Show Notes
What happens when Christians separate righteousness from justice?
Watch this conversation on YouTube .
In American Christianity, questions of personal morality and public justice are often treated as though they belong in different categories. Christians may speak confidently about some moral issues while dismissing others as distractions from the gospel or as politics the church should avoid. Charlie Dates’ new book, What Hath Justice to Do with Righteousness?, challenges that distinction. Scripture, he argues, doesn’t allow Christians to choose between personal holiness and concern for the people and communities around them.
On this episode, Russell and Charlie explore what that divide has done to the American church and why, in Charlie’s words, American Christianity can become “more American than Christian.” They discuss what the prophet Amos has to say to comfortable churches, why pastors can be tempted to avoid difficult subjects, and what Christian courage looks like when speaking the truth comes with a cost.
Dates has no easy optimism about where American Christianity is headed, in fact, he says he has a “healthy cynicism". But, he does have hope that, as he says, is needed “when the evidence is against you.”
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
More from The Russell Moore Show
Five years after The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, have American churches learned anything about the dangers of celebrity, power, and spiritual abuse?
What if the most important questions people are asking about Christianity are no longer about whether it's true, but whether it can make sense of their lives?
From the Moore to the Point newsletter: We ought to look around at places without keg parties or ketamine hits and ask where our own sense of solidarity is real and where it’s just another prelude to a coverup.
What would we learn if we listened to the people who have left our churches?
Maybe the way to speak with clarity into a loud and angry age starts with learning when not to speak at all.