American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Delve into the captivating world of “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” by Tim Alberta, a must-read book that offers a profound exploration of the intricate dynamics shaping modern American politics. This insightful work combines meticulous research with compelling storytelling, delivering a thought-provoking narrative that is sure to resonate with readers.

Discover the transformative insights within the pages of “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” and elevate your understanding of the ever-evolving political landscape. Continue reading to uncover the book’s enduring impact and unparalleled significance.

Genres

Religion, Spirituality, Society, Culture, History, Journalism, Current Affairs, Memoir, Nonfiction, Political Science, American Studies, Biography, Leadership

“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” by Tim Alberta delves deep into the inner workings of the Republican Party, offering a comprehensive and nuanced examination of the pivotal events and key figures that have shaped the party’s trajectory in recent decades.

Through meticulous research and captivating storytelling, the author presents a detailed account of the ideological shifts, power struggles, and strategic maneuverings that have transformed the GOP, ultimately culminating in the rise of Donald Trump and the unprecedented challenges facing the party in the modern era.

Review

Tim Alberta’s “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” is a masterful work of political journalism that transcends the boundaries of a traditional historical narrative. By weaving together personal accounts, insightful analysis, and a deep understanding of the complex dynamics within the Republican Party, the author has created a seminal work that illuminates the intricate forces shaping the American political landscape.

The book’s breadth and depth of coverage, combined with its engaging and accessible writing style, make it an essential read for anyone seeking a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of the GOP and its role in the ongoing transformation of U.S. politics. “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” is a must-read for political enthusiasts, historians, and anyone who wishes to gain a deeper appreciation for the nuances and complexities of contemporary American politics.

Introduction: An insider’s account of what’s gone wrong in American evangelicalism

The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory (2023) is an expansive and critical portrait of evangelical Christians in post-Trump America. Penned by the son of a pastor, it tells the story of a religious movement that has subordinated its faith to worldly politics – and lost its way.

How should Christians relate to political authority? Jesus’s reported answer to this question is well-known: “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” Political power, in other words, is the province of the emperors. Christians owe them obedience and even love, but not their souls. Jesus’s kingdom, after all, “is not from this world.”

Yet millions of evangelical Christians regard America as their kingdom. They see it as a uniquely blessed nation – a land whose people are in special covenant with God. If America is the favored object of God’s attention, it follows that Christians have a religious duty to keep the country on the straight and narrow path – that is, to involve themselves in politics. As a result, many evangelicals today appear to devote greater energy to waging war on their “woke” enemies than to answering the question, “What would Jesus do?”

That, in a nutshell, is the conclusion Tim Alberta reaches in The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory. The son of a pastor and a practicing Christian, Alberta documents how the faith in which he was raised has been subverted by political concerns that trivialize the kingdom of Jesus.

“What the hell is wrong with these people?”

Tim Alberta didn’t want to write about religion. To him, faith was something personal and private. Politics was an easier topic – a matter of public interest rather than individual salvation.

That changed when Donald Trump ran for the presidency.

Trump was an outsider. No one foresaw his takeover of the Republican Party. Few could believe it even as it was happening. What explained his rise? How had he been able to brush aside so many seasoned and sober career politicians?

To answer those questions, you had to understand the changing mood in Middle America. Alberta’s reportage took him into communities that reminded him of the one he’d grown up in on the outskirts of Detroit. People in these places had four things in common: they were white, wealthy, conservative, and they attended an evangelical church.

These communities had been an integral part of the Republican Party’s base for half a century, but their relationship with politics was transactional. They didn’t vote for republicans so much as they voted against liberals. Politics was essentially about “lesser evilism.”

Trump was different. Granted, evangelicals hated Hiliary Clinton, but they were also genuinely enthusiastic about her opponent. Trump made no attempt to hide the salacious and ruthless reputation he had built: his campaign included casual calls to violence, mockery of disabled people, and crude sexual bragging. Still, the evangelical support for him rose. By the end of the campaign, evangelical conservatives, once Trump’s softest backers, had become his staunchest advocates. What explained this allegiance?

Trump’s character didn’t matter, evangelicals argued – God often uses imperfect instruments to pursue his ends, after all. Godless democrats, they said, were waging war on Christianity and winning. For all his flaws, Trump was a shield against the rising liberal tide. Voters had two choices in the 2016 election: Trump or “American carnage.”

