Hello, fellow wayfarers … Why you should be careful what you pretend to think and to be … What the disappearance of church choirs means for civil society … How my son, turning 18 this week, reminds me of the sign of Jonah … A Desert Island Playlist from New England … This is this week’s Moore to the Point.
How People Become Who They Pretend to Be (and Why That Only Works in One Direction)
American Christian social media lit up last week with the story of another fraudulent influencer. An account claiming to be run by a patriarchy-supporting “trad wife” with 14 children turned out to be that of a single, childless woman with a fake identity and a falsely narrated life.
This case was an especially literal example of a broader truth that ought to serve as a warning in an age of ideological extremism: You become who you pretend to be—but in one direction only. You can fake your way to vice but never to virtue.
The evolutionary biologist Hanno Sauer has written a book, The Invention of Good and Evil, that seems designed to elicit eyerolls from me from the title on. Sauer’s argument is common enough from the reductionist materialist perspective: that morality and immorality, good and evil, don’t reflect anything transcendent about reality but instead show how humans have evolved to cooperate for the flourishing of the gene pool.
Sauer’s analysis is more interesting when he gets to a sociological examination of the last 50 years or so, however. He wonders how, in this cultural moment, people navigate what’s right and wrong. Among other things, he points to the role of pretense.
After a long discussion of broadening views of human rights, including what some refer to as the “wokeness” wars of the past several years, Sauer looks at the global right-wing backlash, especially as mediated through social media. There, he describes a pattern of irony-leading-to-reality that I’ve seen play itself out in a thousand tragic stories.
He asks, first of all, why so many have embraced what would be seen in almost any other age as cruelty of a cartoonish sort. Some of this, he argues, is the desperate search for something against which to rebel.
“In the case of many adolescents, what’s left to rebel against when your former hippie parents don’t have a problem with drugs and premarital sex?” he writes. “Not infrequently, this next step has consisted of swastikas, crude misogyny and confessions of murder fantasies.”
At first, much of this rebellion is played for laughs. “Which aspects of the right-wing backlash were really meant seriously, and which were simply provocation, whether the ends eventually justified almost every means?” Sauer asks. In the beginning, much of it is the latter, “only ever meant ironically, or more precisely meta-ironically: the irony being to leave it unclear what was really meant ironically and what was not,” he writes.
Human psychology, however, does not allow the heart to keep this kind of “vice-signaling” at the level of trolling. “Unfortunately, some people who had been in on the joke forgot that you have to be careful who you pretend to be, because at some point you become who you pretend to be,” Sauer notes. “Many, once they’d shed their ironic pose, became real Nazis or real misogynists (and often both).”
This is especially true, he argues, in a time of “extremism inflation” driven by an attention economy. If you’ve wondered why much of what you see in online Christianity seems to be a direct inversion of the Christian elder—as “temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money” (1 Tim. 3:2–3)—you are not the crazy one.
“Almost every social grouping, both right- and left-wing, has to struggle with the problem of extremism inflation, particularly as those few extremists end up dominating discourse,” Sauer writes. “A group’s ideology inevitably ends up being dominated by the people who represent the most extreme version of that ideology, and beyond a certain point, this extreme version eventually becomes the new normal.” He continues,
Anyone who wants to join the group or move up within it must be able to demonstrate a particular loyalty to the cause, and that usually means escalating this radicalization loop even more. From there, it is only a small step to proclaiming that Kim Jong Un can teleport or that the “Führer” is infallible. Vanishingly few actually believe this nonsense, or indeed that anyone else believes it. But ideological extremism becomes a costly signal, as it is designed to build trust within groups by burning bridges with common sense—and with others—and further consolidating the group’s bonds.
In this way, the vapid advice for people to “fake it until you make it” is actually true. Pretending to be extreme will eventually make the typical person into an extremist. Pretending to see compassion as toxic or fidelity as weakness will eventually lead to an inner life of cruelty and coarseness that matches the outer show.
That’s because the hunger for the pretense is itself already a loss of integrity. Those who mimic the ways of an idol, the Bible says, do, in fact, become like that idol over time (Ps. 115:8).
For this reason, the apostle Paul warns about unconfronted immorality under the cover of church membership: “Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?” (1 Cor. 5:6, ESV throughout). What’s normalized is imitated, and immorality that is imitated ultimately becomes real.
It doesn’t work the other way around, though. You can pretend your way to vice but not to virtue. You can wink with irony on your way to hell, but there’s no return ticket.
