A casino might be the furthest thing from a church. But Dr. Russell Moore, editor at large of Christianity Today, recently wrote about what he sees as the “casinofication of the church.”
Moore got the inspiration for the column when “Deseret Voices” host McKay Coppins coined “casinofication” while chronicling his gambling experiment for The Atlantic.
On this episode, Coppins asks Moore how that phenomenon is playing out in the American religious experience.
Subscribe to “Deseret Voices” on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Note: Transcript edited by Steven Watkins.
McKay Coppins: Dr. Moore, thank you for coming on “Deseret Voices.”
Russell Moore: Thanks for having me. Good to be with you.
MC: I was thinking about this. I’ve been interviewing you for many years, you know, I think when we first met you were a, you know, prominent theologian, still are, a leader in the Southern Baptist Convention. I was a political reporter covering the intersection of politics and religion, and you were always very patient and generous with your time in explaining the nuances of evangelical politics to a Latter-day Saint reporter who is, you know, curious, but very much an outsider. And a lot has has changed in the decade since we first met, and maybe we’ll get into that a little bit later.
But the reason I wanted to have you on is because you actually invited me on your podcast recently to talk about my recent Atlantic story about gambling. You know, I was, for those who are unaware, The Atlantic gave me $10,000 last year to gamble with over the course of an NFL season to experience the phenomenon of online gambling as I reported on this industry. And I write all about my experience. I talk to you about it. It was very alarming in a number of ways. But one of the things that I observed was the way that online gambling is changing sports, right? And specifically changing the relationship fans have to sports. You know, people gambling on games today are mostly not just rooting for or against a team in the kind of traditional communal sense that we associate with sports, right? They are using a game as a vehicle to make money. Or, you know, to burnish their own kind of self-conception as an ace gambler or whatever.
And you latched on to that idea, and after our conversation wrote a really insightful piece for Christianity Today magazine, where you’re editor at large, called “The Casinofication of the Church.” And it captures a phenomenon that I think is so important to, you know, religion in America right now and the threats posed to it from within. And I wonder if you could kind of lay out your thesis, and then we could kind of dig into the specifics.
RM: Well, I was really interested in our conversation about, not just what you were talking about that happened to you over the the time period, which I thought was really interesting, but also specifically about the love of the sport, and how the love of the sport itself was transformed by it becoming a vehicle for gambling. And the more I thought about that, the more I started to recognize this pattern and trend going in all kinds of different directions. I mean, I think of, in just dealing pastorally with people, I think of a guy one time who was addicted to porn, who said to me, “I thought that this would kind of amplify my quest for intimacy, and what it ended up doing was stripping the capacity for intimacy, because it just became a means to some other end.”
And I see that happening exactly what you were describing as casinofication happening within the church, which is this idea of turning worship into a means to an end, or turning church community into a means to some other end, and instrumentalizing it, which ultimately I think ends up evacuating it. So, I mean, I think about what happened, for instance, with a lot of, not all of them, but with some mainline churches that were once dominant in American life in the ’60s and ’70s, as they became more and more about political action, and the theology and the Bible just sort of became a means to an end to that, you eventually had a group of people who were saying, you know, if recycling is what I need to do, I don’t really need to hear a sermon on the resurrection that makes that point. I can just go recycle. And it ultimately empties it out.
And I see that happening later, but even more dramatically, within evangelicalism. It becomes what’s really then important is the benefit. And so as you’re talking about casinofication, what I see is you have people who have an interest in making it about this. So, you know, you were talking about, for instance, the way that online betting wants you to win at first and wants you to win quite a bit, because they want to get you into this dopamine cycle. I see that happening in churches all over the place, and they don’t even recognize that that’s going on.
MC: Yeah. I’m going to do something that’s always a little uncomfortable when it happens to me, but I want to read what you wrote to you, for a minute, because I think this really kind of captures what you’re talking about. You wrote, “The guy looking at a smartphone in the sports bar and checking his betting apps isn’t really watching the game. The game is just a means to achieve what he really cares about — his bank balance or his self-image as a winner or the little adrenal rush that comes with it. There are always forces at work that want to do the same thing to us with a much more ultimate game. The gospel and the church become carriers for what we already care about on our own individual or tribal terms. When the gospel becomes a tool — for cultural war, institutional survival, partisan politics, and personal brand — its relevance feels sharp and immediate. The things I already care about are being addressed. But the slow formation of institutions, instincts, and affections is being hollowed out."
