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

by Tim Alberta

Trump had won a historic 81 percent of those white evangelical voters. But, as I’d written in the book, that statistic was just a surface-level indicator of the foundational shifts taking place inside the Church.

infected with a relativism that rendered once-firm standards suddenly quite malleable.

What I could offer was a window into my faith tradition. It happens to be the tradition that is the most polarizing and the least understood; the tradition that is more politically relevant and domestically disruptive than all the others combined: evangelicalism.

evangelicals were distinct because of four principal characteristics: Biblicism (treating scripture as the essential word of God); Crucicentrism (stressing that Jesus’s death makes atonement for mankind possible); Conversionism (believing that sinners must be born again and continually transformed into Christlikeness); and Activism (sharing the gospel as an outward sign of that inward transformation). This framework—now commonly called the “Bebbington quadrilateral”—was widely embraced,

To the present day there remains no real consensus around what it means to be an “evangelical.” There was a time when this etymological confusion proved a strength, prompting a growing number of Protestants to set aside organizational rivalries and join beneath a common decentralized banner. Yet such ambiguity was ripe for exploitation. Powerful people began to sense that if doctrinal differences were so easily set aside, then perhaps there was something else—not just something spiritual, but something cultural—that united these evangelicals.

“Evangelical” soon became synonymous with “conservative Christian,” and eventually with “white conservative Republican.”

Trump had campaigned in 2016 on a promise that “Christianity will have power” if he won the White House; now he warned that his opponent in the 2020 election, former vice president Joe Biden, was going to “hurt God” and target Christians for their religious beliefs. Embracing dark rhetoric and violent conspiracy theories, the president seized upon notions of America’s prophesied apocalypse, enlisting leading evangelicals to help frame a cosmic spiritual clash between the God-fearing Republicans who supported Trump and the secular leftists who viewed the forty-fifth president as the last obstacle standing between them and a conquest of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos.

Christian imagery was ubiquitous at the scene in Washington: rioters forming prayer circles, singing hymns, carrying Bibles and crosses. The perversion of America’s prevailing religion would forever be associated with this tragedy; as one of the legislative ringleaders, Missouri senator Josh Hawley, explained in a speech some time after the blood had been scrubbed from the Capitol steps, “We are a revolutionary nation precisely because we are the heirs of the revolution of the Bible.”

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

the twin narratives of America at the abyss and Christianity in the crosshairs were ubiquitous within evangelicalism. Trump instinctually understood this.

He believed that God had a plan for him, a plan for America, and a plan for Israel, and saw his unlikely partnership with Trump as a way of advancing all three. Pence made no apology for mixing faith and politics, though he was always quick to prioritize. “I’m a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican,” he would say

Who would’ve thought that Pence would end up to be the “good one” - I used to demonize that man in college when he was governor of Indiana but he now seems reasonable comparatively

The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements. Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship. “At its root, we’re talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people,”

“We’re clinging to something in America that is a sad parody of what Jesus has already won. We have a kingdom awaiting us, but we’re trying to appropriate a part of this world and call it a kingdom.”

people have nonetheless allowed their national identity to shape their faith identity instead of the other way around.

he believed that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ipso facto an attack on the character of people like himself, which I think, at some subconscious level, created a permission structure for him to ignore the shows of depravity.

Patriotism in the pulpit is one thing; lots of sanctuaries fly an American flag on the rostrum. This was something else. This was taking the weight and the gravity and the eternal certainty of God and lending it to an ephemeral and questionable cause. This was rebuking people for failing to unconditionally follow a president of the United States when the only authority we’re meant to unconditionally follow—particularly in a setting of stained-glass windows—is Christ Himself.

preaching a blood-and-soil Christian nationalism that merged two kingdoms into one.

The candidate was serving up a cocktail of discontent—one part cultural displacement, one part religious persecution, one part nationalist fervor—that would prove irresistible to certain people he pastored, people who were scandalized by shifting public norms and by the prospect of Christians losing their status in a secularizing America.

it’s hardly coincidental that most of the churches in chaos are old, white, and evangelical. These are the congregations, he said, that have spent decades marinating in rhetoric of “Armageddon for the Church, enemies coming for us.”

Whereas it was once feared that sinister geopolitical forces would target America as a means to extinguishing its holy light to the world, the narrative began to shift as the Moral Majority gained clout in the 1980s.

it wasn’t Nancy Pelosi they were after; it was Mike Pence. A fellow believer. This is the biggest change I’ve observed in the last few years. The enemies aren’t those outside of the Church; it’s people in your church who don’t think exactly the way you do.”

Falwell would soon emerge as one of the most consequential figures of the late twentieth century; that his synthesizing of Christianity and conservatism would roil America’s political landscape and radicalize its Protestant subculture; that his small school in Lynchburg, Virginia, would eventually develop into a multibillion-dollar behemoth and, become the embodiment of both the great promise and wasted potential of the evangelical Church.

Fundamentalism was outmoded to many younger believers. Inspired by the likes of Billy Graham, they gravitated toward a broader, more modern Christianity less about rules and more about relationships; it was joyful and civic-minded and proudly pro-American.

author states : gathered loosley under the term ,evangelicals'

in 1971, fundamentalism was enjoying a resurgence.

the very nature of fundamentalism was changing. Preachers who once prescribed total detachment from worldly affairs were now trafficking in jeremiads of civilizational collapse, winning huge audiences of older, conservative Christians who feared that the American apocalypse was nigh.