That’s because integrity and morality and godliness do not come about by outward demonstration. Whitewashing the tomb does nothing to enliven the decomposing corpses underneath (Matt. 23:27–29). Having “the appearance of godliness but denying its power” (2 Tim. 3:5) is not the first step to real godliness but the contradiction and desecration of it.
The way to immorality starts with building one’s way up, and you can fake your way to a foothold on that climb. But the way of Christ starts with a recognition of lack—of the kind of empty-handedness that puts away falsehood (Eph. 4:25).
Pretend to be a Nazi long enough, and you will soon find yourself goose-stepping along with the best of them. Laugh at sexual abuse and human trafficking long enough, and you will become a predator.
Those who wink and nod with “Aren’t we naughty?” trolls, thinking they can do so without ever becoming what they pretend to be, enact a sad irony. They seem to think they can create a Christian nation only if the state is coercive enough to make people pretend to be Christians until they are. But the exact opposite is true.
You cannot pretend your way to a changed heart or a renewed mind, much less to
Christian maturity. The Spirit doesn’t work that way.
Jesus will ask you what he asks of everyone: “What are you seeking?” (John 1:38). But you will not enter the kingdom of God without a congruence between the heart and the mouth. Admittance to the kingdom is through mercy and grace alone, which come only to those who have given up on earning and achieving (Rom. 10:9–11).
Millennia ago, the Bible warned us of all this. “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith,” Paul wrote to Timothy. “Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions” (1 Tim. 1:5–7).
Be careful what you pretend to be. Pretending your way to hell will take you there—and pretending your way to heaven will take you to hell too.
A sincere faith, a good conscience: These things are not good for clout in a time of extremism inflation. But ask yourself: Is that what you really want?
The Rapture of the Bowling Leagues and the Church Choirs
On this week’s episode of the podcast, I sit down with political scientist Robert Putnam to talk about his classic book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community and the new Netflix documentary about his work, Join or Die. We ended up talking about, of all things, choirs.
Putnam, who grew up Methodist, told me about his realizing how community is formed while listening to a church choir in Italy. I noted that fewer and fewer churches have choirs these days, especially larger churches that have worship bands or praise teams but not actual choirs.
I had always just thought of this as the normal “evolution” of worship trends, without reading too much into it. The more I thought about it, though, the more I wondered if the rarity of church choirs is itself a sign of one of those drivers of loneliness and disconnection.
A choir, after all, is a kind of “third space” of church leadership. Most members aren’t (except in unusually gifted congregations) professional musicians or singers, but they aren’t just part of the worshiping assembly either. They practice and prepare to lead everyone else, and that tends to bring about a deeper sense of “being needed” by the church, and thus belonging, as well as a deeper solidarity with others who are also doing the work.
Now that kind of community is not always good. When I was a kid, preachers would sometimes say, “When Satan fell from heaven, he landed in the choir loft.” That was because almost all of those pastors had seen situations in which a choir (often in loyalty to a beloved minister of music) had become a kind of counter-congregation of their own. But everything has a shadow side that can go wrong.
I don’t think choirs are coming back the way they once were in churches, and that doesn’t bother me. Choirs aren’t mandated by Scripture, and churches can carry out the mission of Christ without them. The answer isn’t necessarily to “bring back choirs” but to ask what good thing choirs contributed and how we can cultivate that now, maybe in different ways and with different forms.
Anyway, I am now preaching to the choir. You can listen to our whole conversation here.
A Sign of Jonah Reaches Adulthood
Our fourth son, Jonah, turns 18 years old tomorrow—and I can hardly believe it. As I’ve mentioned before, a cliché that turns out to be true is the one given to new parents: “It goes by so fast.” I am proud of the kind, smart, loving, responsible young man that Jonah is.
When I first started this newsletter, back in the early pandemic days of 2020, I wrote the following, and I believe it all even more now. It expresses something of my prayer for him, and for all of us:
When my wife and I were expecting our fourth son, we, for a time, were drawn to the name Noah. Maybe that’s because I had been teaching through Genesis not long before. But sometime before the due date, we happened to sound out the full name, Noah Moore, and to our horror, realized that someone—maybe even he—might think his name was some sarcastic way of saying “no more” to having children. So we moved further into the canon and named him Jonah.
Unless somewhere out there there’s a vegan named Nimrod or a nun named Jezebel, I cannot think of anyone who lives up less to his name. Our Jonah is kind and easygoing and hardly ever complains. (If you ask me how to parent toward this, I will tell you parenting had nothing to do with it. We have five, so just about every personality sort is here among us—and we love them all.)
