YouSaid · the spoken record

Russell Moore

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2021-10-28

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2021-10-28

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1. “And then when I would talk about issues of abortion, I would say, well, you can't impose your biblical beliefs on us. Well, you just wanted me to. And I think that both of those two things are legitimate. Because when I'm saying to Christians, you ought to care for immigrants. That's not imposing my view. This is something you should care about”

   2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Texas abortion law. Abortion law. When you come to the question of abortion, people say, well, you can't impose your religious views on the question of abortion. What I would say is think about where our debate is. Our debate is over whether we're dealing with one person or two people. And in my viewpoint, we're dealing with two people. We're dealing with a vulnerable woman and a vulnerable child. And we need to protect both of them. And we need to love both of them. I can understand if people don't agree with me, but it's not imposing my view to do that any more than when I'm working in the area of immigration. And I would have some people who would say, well, come in and talk about how the Bible teaches loving the stranger and advocate for immigration reform. Okay.”

   2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “And I think that's largely true. And it's a warning. But I do think that we're going to come into the public square shaped and formed by the things that matter the most to us. So for people who are religious, that's often going to be religious teachings. That doesn't say that you have to agree with me and that you have to conform, but it says I'm telling you why I care about this particular set of issues. And so with the major concern when it comes to some of these culture war issues for most church-going evangelical Christians is not that they're seeking to impose their views. I mean, there have been attempts at doing that.”

   2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Yes, yes. And no, I don't think that we should impose any church's religious teaching or any religion's religious teachings. There's an old Baptist preacher who used to say everybody wants theocracy and everybody wants to be Theo.”

   2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “They could go through therapy and prayer and completely change their sexual orientation. I mean, we can learn from one another in those sorts of areas. But I don't think we can demand that we give up all of our viewpoints before we have those dialogues.”

   2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Well, I could tell you I've been in heresy trials that I'm too friendly toward LGBT people. In my context. And what I would often say in those settings is, look, if you're going to deal with Roman Catholics who hold to Roman Catholic teaching and evangelical Christians who hold to evangelical Christian teaching and Orthodox Jews and Muslims who hold to the traditional tenets of those faiths You can't say in order for us to speak to one another you have to give all of that up and become a Unitarian I mean that's not the way that we are going to be able to speak to one another instead I think we have to be in a situation where we're honestly in dialogue and there are going to be times where you're not going to change 2,000 years of Christian teaching in my mind but there are all sorts of other areas where for instance I never gave much thought to reparative therapy really until I started hearing from people who had been really harmed by that idea that”

   2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “I don't think there's ever been a Trump desurgence. I mean, I think that there were many people who said, and I had someone in elected office say to me, yeah, you don't understand how Republicans work. When you lose an election, it's who's Richard Nixon. And they move on. And so once an election's over, then the party will move on. Well, that's not happening, and the people who are intellected office, who are alarmed about Trump, and there are a lot of them But they don't speak publicly, most of them. And so I don't think he's had any change in terms of the support that he has. The question is, is there an alternative? And looking around the Republican Party right now certainly is hard to see who could be an alternative for people's loyalty and votes. So I think it's entirely possible that he could run in 2024 and win.”

   2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Right. Well, I mean, that's what I'm saying is the sad end point is what happened on January 6th, which when I saw that happening. I was filled with rage, and I had many people calling and saying, Well, you're vindicated now on Trump, everyone sees it. And I said, no, I've learned my lessons from Access Hollywood. What's going to happen is everyone's going to see the horror of this for a few days, and then people are going to find a way to push it out of the way and say it doesn't matter. And sadly, I think that's what happened.”

   2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Well, I mean, it's hard to see someone who could be more loyal. And I think for entirely good reasons, I really don't think that Mike Pence is a sycophant. I think he saw the example of George H.W. Bush, of a vice president who knows he's vice president and isn't trying to be president and who's loyal. And he was that. I think you can talk to anybody who's ever been in a meeting with Mike Pence. No one's ever heard him say a negative or even just sort of an eye-rolling kind of, can you believe this guy? He never did that publicly or privately. And he may be the only person.”