In 1976, the pollster George Gallup found that one in three Americans identified as born-again Christians, and that an even larger share of the electorate agreed that the Bible should be interpreted literally. Falwell sensed that a fourth great awakening could be at hand,

with the culture wars beginning to rage, Falwell sensed an opening to turn Democratic rule into a referendum on American morality.

Falwell didn’t need another church. He needed an institution parallel to the church, a cultural stronghold that could train conservative warriors to wage a frontal strike on the forces of secularism.

Carter’s presidency was proving injurious to the right—to the whole country, they would argue—and conservatives were desperate to defeat him in 1980. Republicans could not retake the presidency with their existing coalition. They needed to engage an untapped segment of voters. They needed to galvanize fundamentalist Christians.

Schaeffer had sold Falwell on the need to partner with “co-belligerents,” people of different beliefs but shared objectives. The implications, political and spiritual, were profound. Whereas Falwell had once treated theology as the imperative—prioritizing saving the individual soul, believing that America’s redemption was downstream from mass conversion—he was now operating in reverse, setting aside religious differences and working with non-Christians toward a supposed national salvation.

The Republican presidential primary was the first chance for Falwell’s group to flex its muscle. Whereas the GOP establishment’s preference, George H. W. Bush, kept a strategic distance from the religious right, Ronald Reagan made his courtship of these newly mobilized Christian voters a tactical linchpin of his campaign, specifically engaging on the abortion issue

A new standard had been set in Republican politics. That which had animated the party for much of its modern history—an educated, moneyed, socially moderate, culturally coastal sensibility—was suddenly and unceremoniously out of style. Moving forward, passing muster in the GOP would require talking as much about abortion as economics. It would mean campaigning more from the pulpits of southern churches and less inside the parlors of northeastern country clubs. It would involve the concession that base voters no longer took their orders from a party boss or precinct captain, but rather, from a Baptist preacher in Virginia. The Moral Majority had taken over the Republican Party.

Disparaging the weak leadership at the highest levels of American government—and the soft, turn-the-other-cheek mentality that this particular audience was wont to possess—Trump offered two words of advice to the ten thousand students inside the Liberty auditorium: “Get even.”

In 2012

There was an ugliness that lurked in the subconscious of the school, a spiteful alter ego to the Christlike character that was meant to permeate the institution.

Had the vision of Jerry Falwell Sr. been corrupted? Or was Liberty today reaping precisely what the school’s founder had sown a half century earlier?

Moore offered his optimistic take. Yes, he said, there were Christians who seemed intent on undermining their witness. But they were dying off. Their kids and their grandkids—the future of the electorate, the future of evangelicalism—were about to take over. There was a pause. “Yeah,” Brooks said. “But you’d better watch out for the death spasms.”

“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.”

In the brief time since Trump had departed the White House, I’d encountered small pockets of compunction in the evangelical world. The people I spoke to were like hungover frat brothers the morning after a kegger—not necessarily apologizing for their behavior the night before, but acknowledging somewhat sheepishly that things had gotten out of hand.

Jeffress told reporters. “I really am not nearly as concerned about a candidate’s fiscal policy or immigration policy as I am about where they stand on biblical issues.”

Big fuckin yikes

incredibly, 72 percent of white evangelicals responded that, yes, a politician who behaved immorally in their personal life could still perform their public duties with integrity. Five years earlier, white evangelicals had registered the lowest rate of support for that idea; now they were registering the highest.

What I’d personally encountered during those five years wasn’t just an increased appetite for power; it was a sudden onset of dread. They had spent Obama’s presidency marinating in a message of end-times agitation. Something they loved was soon to be lost. Time was running out to reclaim it. The old rules no longer applied. Desperate times called for desperate—even disgraceful—measures.

In 2022, an essay published in First Things magazine lamented that American society has gradually turned against Christianity over the past fifty years. The author, Aaron Renn, described three distinct eras: the “Positive World,” predating 1994, in which Christianity was embraced; the “Neutral World,” from 1994 to 2014, in which Christianity was tolerated; and the “Negative World,” from 2014 to present, in which Christianity is rejected. The essay, a viral sensation among evangelicals, made some compelling arguments. Yet its thesis evinced three essential blind spots.

1: applies to Whites only 2: Jesus promises no preferential treatment 3: Christians in the US are better off than a lot of the rest of the world

Far more revealing, however, was that he saw the persecution of Christians as sufficient to justify behavior that is antithetical to what Christ taught.

“I do think some of what we’ve categorized as Christian suffering is not suffering for righteousness. We’re supposed to be suffering for doing God’s will and what His word prescribes to do, not because government goes against my preferences.”

the college has in recent years become a clique without a tribe: too theologically conservative for many liberal Christians, too attitudinally passive for many conservative Christians.

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. Bunker argued that much of this bad behavior can be traced back to the Christian victimhood complex, which causes some believers to lash out against enemies real and imagined.

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. We have grown so accustomed to our advantages—to our prosperity and our worldly position—that we feel entitled to them.

Modern evangelicalism is defined by a certain fatalism about the nation’s character. The result is not merely a willingness to forgive what is wrong; it can be a belief, bordering on a certainty, that what is wrong is actually right.

they were challenging the pastor’s policy of political neutrality from the pulpit, and accusing him of taking the easy way out of the debates fracturing his church. “And I remember telling them, ‘The harder thing to do is what I’m doing,’” the pastor said. “This is how you lose people. How you gain people is, you pick a tribe, raise the flag, and be really loud about it. That’s how you gain a bunch of numbers. That is so easy to do. And it cheapens the gospel.”