I think that’s such an important, you know, point that you’re making, because when people start to make their church, their worship about politics, or about personal enrichment, or about brand-building, or whatever, at first, it feels almost righteous, right? It’s like, oh, I’m infusing my my work and my politics and, you know, the stuff that I do all day, with religious meaning, right? I am aligning my spirituality and my faith with my career. Isn’t that what God wants? But the danger, as you lay out here, is that one ends up consuming the other, and you know, that the careerism or the politics or whatever ends up becoming the more important thing, and that the church is just kind of a tool to, you know, to win elections, or to make money, or to become famous, right?
RM: I think about what Robert Putnam said a while back. I talked to him about this after he had made this comment in, I think, The New York Times magazine. But he was talking about how misunderstood his idea of “Bowling Alone,” and that the loss of bowling leagues indicates a loss of community, and community loss of community leads to loneliness. And he said, “People don’t understand what the point I’m making. I am not saying join a bowling league to save democracy. I am saying join a bowling league because bowling is fun.” And what comes out of that downstream happens to be really good for democracy.
And I think the same thing is true, even more so, when it comes to religion. I mean, I’ll tell you one of the the places where I saw this happening really starkly was during COVID pandemic, right after, where I would see, I would talk to pastors who were in the same community who would say, “Our churches just sort of swapped a third of our members.” And it was all over one group of people saying the COVID protocols here were too strict with masks or distancing or whatever, and another group of people who were saying, “The COVID protocols are too lax.” They don’t care about us. And so you would have these, one group of people go to the other church, because that, “Well, they’re where I am on this,” and vice versa. And what I noticed from the pastors is that none of them were particularly dogmatic about what they did during COVID. They just kind of made a decision as to what they thought would be the best, and it ended up having this result. But what they said was, “What we found is people who came to our church because of our pandemic protocols really, really cared about that, and that’s what they eventually wanted, was for this church to be kind of a vehicle for saying why the other people are bad.” And so it sort of lost the very meaning of the church.
Well, that happens, that happens all over the place. And I think in, at least in my wing of the church, that really happened at first very innocuously. Because you would have, I remember, church growth experts saying years ago, “Look, people don’t care about justification. What they care about is, ‘How do I make sure I raise kids that aren’t going to be disastrous for me? How how do I make sure that my marriage doesn’t end up in divorce?’” And so we come in, and we talk to them about that, and that’s going to strengthen them. The problem is when that becomes the ultimate goal, it’s kind of what C.S. Lewis talked about. When you make second things first things, you end up also losing the first things. And that’s what is happening. It just becomes, everything becomes kind of deadened by that.
MC: It’s funny. I taught Sunday school for a number of years in my congregation here, my LDS ward, and I was always kind of struggling to find the balance between teaching the doctrine, and teaching what you could call, you know, applying gospel principles to our lives, right? Because the latter always is more interesting, right? It always generates more interest from the people in the class, more conversation. People are raising their hands, they want to talk about, you know, how to be better parents, how to have stronger marriages, how to, you know, go through your day and feel like you’re a good Christian, how to balance work and family and faith commitments, right?
And those things are all so important, and there is a place to have those conversations. But the risk is that you can get to the point where you’re never talking about the actual teachings of scripture, you’re never talking about the actual doctrine that is supposed to be informing it, and it becomes kind of a self-improvement seminar, right? And what you’re saying is that that’s innocuous at the beginning, but if church becomes all about that, then the actual purpose of church gets lost.
RM: Especially now. Because what’s happened now technologically is that people are trained by algorithms to have more or less what they want. So a kind of immediacy of whatever it is that is of interest to them, everything else is sort of being being filtered out. Well, I mean, one of things you notice, in the New Testament, these letters are being written addressing specific problems in people’s lives, but addressing the whole congregation. In other words to say, you’re not a widow, but you have a responsibility for the widows. This actually is of interest to you, because you’re part of this community, you’re part of this body.
We’re in the kind of world where that almost never happens, and it’s really easy not just never to encounter a viewpoint I don’t agree with, but never to encounter something that doesn’t interest me. And then what happens is it feels like serendipity, but it’s got a fake serendipity. You see, “Oh, I think I just, you know, I happened upon this.” Well, you really didn’t. It’s technologically looking for you. In the same way with the gambling app, I mean, you think, “Oh man, I’m really lucky today because I won,” and after a while you start to realize, yeah, they’re really, they know what I’m up to, and they’re a lot more psychologically sophisticated than I am.