   2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “And made payroll. And I'm thinking, how is that the qualification to speak to the moral treatment of people created in the image of God? But that's why I'm saying what concerns me is that it's not that these religious groups come into the political arena and shift it. It's that the political arena often shifts us.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “Well, I became really alarmed when I heard an evangelical leader defending Trump say he's not one of these weak need to turn the other cheek guys. And I'm really, how do you hear yourself saying that would turn the other cheek is a direct quotation from Jesus Christ. And so I've seen this shift happen with some people. I mean, for instance, Jerry Falwell Jr. He and I had a tussle over migrant children. I simply said, hey, we can do better than separating moms from kids at the border. His response on social media was to say, you've never built a business.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “For refugees and immigrants. That doesn't surprise me at all. So the sort of furthest fringes of the birtharism stuff, I've found a lot more in nominal religion than I found with at least expressly within the church. Now, there was a lot of concern with the Obama administration and a lot of that I shared on some religious freedom issues and so forth. That sort of white identity grievance I didn't see as much during the Obama administration as I would see later.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “For me, not as much because I would find the birtharism and that sort of thing much more often among people who were not church going. For all sorts of reasons. I mean, the Cato Institute did a study that surprised a lot of people, didn't surprise me at all, that the more evangelistic a church was trying to share the gospel with people. The less. Xenophobic, that congregation would be, and the more likely they were”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Don't think it was created by that at all. Yeah, I think it goes back to Cain and Abel because I think this is something about racism that is at its root. And I mean this literally satanic in the prizing of one's own flesh and the demonization of another person created in the image of God. I think there's something deeply, deeply twisted about that. And that certainly goes back a very long time.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “People for whom there are great ethnic and religious prior religious divisions between Jews and Gentiles. The gospel unites those people into one body and says that we're to bear one another's burdens, which means that when you have African American Christian moms who are worried about their sons going out at night, that's my problem too. They're worried about what will happen if their sons get stopped by the police. That's now my problem too. Or when as one African-American pastor said to me one time he was going through college applications with his son and he was praying that he wouldn't get into some schools because he thought they would be unsafe for him as a young black man. And to realize. There are many things that I would be considering as I'm going through college applications, but I would never have to consider that”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Yes. Yes. I remember being really little in Sunday school and having a Sunday school teacher say because we would bring these little envelopes that would have our offering in it, you know, a quarter in it for offering. And I had taken the quarter out and put it in my mouth. And she said, don't put that quarter in your mouth. A black man may have touched that. And I remember thinking at the time, this doesn't really line up with singing. Jesus loves little children, all the children of the world. I mean, those two things can't really go together. So, yes, that's also, I think, a matter of integrity and credibility because this is one of the very first things addressed by the newly formed Christian church is how do you have together in one body?”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “I don't know. I can't really speak to anyone else's motivations. I can only tell you my motivations were in Coming across so many people who had been sexually abused and assaulted in a church context and seeing what had happened to me, this is the most reprehensible thing that can possibly happen, not only because it's self-evidently an awful thing, but because it's an awful assault on someone that is allegedly in the name of Jesus, in the safest place they could possibly be. And so to think about, you know, my own home church that really was a home for me and in which there was this circle of trust in those people. To think of that being used in any church context, it's awful in any context, but especially in a church context, I think is one of the most horrible. Things that can happen.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Well, I'll tell you what is encouraging. The discouraging is there. The encouraging is, again, as I said before, most people at the congregational level actually want to, in my perception, actually want to do the right thing. And I saw a shift from over the last decade. When I first started talking about issues of sexual abuse, there would be You would usually have to persuade people that this actually is a problem. People would say, well, that's something that happens. The Catholic Church doesn't happen with us, or that may happen somewhere, but it wouldn't happen in our congregation because we know each other. That started happening less and less. And people started recognizing this is a serious problem and this could happen here. Didn't though happen with everyone?”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “For me, I saw it as choosing between my conscience under Christ and saying things that I didn't believe. So it would have been. It would have been easy to say, well, this is who most of our people, this is who they're with. And so I'm going to get on board. But to do that, I would have I couldn't have done it. I couldn't have lived with myself and I couldn't. I have five sons. I couldn't have communicated that to them. So there never was a moment. I never had a moment where I thought maybe I'll. On board with Donald Trump. Now, what I did think was after he was elected Well, let's give him a chance in the way we do any other president. Let's hope that he takes seriously this office, that he tries to unite the American people.