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

by Tim Alberta

Character didn’t matter. Truth didn’t matter. Honor and integrity didn’t matter. Those were means, and all that mattered was the ends: winning elections.

Thomas and Dobson acknowledged, in the pages of their book, that they had not ushered in the sort of kingdom-on-earth spiritual utopia about which they and so many American evangelicals fantasized. In fact, there was evidence to suggest that the country was angrier, more antagonistic, more fearful, more divided—less Christlike—because of the Moral Majority.

“You can’t have a legitimate conversation with these people who are all in on Trump. Because if you find any flaw in him, even flaws that are demonstrable, they either excuse it or attack you.”

nobody went all in on Trump quite like Pence did. Once a respected arbiter of ethical matters, the former vice president forfeited his reputation—not to mention some longtime friends and admirers—by subjugating himself so thoroughly to his boss. But even that wasn’t enough to satisfy the MAGA mob. The moment Pence thought for himself, choosing the rule of law over the ego of a president, Trump’s minions turned on him.

to profess publicly, time and again, that you’re a follower of Jesus before anything else—is to invite and deserve perpetual scrutiny. Unlike all the craven, self-indulgent schemers who had surrounded Trump, the vice president knew the difference between right and wrong. He deserved to be held to a higher standard. Pence did the courageous and honorable thing on January 6, but he was the one who’d spent four years ignoring and excusing all the abuses of power and violent rhetoric and authoritarian impulses that set January 6 into motion.

Moore said he’d spent years justifying his continued role at the SBC because of “the illusion that if I lose my seat at the table, it will be taken by somebody worse, and therefore it will be my fault that the institution suffers.” But his very presence at the table, Moore finally realized, was doing a different kind of damage.

the furiousness of their messaging—on any given subject—did not reflect the realities of the matter at hand, never mind the example of Christ Himself.

“There’s always a threat. Look at Tucker Carlson every single night: ‘They’re out to get you.’ And it works,”

He said, ‘You can’t raise money on a positive. If the goal is bringing in money, you have to scare them.’”

“The Book of Isaiah says that God views all the nations of the world as nothing but a drop in the bucket. All means all,” Thomas told me. “Now, has America been uniquely blessed? Sure. But it could also be uniquely cursed. You better be careful, because patriotism quickly turns into idolatry.

“WHEN YOUR IDOLS BEGIN TO DISAPPOINT YOU,” RUSSELL MOORE SAID, “it can lead you back to God.”

Today’s evangelicalism preaches bitterness toward unbelievers and bottomless grace for churchgoing Christians, yet the New Testament model is exactly the opposite, stressing strict accountability for those inside the Church and abounding charity to those outside it.

“The great fault in the evangelical movement today, is that we’re disobedient to the commands of the one we claim to follow. What were those commands? Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Care for widows and orphans. Visit those in prison. Seek first the kingdom of God.”

Unlike the Catholic Church, which at least offsets its scandals with bountiful, centralized, highly visible social programs—for the hungry, the disabled, the drug addicted, the abused, the sick, and anyone else who needs help—the evangelical Church is not exactly synonymous with charity.

Whereas Catholics stress the “works” that must accompany faith, Protestants adhere to the doctrine of salvation by grace alone. Intrinsically, then, the “public priorities” of many evangelicals skew away from the social good even as their churches make profound contributions to it.

Spectacles that would have appalled and shocked generations of American churchgoers had become commonplace, garish manifestations of a spiritual ecosystem spun so far off its axis that the falcon could not hear the falconer (even with all the yelling, battle axes, and Pence jeering).

Global Vision is less a revival than it is a circus.

Graham grew openly suspicious of partisanship as his career wore on. He distanced himself from the religious right, eschewed the Moral Majority, and became known as “America’s pastor,” the man who met with and prayed over every U.S. president spanning nearly seventy years. Before his death, Graham repented for his early political activism, saying he’d “crossed the line” in ways that harmed his witness for Christ.