Having come to see Trump as a defender of their faith, evangelicals took attacks on him personally. Alberta discovered as much when he went back to his hometown after his dad’s sudden death in 2019. The funeral was held in the church in which his father had been a pastor for 40 years. Rather than offering their condolences, however, a number of congregants berated Alberta about the book he’d recently published, a critical account of Trump’s rise.

One man repeated what Rush Limbaugh, the conservative broadcaster, had said about it on his show. Another demanded he publicly walk back his criticisms of the president. A third accused him of being a supporter of the “deep state,” a shadowy conspiracy to unseat the president.

Alberta, and his wife, were stunned. “What the hell is wrong with these people?”, she asked. That was the question he now set out to answer.

Paranoid politics, conspiratorial Christians

Chris Winan was a liberal pastor in a small community of conservative evangelicals in Michigan. When he took up his position in 2019, he didn’t think this was a problem: as he saw it, people came to church to hear about Jesus, not politics.

Winan had seen the diatribes about godless democrats’ “war on Christianity” his congregants sometimes posted on Facebook. He ignored them and got on with the job of ministering. Even if people really believed such nonsense, which he doubted, they were a small minority.

Then the pandemic hit. The mood in congregations like Winan’s soured as democratic governors ordered shut-downs. Facebook posts now took a conspiratorial turn. The virus, people said, was a hoax cooked up by globalist elites. It was simply an excuse to close churches. The long-prophesied war on religion had finally begun.

Such ideas had been circulating among evangelicals for a while. During the Cold War, they saw the Soviet Union, an atheist state, as the greatest threat to Christianity. After its dissolution in 1991, that threat was gone. Evangelicals now paid closer attention to internal enemies. The notion that liberals wanted to dismantle Christianity remained a fringe idea, however – until Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008.

Thanks to a conspiracy pushed by public figures like Donald Trump, then still best known as a reality TV host, more and more conservatives came to believe that their current president was a non-American, possibly Muslim, possibly Marxist enemy of Christianity. Trump embraced these themes as a presidential candidate in 2016. The democrats, he said, wanted to “hurt God.” If he won, by contrast, Christianity would “have power.”

Trump’s decision to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic further amplified conspiratorial ideas. If the virus wasn’t really that dangerous, there must be a reason liberals kept pretending it was. It didn’t take much imagination to conclude that it was a plot against the president.

By the time of the 2020 presidential election, Chris Winan, like many pastors, had become embroiled in politics. Congregants wanted him to denounce Joe Biden. When he refused, they left the church. Things got even worse after Trump’s defeat. A popular church leader had to be fired after she used her position to spread propaganda from QAnon – the far-right conspiracy theory and movement – depicting Trump as a messianic figure battling a satanic conspiracy. Even more people left. But the worst was yet to come.

On January 6, 2021, Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington. Winan watched in despair as Bible-toting, cross-carrying rioters forced their way into the building. For the first time in his life, he questioned his faith.

Winan recounted these experiences in an interview. At the end of their conversation, Alberta asked him the same question his wife had posed: What’s wrong with American evangelicals? The pastor thought for a moment. “America,” he said, “too many of them worship America.”

Caesar’s sword and Jesus’s cross

What did Winan mean? To answer that, we need to first take a look at the Bible.

In the Old Testament, God creates Israel for the Jewish people. This nation is in covenant – that is, in a special relationship – with God: it’s the chosen nation for the chosen people who live under God’s chosen laws. In the Old Testament, the chosen people stray from these laws and worship the idols of other nations. God punishes them by allowing the nation of Israel to be destroyed.

The Jewish people endure hundreds of years of exile, all the while yearning to return to that special relationship. But God has other plans. Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter’s son raised in the Roman-occupied province of Galilee, delivers the news: the old kingdom of Israel won’t be reestablished. But there’s good news, too – there is a better kingdom, not in this world but the next, and it’s for everyone who accepts Jesus, not only those of Jewish faith.

In the book of Hebrews, this second kingdom is described as a new covenant that “has made the first one obsolete.” This marks a fundamental shift in the history of religion. The promised land, we’re told, isn’t to be found in the here and now, but in God’s eternal kingdom. As Paul says, those who accept Jesus as a mediator between humanity and God do not have their minds “set on earthly things” because their “citizenship is in heaven.”