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “That's not what I was. We have a phrase called surrendering to ministry in my tradition. When I walk down the aisle and committed my life to ministry, that's not what I was signing up for. I was signing up to follow Christ, which means to speak honestly to people and to say here is how I see this. You can do with it what you want. I mean, the shift from the Clinton, Bill Clinton era to the Donald Trump era, there wasn't even, it wasn't as though you had people saying, I really wrestled with this question of moral character. And I've come to conclude it actually doesn't matter. Almost no one said that. Instead, it was well, yes, but think of how high the stakes are.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Will not criticize our elected officials. And I said, okay, so let me just get this right. You are opposed to my criticizing President Biden last week about the attempt to repeal the Hyde Amendment. Oh, no, no, that was good. So what you're saying is. What you're asking me to commit to is not that I won't criticize elected officials, it's that I won't criticize this group of elected officials.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Unbelievable pushback from people who are saying, how can you criticize someone who's on our side? And I would say, well, who's our here? I mean, this is, I didn't sign up to be on Donald Trump's side. I signed up to be on the side of Jesus Christ. And so you would have these sorts of constant pressures to meet with groups of people who were upset. We had some people who threatened to withhold money from the convention's missions program because I wouldn't support Trump. And these sorts of things. I remember at one point I was, this was actually after the defeat of Trump and someone was in one of these meetings criticizing me for and said, why don't you just commit now that you”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “I assumed anyone listening to that tape would conclude that this is not a person who is fit to be in public office. Certainly people who have been warning us all for years about moral relativism and about sexual anarchy and these sorts of things, I assumed that they would see this and say that's a step too far. When I spoke to that, I was immediately getting”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Constantly. I mean, I was in and out of heresy trials, basically, for five years. So, I mean, maybe the most after Access Hollywood, when Access Hollywood happened.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “Well, I think to some, there are many evangelicals for whom this was for the same reasons as the general public, general Trump supporter and evangelical Trump supporters would have the same sort of calculation. And I think one sort of key defining moment was in the debate with Hillary Clinton when she said on the stage when asked about late-term abortion, when she gave an answer that didn't even work through the moral implications at all, didn't even acknowledge I can see why people would find this to be awful. That was a moment where I saw even many very reluctant Trump supporters turn into committed Trump supporters.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “One person, a good friend, said to me, I'm not voting for one person. I'm voting for a thousand people. I'm voting for an administration. I'm voting for judges. I'm voting for these things. Okay, that's a reasonable case. It wasn't the case I made. It wasn't the conclusion I came to, but it's a reasonable conclusion. Problem is very few people were then able to say, okay, I'm voting for this person and then I plan to. Hold him accountable to say this is awful behavior or so forth. That didn't happen. Instead, it wasn't that.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “About evangelicals and Donald Trump. And she said, You can just see Russell Moore going through the stages of grief throughout the 2015-2016 election because first it was, well, evangelicals aren't supporting him, which was true. And then, well, church-going evangelicals aren't supporting him. These are nominal evangelicals. Which was true at the time? Then, well, evangelicals are supporting him, but because they see it as a lesser of two evils calculation, which was largely true at the time. But then it didn't hold. And that was my big concern because I had seen this pattern happen before, even with people who weren't trying to demagogue, where the tribal leader changes the base. And so the people who would say,”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Most people in the evangelical social conservative world agreed with me. They weren't as outspoken as I was, but they didn't disagree with me about any of it. As a matter of fact, when I did the op-ed in the fall of 2015 about evangelicals who are supporting Trump or betraying their own professed values, many of the people who later became key figures of support for Donald Trump were the people calling me to say, finally someone is expressing what I think. Thank you for saying this. Then that started to shift. Not because Donald Trump changed, but because he started winning. And so there was a figure who I was listening to a radio program one time where she said she was talking.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “I mean, this wasn't a figure that was unknown to us. This wasn't someone who was having to introduce himself to the American people. Any of us who were alive in the 1980s remember all of the Donald Trump news. And then I remember being really concerned as early as 2014, I think, when the Ebola issue was happening. And Donald Trump had criticized missionaries who were treating people with Ebola and were trying to get back into the country to get medical treatment and said something along the lines of they knew what they were doing. They chose to do this and they should pay the consequences, which I thought was a reprehensible comment. And then you add to it all of the other things. What I found was that when I first started talking about this,”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Right. That's exactly right. That's always been the case, and it's constantly the case. The difference is now that applies to absolutely everything. So a friend of mine and I were talking about the pressure that's on pastors right now to be not only biblical exegetes and theologians, political scientists and pollsters, public health experts and epidemiologists. All of these things so that if one pastor said when the Biden administration sent down the vaccine mandate, he had people in the congregation saying your silence is deafening. And he said, I don't even know what this policy, I don't know OSHA policy. How can I be expected to be an expert in that? That's what's happened in American life. And I wish I could say that congregations are exempt from. But they're not.