Southern Baptist leader calls for fresh approach in "increasingly post-Christian America"

While Easter services bring more Christians to church than any other time of the year, attendance on most Sundays is falling, reports CBS News correspondent Jan Crawford. That led Russell Moore, the new leader on ethics and policy for the Southern Baptist Convention -- the country's largest Protestant denomination with 16 million members -- to call for a change in tone.

"Our message to the outside culture cannot simply be, 'You kids get off of my lawn,'" Moore said.

For a generation, the public image of American evangelicals included the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson -- the "moral majority."

Yet as churches faces declining membership and influence, Moore said the days of the "moral majority" are over and the church has to adapt. Nearly a third of older Americans identify as evangelicals, but those numbers drop dramatically among younger Americans to 1 in 10.

"The new reality is an increasingly post-Christian America, an increasingly secularizing America," Moore said.

A father of five boys with his wife of 20 years, Moore represents the old and new. His grandfather was a minister in Mississippi where Moore gave his first sermon at the age of 12. However, he's not your grandparents' evangelical. He's an intellectual who blogs and tweets, and his sermons include pop culture references like when he described a conversation he had with a government official.

"I said, 'I am a country music fan.' He said, 'Me too. I love Taylor Swift,'" Moore said in a sermon. "There's part of me that wanted to say that you and I don't have the same definition of country music. Nobody who has ever dated John Mayer sings country music."

Moore said millennials are demanding authenticity.

"The church has been phony occasionally," he said, and young people see that.

"Even the way that we've done testimonies have meant to encourage people by standing up and having someone who seems to be successful in every area of life, rather than instead having someone who stands up and says, 'I was a drunk, I was addicted to heroin, and every single day of my life I'm grappling and fighting not to go back to alcohol and to heroin.'"

Yet a different tone only goes so far. Some say the church should pull back from social issues. Moore says that's a mistake. On abortion, he sees the church gaining ground. When it comes to issues like homosexuality, however, it's becoming increasingly impossible to reconcile.

"Is homosexuality a sin?" Crawford asked him.

"Yes. I believe that any sexual activity outside of marriage which is the conjugal union of a man and woman is a sin," Moore said.

That puts Moore and the church out of step with most Americans. A third say they have left their childhood religion because of its views on gay rights and 43 percent of young evangelicals support same-sex marriage.

Moore says Christians should disagree but with kindness.

"We have to speak to the outside world about why it is that we believe in a Christian sexual ethic," he said. "Not because we hate people. Not because we are bigots. It's because we really do believe this is how God has designed the universe."

It's a belief that has today's evangelicals no longer holding the moral majority. Instead, they're a minority of believers seeking to persuade the skeptics.