Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 181:721 (Jan 2024)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Matthew S. DeMoss

BSac 181:721 (January-March 2024) p. 118

Book Reviews

By The Faculty and Staff of Dallas Theological Seminary

Matthew S. DeMoss

Editor

Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America. By Russell Moore. Sentinel, 2023. 256 pp. $29.00.

Russell Moore, editor in chief at Christianity Today, was formerly the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, as well as the chief academic officer and dean of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. This book is a lament about the current state of evangelicalism from the perspective of an insider. Moore uses the “altar call” as both a rhetorical frame and a literal call to repentance for evangelicals, Southern Baptist or not, for letting political issues drive ethics, whether those issues be related to American or Baptist politics. Losing Our Religion is a call to revival and reform for the evangelical church to return to being truly evangelical in both doctrine and practice. What Moore ultimately provides is a roadmap for moving forward after one has lost their religion while still keeping the faith.

He begins by recounting his experience of psychological warfare over his refusal to endorse Donald Trump for president in 2016. This intersected with the #ChurchToo movement and revelation of abuse cover-ups within the Southern Baptist Convention. Moore found himself wondering “if the plot twist to the story of American conservative Christianity was that what we thought was the Shire was Mordor all along” (10–11). Moore argues that we have arrived at a cultural situation where evangelicals do not practice what they preach (20), and therefore, the altar call may be just the remedy needed. To accomplish this, Moore offers a series of admonitions to the evangelical church, lamenting what has been lost and offering paths forward.

In chapter 1 Moore focuses on evangelicalism’s lost credibility. Young evangelicals walk away not because they’ve stopped believing but because they don’t believe the church believes what it teaches (41). Moore notes, “One can stop believing, but one cannot stop having been a believer. That has massive implications for society, for churches, and for the spiritual and mental health of countless people” (46). This changes the way one should view and treat those who are “deconstructing,” since “the question is not whether we will deconstruct, but what we will deconstruct” (46).

In chapter 2 Moore turns to evangelicalism’s lost cultural authority. He observes, “An eclipse of truth” (70) where “questions become not about what is true or false, but rather how to prove that one is really in one’s tribe” (71). The da...