There was no foaming, mad-as-hell partisanship to be found at a Graham rally. There certainly were no guns, no calls for violence, no swarms of people dressed—and visibly ready—for combat.

The church had been established on the concept of “radical compassion,” but now it was known as just plain radical. Whatever money Global Vision raised for the hurting was being dwarfed by the proceeds Locke generated by inflicting pain onto others. Suddenly the reward found in loving one’s enemies seemed trivial relative to the reward found in hating them.

He discovered that there was a market for being irrational. He came to appreciate that wrath is a business model, that crazy is a church growth strategy, that hating enemies is far more powerful—at least in the immediate sense—than loving them.

It’s easy for evangelicals to dismiss Global Vision as an outlier, the same way they did Westboro Baptist. It’s much harder to scrutinize the extremism that has infiltrated their own churches and ponder its logical endpoint. In this environment, if a pastor begins to dabble in conspiracies and political deception, what guardrails exist to keep him from going off the grid altogether? And what if he does go off the grid—does it even register?

what their congregants crave, more and more, is not so much objective religious instruction but subjective religious justification, a clergy-endorsed rationale for living their lives in a manner that might otherwise feel unbecoming for a Christian.

three features of creeping totalitarianism in the name of religious conviction. The first can be seen when leaders assert the primacy of an ethnic or cultural identity over shared humanity. The second is when they stress the purification of those identities (inevitably leading to forms of ethnic cleansing). The third is when violence becomes legitimized for the protection of group identities.

When believers invoke eternal symbols to advance an earthly goal, those symbols become cheapened to the point of ultimately meaning nothing.

“I’ve come to believe . . . that the Christ of the gospel has become a moral stranger to us,” he said. “If you read the gospels, the things that profoundly mattered to Christ, they marginally matter to most evangelical Christians. And the things that really profoundly matter to them, marginally mattered to Christ.”

extremists were now the establishment. Those fabled gatekeepers who once kept crackpots away from positions of authority no longer existed. Those fanciful unwritten rules that dictated who did and didn’t deserve our attention no longer applied. This was true for American politics, and it was true for American Christianity.

A small-town restaurant owner who’d been arrested four times in the decade before seeking political office, Boebert was fond of boasting that God told her to run for Congress because her unlikely victory “would be a sign and a wonder to the unbeliever.” If the unbeliever paid attention to Boebert, the only signs they saw were of psychosis.

Simply put, many American evangelicals cannot let go. They cannot detach themselves from national identity or abandon the notion that fighting for America is fighting for God. Hence the creeping allure of “Christian nationalism.”

“Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally,” Orwell wrote. “Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.”

“Put on the full armor of God,” DeSantis would say, “and take a stand against the left’s schemes.” In substituting “the left” for “the devil,” DeSantis wasn’t just counting on the biblical illiteracy of his listeners. He was banking on a nationalist fervor that rendered scriptural restraint irrelevant.

He was confident that evangelicals in the audience would agree that he knew better than Paul; that the real enemy is the left; that the real struggle is against flesh and blood; that the real power belongs to a politician who can ignore Anthony Fauci’s coronavirus protocols and eliminate Disney World’s tax exemptions.

Something was happening on the religious right, something more menacing and extreme than anything that preceded it. This was no longer about winning elections and preserving the culture. This was about destroying enemies and dominating the country by any means necessary. There was no rhetoric too appalling, no alliance too shady, no biblical application too sacrilegious.

Jesus deserves a better Christianity than this.

“You see, the kingdom of God isn’t real to most of these people. They can’t perceive it,” Zahnd said. “What’s real is America. What’s real is this tawdry world of partisan politics, this winner-takes-all blood sport. So, they keep charging into the fray, and the temptation to bow down to the devil to gain control over the kingdoms of this world becomes more and more irresistible.”

“You are forming your people in anger and hate. You are helping to intensify their capacity to hate other people,” Zahnd said. “You are giving them permission to carry around this permanent rage.”