When Jesus says “my kingdom is not from the world,” he emphasizes that his religious teachings are separate from earthly political activity. His advice to “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s” reinforces this distinction. Political authorities in this world may command the obedience of Christian subjects – in this case, Jesus is telling his followers to pay taxes to the Roman state. Their ultimate loyalty, however, is to God, the king of kings. To worship a state, then, is to worship a false idol. As a pastor put it in an interview with Alberta, “You can take up the sword of Caesar or the cross of Jesus. You have to choose.”

Evangelicals, Winan and like-minded critics charge, have made the wrong choice. They aren’t satisfied with the kingdom of Jesus; they want more than God’s covenant. Like the ancient Israelites, they seek the promised land in the here and now. They believe that America’s miraculous rise to the status of the world’s most powerful nation is evidence of a providential blessing. It’s a new Israel – God’s chosen land. To believe this is to believe that it’s a duty as a Christian to protect America at all costs – to fight for it as if salvation hung in the balance.

To worship America as a new Israel conflates the worldly and the eternal. For Winan, it’s simply bad theology. In Second Corinthians, for example, Paul tells us to fix our eyes on the unseen, “since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” Worldly affairs are by definition transient; so too is membership of a political community. Many evangelicals, however, are fixated on this world. As Winan puts it, they no longer see themselves in the way first-century Christians living in Rome saw themselves: as exiles in a metaphorical Babylon. Instead, they have become proud of their imperial citizenship. Rather than fleeing from the temptation to rule, as Jesus did, they have made deals with the devil to achieve influence, power, and wealth.

Decline and renewal

According to Pew Research Center data, 90 percent of Americans identified as Christian in 1991 while just five percent said they were religiously unaffiliated. Thirty years later, by contrast, just 63 percent of Americans identified as Christian. The number of unaffiliated – that is, secular – Americans had climbed to 29 percent.

Why has the church lost so much ground? Russell Moore, a theologian associated with the Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest evangelical denomination, blames politicization. People came to see Christianity as a means to an end, he argues, and they realized they could get to that end without Christianity. As he sees it, “evangelical” isn’t a religious marker anymore – it’s synonymous with “white conservative republican.”

In Moore’s telling, the evangelical church is in crisis. Having lost its theological moorings, it’s less concerned with Jesus than it is with the news cycle. Statistics paint a similarly bleak picture. Pastors, for example, are virtually an endangered species. In 1990, one-third of evangelical pastors were under the age of 40. Today, it’s just 16 percent.

Political disagreements are fracturing churches across the country. The United Methodist Church, for example, has split into two separate entities while the Southern Baptist Convention is hemorrhaging affiliate churches that reject the church’s political direction.

Polling shows a surge in the number of Christians who self-identify as “mainline protestant,” a more theologically liberal and progressive branch of the church. Today, more white protestants identify with the mainline tradition than the evangelical church. Why is this?

The answer many exvangelicals – the term for those who have left evangelicalism – give is that the evangelical brand has become toxic. Sensing that evangelicalism is little more than a vehicle for social and political power, many Americans want nothing to do with it. Evangelicalism, in other words, has become an obstacle to evangelizing – to “make disciples of all nations,” as Jesus instructed his followers.

For Alberta, evangelicals are repeating a mistake made by some of Jesus’s first followers, as well as the religious elites of the time. Many people couldn’t understand why Jesus reached out to sinners, official enemies, and outcasts. What they didn’t grasp is that Jesus’s path to salvation was not exclusionary. Too many evangelicals, Alberta argues, view the church as a castle with high walls, not as the hospital to make sick people well Jesus envisaged. The doors of that hospital are always open; the gospel goes out to everyone.

If evangelicals wish to halt the decline of faith in America, Alberta concludes, they’ll have to rediscover this universalism. That, ultimately, means abandoning the exclusionary self-identity they have embraced while fighting political battles and learning to speak to all Americans.

Conclusion

For millions of conservative Christians, America is a cherished realm – a country distinguished, uniquely favored, and in a distinct covenant with God. But this love of country has morphed into an extreme right-wing nationalism.

As Tim Alberta sees it, the church he grew up with is losing its way. Today, Jesus has receded into the background as congregations around the country devote themselves to fighting political battles. If evangelicals don’t change course and rediscover their original purpose of spreading the gospel, he concludes, their movement risks losing relevance in the lives of ordinary Americans.

About the Author

Tim Alberta

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