between the imago Dei and the priesthood of all believers and universal suffrage is straight and iron-clad. The 19th Amendment is almost an article of faith, and to question its wisdom, or to suggest an alternative way of exercising the franchise, is tantamount to denying a clause in the Apostles’ Creed.)
But it’s not lost on us that the Overton window has shifted. A year ago, when NBC showcased Wilson, the scary gotcha question was about whether a Christian town would permit so-called “gay marriage.” Pastor Wilson said “No; Obergefell must go the way of Roe,” much to the consternation of the reporter. Now they have to reach farther back (to the early 20th century) to try and scare the normies, because the possibility that Obergefell and its solemnization of sodomy might have unleashed sexual anarchy on society has started to dawn on more than one person. The National Conservatism conference is hosting a prime-time, open-to-the-public panel on ending Obergefell, led by Jeff Shafer of The Hale Institute of New Saint Andrews College (Obergefell delenda est).
In sum, in the vision of Moore and French, this sort of reversal is not supposed to happen. The Moscow Project is doomed to fail. Christendom will not (and must not) be rebuilt. But here we are, engaged in what we know and expect to be a multi-generational spiritual and social construction project, with adversaries all around attempting to derail and sabotage our efforts.
The key elements of that project are as follows:
1) The potency of covenant renewal worship, with God’s people, on the Lord’s Day. The right worship of God, the preaching of his Word, the administration of the sacraments, and singing the whole counsel of God are the well-spring of everything else. When we ascend into God’s presence on the Lord’s Day and honor him there, we then expect that he will empower and enable us to advance his kingdom and extend his reign here, on earth as it is in heaven.
2) The recovery of the faithful and fruitful Christian household. The Muslim plan to conquer the (formerly) Christian West appears to be to immigrate to our nation, exploit our bureaucratic welfare system, and then outbreed us, starting in Michigan and Minneapolis. With a renewed vision of God and his purposes on earth, our aim is to be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth with image-bearers of God. In other words, we want people to get married and have lots of babies.
And with that in mind, I came across this marvelous sentiment from Teddy Roosevelt in his famous “Man in the Arena” speech.
Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that the chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times, and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is in the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that the man and the woman shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If this is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to deliberate and willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the race.
Indeed.
But of course, it’s not enough to have children; Christians must learn to keep their kids. Russell Moore recognized our sneaky way of drawing people to our biblical vision—we provide a myriad of resources on marriage and family to “vulnerable Christian parents” who are trying to figure out how to raise godly kids. We want Christians to parent out of the covenant promises of God (Or, if you’re a Baptist and you can’t quite get there, at least you can parent out of the gracious providence of God—God placed your kids in your home so that you would raise them in the Lord).
3) From that foundation of cultural Christianity (from worship to the household), everything else flows. Christian education, entrepreneurship and productive households, statesmanship and civic duty—all of these flow from these foundations. And we are undeterred by the various evangelical kneecaps designed to cripple any exercise of corporate Christian agency, in a masculine key, with respect to earthly social and political life. We’re just going to keep doing things.
This is what makes Russell Moore so mad. Moscow is a microcosm of America: a town run by progressives and liberals, flying the rainbow flag, but inhabited by large numbers of normies and grillers, with a growing and thriving community of serious Christians who intend to bring the word of God to bear on every aspect of life over the course of generations.
If that sort of thing starts to catch on, who knows what might happen? Even the losers might get lucky sometimes.