And what that ultimately I think kind of breeds is a sort of cynicism, where, for instance, of all of the — I was noticing a couple of years ago — of all of the books of the Bible that I have preached and taught through, which is almost all of them, there was one I have never touched, and it was Nehemiah, in the Old Testament. And I never realized why. I thought, why have I never preached from Nehemiah? And after I thought about it for a while, I realized it was because the only time I ever heard Nehemiah preached or taught when I was a kid was during a building campaign. And so you would have somebody come in, “We’re building this new, you know, fellowship hall for our church, and so let’s go through Nehemiah, talking about, you know, raising support for the building of the wall to build this fellowship hall.” And then as time went on, I started to realize there are actually consultants that can come in and say to your church, “Here’s how you get people to do this by, you know, preaching ‘A Time To Build,’ you know, that kind of thing.” And eventually, it creates a kind of cynicism where you’re like, well, this is really about trying to get me to do something that nobody’s up-front telling me they want me to do. And I think that that can happen really easily in almost any kind of community.
MC: That’s really fascinating. You know, last year I had Ross Douthat on the podcast, The New York Times columnist, obviously Catholic, and he and I were talking about how for people like us who are people of faith who write for or speak to predominantly secular audiences, often when we are trying to kind of make an argument in favor of religion, we fall back on the easy arguments, which happen, which are about kind of like, you know, social science, right? All of these studies show that religious people have stronger marriages, or lower divorce rates, or they have higher income levels, or, you know, they have less friction in their communities, and like, all those things are true. And actually, there is a pretty expansive body of academic literature now that supports that there are all these positive, prosocial benefits to organized religion. But that’s not really the point of organized religion.
RM: Right. Well, and the problem is, once you lose the point, you lose those things. Because that’s the reason that all those things are true, is because you have a group of people who are devoted to something else, and something that’s even more ultimate. That then allows them to prioritize all those other things in a way. I mean, for instance, I noticed years ago, when I would be talking to couples who were living together, not married, and my assumption was that if I asked these couples, “Hey, why aren’t you married?” that they would say, “We don’t need the institution of marriage; it’s just a piece of paper; we don’t take it that seriously.”
I mean, that almost never happened. Instead, what happened was I had people who took the institution of marriage really seriously, and what they would say is something like, “My parents were divorced. I don’t ever want that to happen again, and so I want to make sure before we are married that we are perfect soul mates for each other, that we’re able to meet all of each other’s needs, and that everything is in order,” and I’m like, “Oh, well then you’re going to be in a really disastrous sort of marriage.” Because if you’re counting on that person to meet all of those things, those things are not going to be met, because that comes with the kind of risk and vulnerability and actual connection where I’m saying I’m married to you because I love you, not so much because, you know, I read a study where people are less likely to have heart disease if they’re married. That’s true, and that’s a good thing to kind of point out when you’re talking about the goodness of marriage as a secondary way. But you don’t want to have somebody to say, “You know, I really want to reduce my chance of heart disease, let me try to find somebody.” That doesn’t end up —.
MC: How romantic.
RM: No, that doesn’t end up well.
MC: You know, you write in your piece about how in every age, the church has to kind of be shaken out of this confusion about what it’s supposed to be about. And you go through a bunch of New Testament scriptures where these issues are being addressed. In your study of scripture and theology, how does the church kind of escape this cycle where, you know, Christians start to make it about something else, whether it’s making money, or politics, or, you know, tribalism, or whatever? How is that cycle broken?
RM: Usually through, initially at least, some sort of external crisis. So, I mean, I think about Augustine writing “The City of God.” This is happening with the collapse of the Roman Empire, with a lot of people saying, “Well, the world as we know it is coming to an end, and everything that we thought was stable turns out to not be stable.” So what then? And then there is a message, “Look, you actually already know how this works. You just don’t know how it works in your own life.” And so let’s go through that. And I see that through history where there’s a kind of exhaustion that then is is met with some sort of external crisis.