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “There's definitely a generational split. And that was another thing I was able to say, well, there is a generational shift happening in evangelicalism, which is true. The old dynamics don't apply to the younger generation. Not because the younger generation is liberalizing. If anything, they're theologically more conservative than their parents and grandparents were, but because they're very suspicious of any cynical use of the faith.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “Was to pray for the family of George Floyd after the murder of George Floyd and has dealt with a backlash of his being a critical race theorist ever since. I mean, that sort of thing has now the congregational level and to the family dinner table in a way that has really flipped a lot of the concerns. When 10 years ago, I would have parents concerned about their children leaving home and secularizing and losing their faith. Now what I'm hearing are children, adult children who are saying, what do I do with my mom and dad who have become radicalized on Facebook?”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “It becomes a question of who's going to win and who's going to lose, or a pastor I knew who simply prayed sometime around the inauguration for President Biden and Vice President Harris. This is not an unusual thing to do in an evangelical context. We're commanded, 1 Timothy 2, to pray for governing authorities, but he had someone stand up and start yelling. That's not the president. So even these, it's not just that you have pastors who are facing backlash because they're taking courageous stands on refugees. That's true and that happens. But even the people who are not really interested in addressing these political issues at all are facing this. Or a pastor that I talked to recently, all he did.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “Nuance is not an incentive structure. And so to be able to come in and say this political leader, I think is mostly wrong, but I can work with him or her on these sets of issues we agree on becomes a threat to tribal identity in a way that's very, very difficult to undo what's changed in the last few years. I was seeing these dynamics at the Washington level and at the political level. But now I'm seeing them all over the place at the congregational level where what I'm hearing from every day are pastors who are beleaguered because they're trying to figure out what to do about masks, for instance, during the height of the COVID pandemic and their congregations are at each other's throats over that. It's not the same thing as just, well, we're trying to decide what to do.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “Well, and not only that, there's this sense of when I first went to the ERLC, I told my wife, if you ever hear me say the words, this is the most important election in our lifetime Just take the keys away because I had heard that every four years. I never heard anyone say, you know, this election isn't the, it's important, but it's not ultimate. But they can't all be the most important election in our lifetimes. But there's this sense of total victory or total defeat that comes into people's minds where we're either going to be exuberant in our winning or we're going to be totally defeated in our losing. And so the winning and the losing becomes an existential.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Our friend Adam Kensinger in the house. Tweeted the other day. I've known lots of people who have left their churches over politics. I've not met one person who has changed their politics because of their church. And that sadly really resonant right now.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “But my priority is something else, which means I'm going to keep that, at least to a large degree at a distance. That's very difficult to communicate.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “On the National Mall in DC. And what was disturbing to me is that I would see so many evangelical Christians that I knew on social media talking about how great it was that Glenn Beck is preaching the gospel. And I listened to that speech. He didn't preach the gospel at all. He was talking about political grievances and issues. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but that's not the gospel of Jesus Christ. And it was easy to, it was just easy to make that shift when there's so much pressure to be part of a cultural political tribe that gives identity. When that is constantly facing people, it becomes very difficult for those people to step back and say, I may be a Republican or a Democrat.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Yeah, and that's the opposite model of when the primary issue is mission. So if what you see the rest of the world around you, if you see everyone as a potential future brother or sister in Christ, you really do have confidence in the power of the gospel that changes the way that you see people. People aren't then able to be demonized because you actually believe in demons. You know, we're not wrestling against flesh and blood. But when that changes and when the incentive structure is toward the adrenal feeling of rage, that takes on an entirely different shape. So I saw this, I think, for the first time in maybe around 2009, 2010, when Glenn Beck had something called the Restoring Honor. Rally or something like that.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “Present in American life, and that bleeds over into congregational life in a way where what the Bible would refer to as an unhealthy craving for controversy starts to dominate every aspect of life. And so I started seeing this happen.