‘Moral majority’ now ‘prophetic minority’

Nashville — Russell Moore has been making the rounds of national media outlets, telling his secular interviewers of the collapse of the Bible Belt and how it is bad for America but good for the Church.

Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, made a splash with those comments in an Aug. 16 Wall Street Journal article in which he said “we are no longer the moral majority. We are a prophetic minority.”

The topic arose again in an NPR interview aired Aug. 21 in which Moore explained to host Jeremy Hobson that Christianity is, at last, separating itself from the culture.

He told Hobson, “It’s very good for a church to live up to what the Bible has called us to be all along, which is a counter-cultural reality that points to the kingdom of God, not just the values around us.”

The downside, Moore added, is that Bible Belt values “held some bad things back” in the society — “just in the sense of family stability, the sense of encouraging some good, moral standards in some ways.”

Moore said the church must continue to push for the one-man, one-woman definition of marriage because it provides stability to families.