The Evangelical Temptation to Prove Ourselves

This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

For a long time, I have feared that my fellow American evangelical Christians were yielding to the third temptation of Christ: to sacrifice integrity for the conquest of power. Yet over the past year, I’ve started wondering whether we’re falling for an entirely different temptation—the one we least understand and were least taught to withstand.

The Gospels tell us that right after Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan, the Spirit directed him into the wilderness where the Devil set before him three temptations (Matt. 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13). One temptation was to turn stones into bread—to satisfy his own appetites at the Devil’s direction.

This was, of course, the primal temptation of humanity (Gen. 3:1–3). This one is easy enough for us to understand because all of us grapple with our appetites—some for food, some for sex, some for drink—in ways that can make those appetites ultimate.

Another of the temptations was that the Devil would give Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” (Matt. 4:8) if he would just become a momentary Satanist. (Spoiler alert: Jesus passed up this offer.)

Again, most of us can understand this one because almost everyone is tempted at some point to trade principles for power. For a few, that power is a position in the White House, but for many of us, it is the ability to get the last word at the family dining room tables in our homes or to get the best seats at the conference tables at our jobs.

That temptation is still at work and transcends almost every tribal boundary. Forms of Christianized Marxism often yield to this temptation by replacing ...

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