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “That it was coming out of his role as a preacher to Jerry Falwell Jr., who was a real estate developer. Pat Robertson that you mentioned was a broadcaster, but he was coming to broadcasting from primarily this role of being a Bible teacher to talk radio hosts. I mean, that shift has been really dramatic just in terms of leadership. Then when you get to the congregational level, what you have is, I think there's a sense of Walker Percy writes in the moviegoer about Banks Bowling in New Orleans who would go to the public library and would read National Review and the New Republic together. And he said he didn't know if he was a conservative or a liberal, but the hate that they had for each other made him feel alive. I think there's a very real sense where that is so.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Well, I think there are a couple of ways. I mean, if you look at the national level, one of the things that's really concerning to me is probably the exact opposite of what would be concerning to most people on the left. Most people on the left would probably be worried about the religious right becoming more and more theocratic and more and more religiously extreme. I actually think that's not what's happening. What's happening is a secularizing of Christian political action in some really troubling sorts of ways because there's a piece in the hedgehog review out of the University of Virginia that I think is brilliant about the changing shape of the culture wars, which noticed the difference between even vocation of leadership. So you go from Jerry Falwell, Sr., whatever you think of Jerry Falwell Sr., he was a preacher.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “Very pro refugee, pro immigration, pro-immigration reform going all the way back to the Bush administration and continuing since then. So what was also true is that one of the things that I learned in this role, I remember working on immigration reform, for instance, being in the Obel Office and being in Congress, It became very clear that what really mattered when it came to immigration is who cared about it the most and who typically cared about it the most were the 20% or the 25% who opposed it. They were the ones for whom that's the only issue and that's what they're devoted to. But there were people who for whom any talk of immigration is George Soros, conspiracy theories”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “I came into office, my predecessor, Richard Land, a very well-known figure in the religious rite, had been through. A great deal of controversy, largely over his comments after the shooting of Trayvon Martin. It was a very tense situation. I came into office really wanting to do two things. The first thing is to help Baptist Christians to think through the moral implications of our faith on the full range of issues. And then only secondly, only after that to speak to policies. So I was constantly working to sort of keep the order of priority in line, in my view. And when it came to, for instance, the issues of immigrants and refugees, that really wasn't a deviation because if you look at what the Southern Baptist Convention was adopting every year in their resolution,”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “Vocation. And that certainly was true for me. I would see all of these various influences that tended to come together. And I was utterly devoted to the Southern Baptist Convention because I had my experience was very different from that of my dad. I grew up in a congregation that was loving, was cohesive. I never really saw the dark side as I'm growing up. So when I thought about the church, and particularly when I thought about the Southern Baptist Convention, I thought about something that was They were the people who had introduced me to Jesus, and I really believed in what we were doing together.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “Well, I mean, it's something similar to what I said to a student this morning who was thinking through trying to plan his life. And I sensed that he was trying to avoid going in a wrong direction. And I said, look, you can't plan it out with that detail. Usually you look backward and you see how things that you thought were cul-de-sacs actually come together in what it is that you're called to do. And I think that's true for people in virtually every.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “In many ways, reaffirmed my belief in the possibilities of politics. So I didn't leave Gene Taylor world cynical or disillusioned by politics at all. It wasn't that sort of, it was just that I remember going to the Library of Congress. They would have discard books that congressional staffers can take and I would get all sorts of books. And one of them was a guide to doing weddings and funerals. And I remember not even thinking about it. And then when I was at home later that night thinking, why did I want this? And that sort of caused the process of rethinking the path of my life. But not because I concluded that something was ugly or wrong with politics. That would come later.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “Yes. Well, I knew Gene didn't even vote for Clinton himself in the general election and never did, to my knowledge. But he wouldn't do it. We left that meeting. It was very heated. I was driving him and I was shaking. I was so nervous. And he just sat down in the car and said, all right, let's start talking about something else. And I said, are you not thrown by that? Who cares about that? You know, I'm here for my constituents not for that. So I was able to see that sort of side of him in a way that”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “If it went to the House of Representatives, he would vote for whoever received a plurality in the Fifth Congressional District of Mississippi. They wanted an assurance that he would vote for Clinton.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Majority Republican district had a lot of pressure to switch parties. And he said, I won't do it. And he was a very conservative Democrat, pro-life, fiscally conservative, very, very pro-military. And he had a lot of pressure from his own caucus to change, and he wouldn't do it. So I would go with him sometimes at what I kind of would call heresy trials where he would be with the base criticizing him for not. I remember one time being with him with a Democratic County committee that was, they were really upset that he had said in 1992, this was, that if the presidential election went to the House of Representatives, which at the time was a possibility. Ross Perot was in the race at the time.”

    2021-10-28 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 465 — Russell Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source