Leading US evangelical and Southern Baptist Russell Moore has offered blistering critique of white supremacy following the events at Charlottesville, calling the ideology 'terrorism, Satanism and devil worship.'
'White supremacy angers Jesus of Nazareth. The question is: Does it anger his church?' Moore asked yesterday, writing for the Washington Post, after incendiary white supremacist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia saw one person killed at the weekend.
Moore, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, noted that the New Testament sees Christ often calm in times of crisis, except for very particular occasions – such as his famous clearing of the money lenders from the Jewish Temple.
The Temple story, Moore said, illustrates Jesus' ultimate desire for 'a house of prayer for all nations', radically challenging a racial ideology that limits the blessings of God to only one ethnicity.
Christ reserved his strongest criticism for those who claimed to represent God, Moore said. He wrote: 'The Scriptures show us two things that make Jesus visibly angry: religious hypocrisy and racial supremacist ideology.'
Moore said this was crucial because 'many of those advocating for white supremacy claim to do so in the name of Jesus Christ. Some of them speak of "Christendom" — by which they mean white European cultural domination — and not of Christianity. But many others are members of churches bearing the name of Jesus Christ. Nothing could be further from the gospel.'
Moore, who has been unafraid to condemn the racist rhetoric of the Charlottesville demonstrations, concluded: 'The church should call white supremacy what it is: terrorism, but more than terrorism. White supremacy is Satanism. Even worse, white supremacy is a devil-worship that often pretends that it is speaking for God.
'This sort of ethnic nationalism and racial superiority ought to matter to every Christian, regardless of national, ethnic or racial background. After all, we are not our own but are part of a church — a church made up of all nations, all ethnicities, united not by blood and soil but by the shed blood and broken body of Jesus Christ.'