I mean, I think, I mean, why am I a Christian? There are all kinds of reasons why, but in terms of just my my family background to expose me to it, it’s because I had a grandfather who was in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, and was blown up in a tank, and survived. And then came back and asked, “Wait a minute, this just happened. I was almost dead just like my friends. The things I thought mattered don’t really matter to me anymore, and I don’t know how to find the things that do.” And so that leads to this sort of questing and this sort of searching to try to find what that is. I think that happens not just in the life of an individual, but I see that happening in terms of the life of the church.
So if you think of the Reformation is happening after the printing press is shaking up everything in global life. The Great Awakenings are coming after this time of real tumult happening here. So it’s usually some external event that causes. And the problem is what I find is that people tend to want to fix that too quickly. And so, you know, we have a lot of — in evangelical circles — a lot of talk about revival. I don’t know if that’s present in LDS life in the same way. But a lot of talk about revival, and when I talk to people, what I’ll find is they get really annoyed if when they ask the question, “Are we in a revival?” if the answer is, “I don’t know.” Because what they want is either we are in a place of just complete collapse and persecution, or we’re on the upswing, and things are going to get better, and we need to know how to know what that is.
And usually, when I will have people who will say, “The institutions are in trouble, everything seems to be in tumult. What do we do?” I will usually say, “I don’t think we know yet, and I don’t think we should.” Because there has to be that that time of perplexity, where you’re saying, “OK, all of the old avenues that we used to use aren’t working and haven’t worked, so we need to seek something else.” And if you try to bypass that, it just doesn’t have the same power.
MC: It’s funny you say that, because as you were talking about the kind of pattern of an external crisis forcing a reckoning within the church, I was thinking about the external crises that have defined the 21st century. And you had, you know, beginning with the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the wars that followed, the financial crisis and recession of, you know, 2008, 2009, and after, the pandemic of 2020.
And, in my mind, I was about to be kind of the contrarian and say, “Well, counterpoint, look at all these external crises that we’ve had in the 21st century, and I don’t see a ton of evidence that it’s caused some great reckoning within the church. If anything, each of those moments in different ways have caused, you know, a lot of people of faith to, you know, kind of fall further into this trap of making the church about something that it’s ultimately not supposed to be about.” But to your point, I’m maybe looking at too narrow a time horizon, and it’s possible that those crises are leading to, you know, a reckoning it just takes time, maybe even generations, right?
RM: Or maybe not. So, I’m not saying that an external crisis is a sufficient cause. I’m just saying it’s usually a necessary cause. In and of itself, that crisis can’t do anything. Just in the same way, I mean, we can meet we can talk to people who personally have been through the exact same kind of trauma. And one person says, “I came out of that trauma, really learning some things about my life, that I was able to put my life back into order,” and another person who’s completely destroyed by it, and who, you know, turns to alcohol or something else to try to numb it. So the crisis itself doesn’t create it. It’s just that when we see these things tending to happen historically, they tend to come when there’s a crisis that creates this sense of “I don’t know what to do.”
That’s why, you know, when I look at, with churches, the churches that I worry about in terms of survival are not the small community churches. You know, the typical church is under 70 people in American life. Those churches are going to be OK because they know each other, they’re staying. I’m not worried about the mega churches. They have the resources to be able to go. It’s those medium-sized churches that don’t know that anything’s wrong, because the money hasn’t dried up. But they’re not paying attention to the fact that everybody who’s giving and everybody who’s serving is over 70. Those are the places they don’t see the crisis, and when it happens, it’s just going to be all at once. Then they’re going to be in trouble. So, it’s a particular kind of response to a crisis rather than just the crisis itself.
MC: So I mentioned at the beginning that when you and I met, I was covering religion and politics. You were a leader at the Southern Baptist Convention. And I can’t remember exactly the first day that we spoke, but it was probably around the beginning of the rise of Donald Trump in the Republican Party. And you were at the time being pretty vocal about your criticisms of some of the rhetoric that Trump was using, but I think more directly the way that some on the religious right were responding to Trump. And you were, I think, trying to kind of steer the church away from getting sucked into the kind of vortex of politics where it becomes kind of overwhelmingly toxic. And we don’t have to go into the whole history, but obviously there was a backlash to some of the points you were making and you ultimately left the Southern Baptist Convention.
Looking back on all of that now and we’re, you know, a decade into the Trump era. You know, do you see anything differently? Are you surprised by anything that’s happened? What worries you? Are there any signs of hope? So I’m just curious if, you know, with some retrospect and some hindsight, how your whole experience looks now.