When I read the prophet Jonah—rebelliously running away from God’s call, denouncing the people of Nineveh, and resentful of God when they repent—none of that sounds like my Jonah at all.
The prophet Jonah is hardly an admirable figure on his own terms. The book starts with his running away from his mission and ends with him despondently griping under a tree. But that’s exactly why he is the figure from whom we need to learn right now.
The times around us seem tumultuous and unpredictable. 200,000 Americans are now dead from this virus. We are arguing among ourselves about how we would know to trust a vaccine when it arrives—and, I am sure, even when it does, and is medically verified, we will still have to deal with crazed Facebook conspiracies about Bill Gates or whatever.
At the same time, we see economic pain all around us, and racial injustice and social fraying. Then put all that in the context of the insane news cycle of this presidential election—coming at the end of four years in which countless families and friendships and even churches were split apart over politics.
And, just with the end in sight, the death of a Supreme Court justice now prompts another potentially incendiary months-long standoff. A friend was talking about the national anthem, and I joked that I am for changing it, temporarily, to Merle Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December (We’ll Be Fine).”
Many are looking for signs in all of this. Are we headed for collapse as a society or for a return to some kind of normalcy? How do we know? At the same time, many are wondering about their own futures, their own families—what’s next?
Life is always uncertain, but 2020 seems to have heightened many people’s sense of that. After all, imagine going back to New Year’s Eve 2019 and showing yourself pictures of people everywhere in masks, the Golden Gate Bridge aglow against an orange sky from the cinders of wildfires, and so on. You might have thought you were peering into the end of the world. This can be disconcerting to some, as they wonder what the signs are pointing to. Maybe we can’t imagine that either.
Searching for signs is not an unreasonable longing but a very human one. And we have an answer to that longing—even in times like these—that comes not as a warning or a foreboding but instead as “good tidings of great joy” (Luke 2:10).
The Gospels tell us that Jesus was confronted by the scribes and Pharisees saying to him, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you” (Matt. 12:38). Jesus’ answer was this: “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah” (v. 39).
Now, at first hearing, that sounds like some grim and apocalyptic news. After all, Jonah was a scapegoat for seafaring pagans, who threw him into the ocean to pacify whatever god they feared he had angered. He was then swallowed by a sea creature, and only at the moment of utter desperation his cries were heard and he was vomited up on dry land. But the grimness is just the point.
The sign of Jonah has two aspects. The first is this: “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:40). There was nothing impressive about Jonah—he arrived in Nineveh as, quite literally, fish vomit. But he could only come to Nineveh as one who had passed through the waters of death.
Like Jonah, Jesus was handed over to pagans (Romans) who (in some cases reluctantly) saw him as dispensable. Like Jonah, Jesus went down to the place of death. Like Jonah, Jesus cried out to God—and was heard (Heb. 5:7). In the sign of baptism, we re-enact that reality. We too are buried under the waters of death and raised to newness of life (Rom. 6:4–5).
The sign is the scandal of the cross: an executed Messiah who took on the curse of sin and death for the world. And the sign is the empty tomb: a Messiah who was heard by God, who joins us to the resurrection life he embodies and will never lose.
Can I tell you that you will avoid suffering over the next year? No. Can I promise you the virus will pass over your house and go away? No. Can I guarantee that the United States will not collapse into social collapse? I don’t think it will, but no, I can’t guarantee that either.
What I can tell you, though, is that if you are in Christ, you have already survived worse than all of that. You have been crucified with Christ, and your life is now hidden in him (Col. 3:1–3).
That means that if you want to see what your life will be like in the future, you won’t find it in the speculations of futurists or epidemiologists or commentators or economists. Instead, you will find it if you look, by faith, to the right hand of God. Jesus stands there, living your best life now—and one day, after a little while of suffering, he will join you completely to that life.
Yes, we should grieve sin and death and injustice, but we shouldn’t stop at grief. We should grieve with the joy of those who can feel the weight of glory, glory that comes through a cross.
The second aspect of the sign of Jonah is the effect of Jonah’s witness. Jesus said, “The men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented, at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here” (Matt. 12:41). The word of God brings about what God intends—even if we cannot see it working.
Nineveh seemed immovable in its bloodthirstiness, and Jonah, it seems, expected to be a Cassandra, never heard or believed. But he was. The people repented both of what we might call their “personal” sins (idolatry) and what we might call their “social” injustices (violence against one another). God relented from judgment—and then this actually made Jonah angry!
