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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tim Alberta
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August 5 - August 10, 2025
They had all to some extent been seduced by the cult of Trumpism: convinced of the false choices that accompanied his rise, drained of certain convictions in the name of others, infected with a relativism that rendered once-firm standards suddenly quite malleable.
Truth be told, I did see evangelicals divided into two camps—one side faithful to an eternal covenant, the other side seduced by earthly idols of nation and influence and exaltation—but I was too scared to say so.
I was in the company of certain friends that day who would not claim to know Jesus, yet they shrouded me in peace and comfort. Some of these card-carrying evangelical Christians? Not so much.
That word, Thine, implies something more than mere ownership; it connotes exclusivity.
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.
The crisis of American evangelicalism comes down to an obsession with that worldly identity. Instead of fixing our eyes on the unseen, “since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal,” as Paul writes in Second Corinthians, we have become fixated on the here and now. Instead of seeing ourselves as exiles in a metaphorical Babylon, the way Peter describes the first-century Christians living in Rome, we have embraced our imperial citizenship. Instead of fleeing the temptation to rule all the world, like Jesus did, we have made deals with the devil.
“America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”
the great majority of what voters would hear from GOP politicians, came from the Old Testament. That never struck me as a coincidence. Jesus, in His three years of teaching, talked mostly about helping the poor, humbling oneself, and having no earthly ambition but to gain eternal life.
I just always found it strange that these Christians relied so infrequently on the words of Christ.
If Trump possessed any of what Paul dubbed “the fruit of the spirit” (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control), it wasn’t hanging low enough to be picked.
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.
you know what ‘get behind me’ means? It means, ‘I’m not following you.’ It means I’m going to follow Christ.” The preacher’s admonition was straightforward: By setting their minds on the things of man, Christians are telling Jesus to get behind them.
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.”
“I’m afraid we have to leave the church after all these decades,” the man said, “because you’re not interpreting the Bible in light of the Constitution.”
“Americans always think they deserve to win. And so, naturally, the Church has become about winning, too.”
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.
Much of their disdain for Carter and his Democratic Party owed to essential partisan disagreements: taxation, spending, regulation, foreign policy, labor disputes, and the like. Yet these matters were of no obvious moral urgency. And Falwell’s crew couldn’t build a viable public-facing effort—in the twilight of the 1970s—around some of their pet causes, such as fighting the Equal Rights Amendment and supporting religious schools that discriminated against Blacks.
And so Falwell would launch the Moral Majority with a focus on pornography, homosexuality, drug use, rising divorce rates, secularism in public schools, and, above all, abortion.
In 1968, Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical publication founded by Graham, convened a symposium of some two dozen theologians who ultimately could not agree whether abortion is sinful. In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution affirming the procedure under a generous range of circumstances.
Falwell was no stranger to opining on court rulings. Yet the first time he mentioned abortion from the pulpit was 1978—five years after the Roe decision.
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.
The Moral Majority had taken over the Republican Party. But Falwell wanted more. He wanted America.
few years into Falwell’s tenure, and soon after Obama took office, Liberty stripped its College Democrats club of official recognition, denying it the use of university funds. Not long after that ordeal, Liberty blocked campus networks from accessing the website of Lynchburg’s newspaper, the News & Advocate, after it reported on the school’s reliance on federal financial aid.
DeMoss let it rip. “Donald Trump is the only candidate who has dealt almost exclusively in the politics of personal insult,” he said. “The bullying tactics of personal insult have no defense—and certainly not for anyone who claims to be a follower of Christ. That’s what’s disturbing to so many people.
Having grown up as the pastor’s son in Jim Crow–era Mississippi, Gary Moore had seen things inside the church that haunted him. The story of the Southern Baptist Convention, after all, was inseparable from America’s original sin. Formed in 1845 by slave-owning whites who were alarmed at abolitionist efforts within the national Baptist Church, the SBC became an avatar of religious justification for the trafficking and ownership of human beings.
A renaissance of nationalist and neo-Confederate sentiment was discernible inside the SBC; meanwhile, the #MeToo movement, which had emboldened women to come forth with allegations of sexual abuse, was pounding on the denomination’s door.
“Why do we want to be a part of this?”
Moore had to think of his actual family. They had been bullied right alongside him, facing “constant threats from white nationalists and white supremacists, including within our convention,”
“There’s a tendency in fallen human beings to take secondary identities that are important and make them ultimate.
Fox News, the right-wing panic factory.
Once a person becomes convinced that they are under siege—that enemies are coming for them and want to destroy their way of life—what is to stop that person from becoming radicalized?
A majority of respondents came in rejecting the idea that any religion—especially Christianity—somehow made for a better society.
“Whereas it used to be quite popular for people to say the problem with Christianity is that it’s too self-righteous,” Dickson concluded, “it was now far more common for people to say, ‘Actually, the problem with Christianity is that it’s wicked.’”
In 2007, 78 percent of Americans identified with Christianity; by 2021, it was down to 63 percent.
the American Church is suffering from “bully syndrome.” Too many Christians are swaggering around and picking on marginalized people and generally acting like jerks because they’re angry and apprehensive. “Every teacher will tell you, the bully on the playground is usually the most insecure boy. It’s a compensation mechanism. If the boy were truly confident, he wouldn’t need to throw his weight around,” Dickson said. “It’s the same with the Church. The bully Church is the insecure Church.”
There was the authentic martyrdom that established the early Church and the artificial martyrdom of the Church today; there was the actual persecution of Christ’s followers in Rome and the embellished persecution of his followers in America.
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.
that too many American Christians think of themselves as American Christians.
Christians “are now showing us what they’ve always been thinking.”
“They need help to understand that you can care for your country without worshipping your country,” Bacote said. “They also need help to understand that you can care for your country and seek good for your neighbors. Just because other people are getting something, doesn’t mean you’re losing something.”
To awaken from its fog, Dickson told me, American evangelicalism must first rid itself of its persecution complex.
THE FIRST TIME I WALKED INTO THE SANCTUARY AT FLOODGATE, I didn’t see a cross. But I did see American flags—lots of them. There were flags on the screens behind the stage, flags on the literature being handed out.
Inside the sanctuary, attendees wore MAGA caps and Second Amendment–related shirts. I didn’t see a single person carrying a Bible.
Not a single person seemed to register any objection, or even surprise, at this pastor boasting that he’d done a Nazi salute from the pulpit.
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.
One afternoon, while waiting in line at a pop-up kiosk selling coffee and pastries, I heard the woman behind me broadcasting her disgust at seeing Starbucks was being served. “They put baby parts in their coffee,” she told her friends.
Reed unleashed a pack of starved partisan animals to feast on the fright of Christians.
Pence had knowingly bastardized a precious passage from the New Testament. The epistle to the Hebrews states, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” In addition to substituting “Old Glory” for “Jesus”—a stunt that was nothing short of blasphemous—Pence deliberately conflated the freedom of being reborn in Christ with the supposedly all-conquering civil liberties enjoyed by Americans.
Just as you might stop taking marital advice from your neighbor if you saw cell phone footage of him paying for prostitutes and cocaine in Vegas, you might stop taking spiritual guidance from your neighbor if you saw him chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” at the Capitol Building.
If Jesus warned us that what comes out of our mouths reveals what resides in our hearts, how can we shrug off lies and hate speech as mere political rhetoric?