RM: Well, I mean, when I look back, I can think about the things that I was saying this could happen. to the country, and this could happen to the church if we go down this path and we go this direction. That seemed, you know, I would have people, “Oh, come on, that would never happen.” And now I look back and think, oh, I underplayed that dramatically. If I had said in 2015 — actually, I first started talking about this in 2014 because this was when — I think the first time was when Trump attacked missionaries who were trying to come back with — to be treated for Ebola. Who had been caring for the poor and sick overseas. So, I mean, if I had come in and said, “Hey, this is what is going to happen and what you’re going to be OK with,” it would have sounded deranged.
MC: What specifically?
RM: Well, I mean you just go through every every step of it. I mean, if I had said, “There will come a time when he will lose an election and say, ‘I did not lose the election’ and unleash a mob on the United States Capitol threatening to kill his vice president,” nobody would have nobody would have believed that. If I had said, “There will come a day when Mike Pence would not be able to go into a family values event because of …” I mean, nobody would have believed that. It would have sounded just absolutely deranged. And yeah, so I think that’s — I think the main thing that has shocked me over the last decade is how numb I can become to all of this. So there are some days when just because of all of the stuff that’s happening that I look at it and say, you know, this one thing — if you had told me in 2015 that it would happen, I would have been up all night alarmed. And now it’s just like, yeah, it’s the 10th thing that you think about in the day and move on.
MC: It is one of the things that I think will be the legacies of this era is just how profoundly desensitized we as an electorate have become to, you know, scandal and outrageous behavior and corruption. And I think we’re going to be kind of dealing with the consequences of that for a long time. And I guess that leads to kind of the next question, which is, do you see signs of people on the religious right, conservative Christians, being ready to kind of climb out of this, you know, this moment, right? Like, is there a fatigue settling in yet? I mean, we’re recording this a few weeks removed from, you know, Donald Trump feuding with the pope and retweeting a picture of himself as Jesus Christ. You know, I hear a lot of fatigue in my conversations with religious supporters of Trump, even, who are just like, “Oh my gosh, like, can we please be done with this whole period?” Are you sensing that yet? Or is that kind of a media manifestation?
RM: Well, I think you have to sort people out here in terms of where they are. And they’re at different places. So when it comes to kind of the really hardcore sort of Trumpist people, and in terms of the evangelicals, I actually have a lot of respect for those people who were from the very beginning saying, “Yes, this is what we want. And we’re OK with all of this.” Much more than the people who knew how bad this this was and who said, “Let’s just let’s just change ourselves to go along with it.”
Those people, kind of the really hardcore people, the pattern that i’ve noticed i kind of learned this the we had kind of had a dry run of this with the “Access Hollywood” tape. When “Access Hollywood” came out i was saying to friends of mine, “Look, people are going to be devastated. People who really believed in him are going to be just crushed. We all know what that’s like to be disillusioned. Don’t do the I told you so. Help people to work through this and get on the other side of it.”
What I learned was that what would happen is people would tend to just go really quiet. You wouldn’t hear about them. You wouldn’t hear from them until there was kind of a narrative to tell, some sort of a story to say. So the same thing, Jan. 6. People just went very, very quiet. And then you would have, well, “Maybe it was antifa.” That sort of thing. So that group I see — when I see those people kind of getting really quiet, it just means things are going badly. But it doesn’t mean that they won’t be back as soon as things go well. But there are another group of people though that I do think are exhausted.
I mean, I talked to, for instance, somebody really, really on the Trump train from Day 1 and still is, still committed to it. But he said, “You know. I really don’t like the way that all of these friendships have just blown apart. And I really don’t like the fact that every conversation that I have with my kids is about Donald Trump.” And I heard somebody else who’s also a Trump supporter who said, “Can we just have a time where everything is not about Donald Trump?” So that’s not somebody who’s ready to say, “Oh, I wish I had voted for Kamala Harris” or something like that. But it is somebody who’s saying, “Man, this just takes a lot of adrenaline to even to be a supporter. It just takes a lot of energy.” And I think for some people, that’s kind of exhausted itself.