That’s because he wanted God to be a manifestation of his own tribal resentments, to carry out his own sense of revenge against his “enemies.” But God, by sending his Spirit with his Word, shows, as he does again and again, what the Gospel of John later tells us: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (3:17).
We then have good news for ourselves and for the world—not good news that wishes away the realities of sin and death and Judgment Day, but good news that goes right through all of that, in a crucified and resurrected and ascended and mediating Jesus of Nazareth.
The more I think of it, the more I think my son Jonah has the right name. Jonah, after all, means “dove.” In the Noah account, the ravens were sent out and did not return—probably because they are scavengers and there were plenty of carcasses in the waters for them to feed on. Ravens signaled the presence of death.
The dove, though, brought back an olive leaf—a sign of life on the other side of the wreckage (Gen. 8:11). Then, Noah sent out the dove again, and it did not return. This was not a sign of abandonment, but a sign that the bird had found a home—a home that awaited Noah and his crew as well.
When Jesus went down into the waters of baptism, waters that John explicitly defined as picturing judgment, he came up out of those waters to a word of affirmation from God—and to a Spirit that lit upon him like a dove (Matt. 3:16). That’s why we can have joy, no matter how shaken the people and nations are around us.
We are created to look for signs. But as Walker Percy pointed out, there’s a difference in seeking signs for “information” versus “news.” Information just tells us something. News, however, is an announcement from outside of what we know—an announcement that changes the way we live and long and hope and love and obey.
The sign of good news is not a flyer telling us what else is happening on the desert island. It’s a message in a bottle, telling us there is life out there, that help is on the way.
The signs of the times seem confusing and contradictory—and sometimes dark and foreboding. But, behold, one greater than Jonah is here. And that’s the only sign we need.
Desert island Playlist
Every other week, I share a playlist of songs one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a desert island. This week’s submission comes from reader Billie Truitt of Windsor, Connecticut, who wrote that she was waiting to see a New Englander’s submission so she decided to send one herself. Here’s her list:
- “Message in a Bottle” by The Police: A must-have for anyone stranded on a desert island. If there are bottles available on the island, I might send some messages myself.
- “Ain’t Misbehavin’” by Ella Fitzgerald and Count Basie: A charming celebration of faithfulness. It’s sometimes sung tongue in cheek, but Ella sings it here like she means it.
- “Jim Morrison’s Grave” by Steve Taylor: Lamenting the end of a life that could have been lived much differently.
- “Master Jack” by Four Jacks and a Jill: During South Africa’s apartheid days, the manager of a mine was often called Master Jack. In this song, Master Jack’s protégé tells him that he’s through.
- “Ripple” by Grateful Dead: A beautiful and haunting mosaic of spiritual realities that the songwriter himself admits he doesn’t understand.
- “Half the Grace” by Brooks Williams: I’ll need these words of encouragement on the island.
- “Centerfield” by John Fogerty: Maybe the most hopeful song ever recorded.
- “Nothing but the Truth” by Pierce Pettis: I’ve always understood this as a songwriter’s song about writing lyrics: “Partly fiction, partly fact, and nothing but the truth.”
- “Skateaway” by Dire Straits: A girl rejected by her peers escapes into her own fantasy world, a world fueled by rock music and reckless roller skating. This one hits home.
- “When Love Comes to Town” by U2 with B. B. King: It doesn’t get any better than this.
- “Better Be Good to Me” by Tina Turner: A woman’s triumphant assertion that she’s worthy of respect. Hearing this song always makes me feel like the top of my head is spinning off.
- “Werewolves of London” by Warren Zevon: Just for fun. When the moon is full on the island, I’ll howl along with the chorus.
Thank you, Billie!
Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?
- For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list between 5 and 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)
- For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books, along with a photo of all the books together.
Send your list (or both lists) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.
Quote of the Moment
“The idea which here shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalization from experience. And it is a myth which distracts us from our real duties and our real interest. It is our attempt to guess the plot of a drama in which we are the characters. But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage.”
—C. S. Lewis, “The World’s Last Night”
Currently Reading (or Re-Reading)
- Jonathan Rauch, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy (Yale University Press)
- Czesław Miłosz, Poet in the New World: Poems, 1946–1953, trans. Robert Hass and David Frick (HarperCollins)
- Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (Vintage)
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Russell Moore
Editor in Chief, Christianity Today
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