God does not tolerate idols competing for His glory, Zahnd said, and neither should anyone who claims to worship Him. “You can take up the sword of Caesar or you can take up the cross of Jesus,” Zahnd told me. “You have to choose.”

The public’s perception of evangelical Christianity is worse than at any point in recorded history. Church attendance is steadily eroding and will nosedive as Baby Boomers die off in greater numbers.

Whereas the evangelical movement once downplayed its alliances with those who might undermine its moral credibility, today it openly champions the likes of Donald Trump and Herschel Walker.

Instead of money, the term used in most translations is mammon, from the Greek word mamōnas. Drawing from roots in Hebrew and Aramaic, mamōnas has historically been understood as referring not just to material wealth but to any entity that encourages greed, prestige, self-glorification.

The Dobbs case certainly changed the landscape of abortion policy in America, but not in the ways people like Wolfe had envisioned. Once a controlled and regulated medical issue, abortion became a wild-west patchwork of policies in the aftermath of Dobbs. Some red states rushed to ban the procedures entirely. But many more blue and purple states, now liberated from any overarching federal framework, pursued laws that made Roe v. Wade look conservative by comparison. On Election Day 2022, the citizens of six states voted on ballot measures that would shatter old precedents by dramatically increasing access to abortion. All six measures—including three in Republican-dominated states—ended in defeat for the pro-life side. The fifty-year campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade had succeeded, and the result was more abortions in America.

If one is driven to electoral advocacy by the conviction that mankind bears the image of God, why stop at opposing abortion? What about the shunning of refugees? What about the forced separation of babies from their mothers? What about the hollowing out of programs that feed hungry kids? What about the lifelong incarceration of nonviolent offenders and the wrongful execution of the innocent? What about the Darwinist health-care system that prices out sick people and denies treatment to poor people and produces the developed world’s highest maternal mortality rate? What about the fact that, in 2020, guns had become the number one cause of death for children in the United States?

Donald Trump promised a transactional relationship with evangelical voters: He would give them pro-life policies in exchange for their unconditional support. That transaction went through, but the receipt isn’t pretty. Abortion rates spiked during his presidency.

Simply put, evangelicals hate feeling like outcasts, and are quick to uncritically follow those who make them feel accepted, relevant, enlightened.

He had persuaded the churchgoing class that it was better to win with vice than to lose with virtue. He had blinded believers to the means and fixed their eyes on the ends. Most significantly, he had shown evangelicals that their movement need not be led by an evangelical.

The campaign against French and his family was vicious. Twitter trolls bombarded him with death threats. They flooded the internet with messages accusing French’s wife, Nancy, an outspoken survivor of sexual assault, of sleeping with groups of Black men during his deployment to Iraq. They photoshopped images of his youngest daughter, who’d been adopted from Ethiopia, inside a gas chamber (Trump, depicted in a Nazi SS uniform, was shown with his finger on the ignition button). The specter of physical violence was inescapable.

She asked whether he’d been bothered by Bill Clinton’s womanizing. The elder responded that yes, he had been. “But you’re okay with paying hush money to porn stars and bragging about grabbing women by the pussy?” she asked. The elder gritted his teeth. “You,” he said, turning to David, “had better get your woman under control.”

arguing that Christian missionaries working in Africa—whom the Obama administration was working to bring back to the United States—should not be allowed to reenter the country. “THE UNITED STATES HAS ENOUGH PROBLEMS,” Trump had tweeted. “People that go to far away places to help out are great—but must suffer the consequences!” Moore paused, blinking rapidly, struggling to summon the words. “And it was like, come on, this one is as easy as it gets: Missionaries caring for the sick get to come home,” he said. “But you had evangelicals defending Trump’s position. Why?”

What once seemed like heightened—but not unhealthy—political engagement turned out to be toxic, malevolent, paranoiac thinking that Trump skillfully harnessed in his rise to the presidency.

Darling noted how there were people at his church who had strayed “really far into the conspiracy stuff, and sending them legitimate news articles with facts does not work.”