MC: Yeah, I remember in 2016, I think it was during the Nevada primaries, I have this vivid memory, and I think about it all the time, of sitting in the lobby of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas. And I was talking to a Republican, you know, operative type who was a Latter-day Saint and a big Trump supporter. And he was kind of trying to, you know, make the case to me that conservative Latter-day Saints needed to line up behind Trump. At the time they were very conflicted. And to a certain extent, you know, data shows that LDS voters still are more conflicted about Trump than they have been with any other Republican president. But the thing he said to me was, “If we don’t get on board, we’re going to become a people without a party.” And he said that as a warning. And to me, that felt like a natural, correct thing, right? I think Latter-day Saints, Christians in general, should be a people without a party to a certain extent.
That I think that there is this fear that Christians will become politically homeless, and, you know, when I look at the gospel, I don’t see it mapping along American ideological lines. I just don’t. I don’t think it exists comfortably on a left-right political spectrum. It should be in tension with every major political party, all powerful people, because it’s not ultimately about politics or power. And that’s what I am constantly telling people who are, you know, trend more partisan one direction or the other. That, you know, to me authentic Christianity should make us uncomfortable in politics. It doesn’t mean we don’t civically engage. It doesn’t mean we don’t vote or support one party or another, but ultimately we shouldn’t feel like we have to perfectly meld our politics and our faith.
RM: Yeah, but that kind of comes back to the gambling app analogy here. Because you have a book of Hebrews, “Here we have no enduring city, we seek the city that is to come.” So that politics, as important as it is, is subordinate to the most important thing, which puts it into a kind of perspective that ought to keep us from this sort of utopian exuberance. “We win this election, we won.” Or this kind of apocalyptic despair, you know?
I used to — when I was first elected president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention — I said to my wife, “If you ever hear me say, ‘This is the most important presidential election of my lifetime,’ here are the people to call to come get the keys.” Because I have heard that every single, every four years. And then there came a moment where I almost said, “This is the most important election.” In fact it probably was, but I didn’t do that.
I think there’s a sense in which, and what that does, it’s not just that it changes the religion, although that’s the most important thing to me, it also destroys the politics. I mean, look at how little we have happening politically in American life, right now, when it comes to actually saying, not just sort of how do we tribally signal who’s who? But how do we actually get something done? I mean, when the Iran war started, I immediately just started thinking, man, I just, I don’t know how we could fight World War II in 2026. I really don’t know how we could. Because keeping people’s attention after Pearl Harbor for four years, and keeping them mobilized and together for four years, it’s hard to imagine. Just hard to imagine that happening. And so it really sort of evacuates the politics.
And what I’ve found is the people who invest all their identity in the politics, it’s not just that they become politically obsessed, they ultimately become politically disillusioned. So they’re the people, but that’s because they’ve been putting too much. If politics is about who I am, that’s ultimately going to destroy me. Just as it does — I was talking years ago to a friend whose dad had been a doctor, a really good doctor. And he retired and died within a couple of years. And he said, “It was because he saw himself only as a doctor. That was his chief identity. And when he wasn’t a doctor anymore, he didn’t know who he was.” Well, that’s kind of happened. But not with the sort of thing that actually meaningfully changes things for people’s people’s lives. I mean, we’re going to look back on this time, I think, in American politics and say, “This was — what were you doing?” I mean, this was just a big reality show. You’re not going to have an interstate highway system, or, you know, some some sort of big national project, just a bunch of signaling.
MC: And I think also adding to that, why did everyone care so much? Why was everyone so deeply personally invested in every kind of micro news story, when you’re right, so much of it was performative cruelty, or performative, you know, outrageousness. No, I think you’re totally right about that. Well, Dr. Moore, before we close, I want to ask you a final question that I’m trying to ask all my my guests these days. You know, there’s a lot happening in the world that’s causing anxiety and anger. We’ve talked about some of it today. What is keeping you sane these days? What is grounding you?
RM: I teach Sunday school. And so, every Sunday I’m teaching an adult Sunday school class of people ranging from age 19 to age 90 and everything in between. And we’re going through books of the Bible together and living life together. And that keeps me sane.
MC: I got to say now I’m feeling a little bit sheepish about the fact that I confessed that I was a Sunday school teacher because I’m not quite as qualified as you in my tradition. It’s all a lay ministry, so we just all take turns. But I did love teaching Sunday school and I would love to sit in on one of your classes one day, but, Dr. Moore, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate your time.
RM: Oh, thanks for having me.