Busy Russell Moore to teach classes at Lipscomb University as 'distinguished visiting professor of faith and reason'
News Analysis
Former Southern Baptist and Woke opportunist Russell Moore – the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today – will teach courses, deliver lectures and lead special programs as a part-time professor at Lipscomb University this fall.
The private Christian university announced on April 29 that Moore has been appointed as the inaugural Bill and Crissy Haslam endowed distinguished visiting professor of faith and reason. Moore will serve for two years at Lipscomb while continuing his role at Christianity Today.
Moore is a busy guy. In addition to his new gig at Lipscomb, he serves as Christianity Today’s director of the Public Theology Project and is a minister in residence at Immanuel Church in Nashville, Tenn., a church founded by Ray Ortlund, who is pastor emeritus and “pastor to pastors” at the megachurch.
According to Lipscomb, the endowment was created to “attract the nation’s top scholars and thought leaders to Lipscomb to teach and engage with students, the Nashville community and the state of Tennessee through a Christ-centered worldview.”
Moore was named editor-in-chief at Christianity Today in 2022 after serving as the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for eight years, a tenure marked by controversy as he framed key ethical and religious issues that many times were disconnected with the values of average Southern Baptists.
Controversy followed Moore to the former flagship Christian publication founded by evangelist Billy Graham. Despite an apparent conflict of interest, Moore announced in December 2024 that Gavin Ortlund’s book What It Means To Be Protestant was awarded Book of the Year by Christianity Today. Ortlund serves alongside Moore and his father, Ray, on the staff of Immanuel Church.
In February, a Data Republican report revealed that Christianity Today was among a number of charities receiving government funds to the tune of $1.8 million in 2023, which was nearly 19% of the magazine’s operating budget (view Form 990 here).
The revelation about Christianity Today taking government funds vindicated information published by journalist Megan Basham in the 2024 book, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda.
As an illustration of Moore’s disconnect with traditional Southern Baptists, he drew harsh criticism from Basham in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
During a discussion of the anti-Christian Nationalist movie “God & Country” by liberal director Rob Reiner — in which Moore appeared — Basham told Carlson, “They are calling evangelicals, particularly evangelicals who engage in the political process, a ‘threat to democracy.’ And I think that’s the important thing to know that (evangelicals) are 32% of the American electorate. The Atlantic quite rightly called them in 2021 America’s most powerful voting block, so they’re right about that; they are essentially the only obstacle that we still have to the left-wing agenda. If you remove them you removed all the brakes.”
Basham added, “I mean there’s been an entire cottage industry of books from staff writers at The Atlantic, from Russell Moore, who is in this film himself claiming to speak for the sober-minded, non-politically idolatrous Christians which, you know, that in itself, given how political someone like Russell Moore who is the editor of Christianity Today himself is, is hugely ironic….Russell Moore is absolutely a political actor in a much more deliberate and well-funded way than any of the people that this movie is criticizing.” You can watch the interview with Basham on YouTube.
In Moore’s latest book, Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America, he recounts how he witnessed Christian leaders acting during the Donald Trump’s first term as President and how a Baptist leader told him he was playing the game of leadership wrong, according to an article about the book by Bob Smietana of the Religious News Service.
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Woke opportunist?