The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

by Tim Alberta

At the opposite end were the Christians who willfully jettisoned their credibility while voting for Trump—people who embraced the charge of being reactionary hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a playboy turned president.

God has His own kingdom; no nation in this world can compare. God has His own power; no amount of political, cultural, or social influence can compare. God has His own glory; no exaltation of earthly beings can compare. These are nonnegotiable to the Christian faith. One of the Bible’s dominant narrative themes—uniting Old Testament and New Testament, prophets and disciples, prayers and epistles—is the admonition to resist idolatry at all costs. Jesus frames the decision in explicitly binary terms: We can serve and worship God or we can serve and worship the gods of this world. Too many American evangelicals have tried to do both. And the consequences for the Church have been devastating.

“What’s wrong with American evangelicals?” Winans thought a moment. “America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”

“At its root, we’re talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people,” Winans said. “If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel. You believe the sorts of promises made to Israel are applicable to this country; you view America as a covenant that needs to be protected. You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance.

“God told us, this place is not our promised land,” he said. “But they’re trying to make it a promised land.”

“The Church is supposed to challenge us,” Winans told me. “But a lot of these folks don’t want to be challenged. They definitely don’t want to be challenged where their idols are.

In his second letter to Timothy, the apostle Paul, recognizing that his death was near, offered his pupil some parting wisdom about the fickle nature of a religious audience. “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine,” he wrote. “Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.”

Today, politics is changing the definition of what a Christian is. We’re setting the Bible aside and using a different standard.”

They had totally lost sight of people who aren’t like them. And I said, ‘What you’ve done is you’ve baptized your worldview and called it Christian.’”

By the time the Iron Curtain fell, and the United States was left standing as the world’s sole superpower, it was clear to evangelicals that the only enemy left to defeat was the one within.

“Americans always think they deserve to win. And so, naturally, the Church has become about winning, too.”

Patriotism divorced from piety is futile, after all; those who win the world but lose their souls are champions of nothing.

“Anytime you have a group that feels as though it’s headed toward generational demise, it lashes out,” Brooks told Moore. “It puts up a fight. It refuses to give up what’s theirs.”

Southern Baptist worshippers could, at that time, live with criticisms of Trump himself. But the notion that they were in the wrong by promoting his candidacy—according to a denominational leader whose salary was paid by their collection plates—was unforgivable.

The public hasn’t turned against Christians because they act better than the rest of the world, she said. The public has turned against Christians because they act worse than the rest of the world.

The next generation of would-be believers, Bunker warned, is watching us. “They want to know if we love Jesus first”—more than money, more than social status, more than a political party, more than a country.

The first is that too many American Christians are woefully under-discipled. The second—a by-product of the first—is that too many American Christians think of themselves as American Christians.

Much of what drives evangelicals here is “fear that we’re losing our country, fear that we’re losing our power,” Dickson said. “And it’s so unhealthy. We should think of ourselves as eager dinner guests at someone else’s banquet. We are happy to be there, happy to share our perspective. But we are always respectful, always humble, because this isn’t our home.”

Humility doesn’t come easy to the American evangelical. The self-importance that accompanies citizenship in the world’s mightiest nation is trouble enough, never mind when it’s augmented by the certainty of exclusive membership in the afterlife. We are an immodest and excessively indulged people.

Rather than being challenged and transformed by the gospel, they were now coming to church to have their worst impulses confirmed.

Modern evangelicalism is defined by a certain fatalism about the nation’s character.

They weren’t leaving for a lack of discipling; they were leaving because they didn’t want to be discipled.

Unsavory alliances would need to be forged. Sordid tactics would need to be embraced. The first step toward preserving Christian values, it seemed, was to do away with Christian values.

Did he really think #FJB was an appropriate way to bring God back? Klucken shrugged. “People keep on asking for it,” he told me. “You’ve got to give the people what they want.”

The prosperity gospel can be conveniently reverse engineered. Forget about the faith aspect: If you have lots of money, then clearly God has blessed you, and if God has blessed you, then clearly you are living a godly life.

Yes, there was incessant talk about a radical “woke agenda” that was advancing Critical Race Theory and transgenderism and the like. But for every warning of progressivism run amok there was a rebuke of conservatism gone soft; pastors and politicians freely labeled as “cowards” anyone who shared their values but refused to go to war for them. The enemy wasn’t simply those godless secularists on the left, but those gutless Christians on the right.