“The Bible Belt is collapsing,” he declared. “The world of nominal, cultural Christianity that took the American dream and added Jesus to it in order to say, ‘you can have everything you ever wanted and Heaven too,’ is soon to be gone. Good riddance.”

Southern Baptist theologian Russell Moore challenged his fellow Christians to recover the Church’s prophetic voice by first transforming the Church from the inside to reflect the hope of the kingdom of God to the world, and to not lose sight of the Cross as their central mission. Moore was delivering his inauguration speech Tuesday as the new president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Early in his speech, Moore signaled that his approach to political engagement would be different than a previous generation of Christian political activism.

“We can no longer pretend we are a moral majority in this country,” he said in reference to the early Christian Right organization founded by Jerry Falwell. “We are a prophetic minority who must speak into a world that is not different than any other era of this world’s history, but is exactly what Jesus promised us the world must be.”

There would be three aspects, Moore continued, to the ministry of the ERLC under his guidance: kingdom, culture and mission.

While Jesus brought judgement to the kingdoms of this world, Moore said, he also brought hope with news of the kingdom of God. And like Jesus, Christians should also bring news of that kingdom with optimism and without fear.

“As we march forward into the days that are before us,” he taught, “the worst thing we can possibly do in changing times is to come with a sour and dour and gloomy pessimism about the culture around us. We cannot stand and speak, ‘you kids get off my lawn.'”

Taking the long view, though, Moore does not believe that Christians are losing the so-called culture war. In a reference to the best selling 2003 book by Judge Robert Bork, Moore argued that “We are not ‘slouching towards Gomorrah,’ we are marching to Zion.”

Speaking at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., Moore noted that those in politics tend to focus on the short term – political cycles and the next election. Christians, though, are “called to be the kind of faithful witness that is focused on the next trillion years.”

Moore also believes that the Church in America will be better off when Christianity is no longer expected to be the default religion for cultural reasons, when Americans who have not decided to follow Christ as their Lord and Savior no longer call themselves Christian because that is simply what is expected of them, and when the Church is no longer considered synonymous with the Bible Belt.

“The Bible Belt is collapsing,” he declared. “The world of nominal, cultural Christianity that took the American dream and added Jesus to it in order to say, ‘you can have everything you ever wanted and Heaven too,’ is soon to be gone. Good riddance.

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