In sum, if the Religious Right is to be saved, it needs not just a tune-up, but a heart transplant. “Religious conservatives will need a robust religion and a sense of what is, in fact, to be conserved,” he said. If we lack a radical commitment to the Gospel, said Moore, all we have to offer is moralism. “We must remind ourselves that we are not inquisitors but missionaries,” he said “that we can be Americans best when we are not Americans first.”

Finally, in a masterful rhetorical stroke, Moore said that we cannot forget the world is watching us, that there are young men and women out there just like he was as a teenager, bored and unsatisfied with what he had been given, and craving more. What will we show them? Christians are not called to save a nation or a culture, but to be instruments through which the grace of God reaches out and saves those lost souls.