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

by Tim Alberta

“You come home after work, put on Fox News, and leave it on until you go to bed. You trust Fox News—despite the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, the election bullcrap, all the revisionist history on January 6. You sit there for hours, listening to this garbage, rotting your soul.

“We are losing our most stable people. In Mississippi right now, one out of every four Baptist churches are without pastors.

“This evangelical-industrial complex—making millions, getting famous, building some ‘brand,’ restoring wolves to prey on more sheep—it has absolutely nothing to do with Jesus. And we’ve got to stop pretending it does.”

“Some of us are just tired of being used as political props,”

Evangelicals by and large no longer seemed to care whether their preferred candidate had a biblical

worldview, much less a command of scripture. Even at a place like Liberty—especially at a place like Liberty—politicians saw the pointlessness in talking about servanthood, about humility, about unity and peace and love for thy neighbor.

If a megachurch pastor is exposed for misconduct—if he and his staff are proven to be liars, bullies, scoundrels, enablers of abuse—then what good is the testimony of thousands of people who insist that the pastor brought them closer to Christ? One must take a comically small view of God to believe that these people could not have drawn closer to Christ while attending another church—one not guilty of systemic misbehavior.

Many right-wing pastors simply cannot stomach the notion of their churches being accountable to secular actors—legal bodies, law enforcement agencies, media outlets—because their vision for Christianity is one of absolute supremacy.

This effort to assert dominance over the culture is but a precondition for dominating the country itself.

Nearly 90 percent of white adherents to Christian nationalism agreed that “God intended America to be a new promised land” run by “European Christians.” The broader sample of respondents rejected that statement by a two-to-one margin.

More than any figure in American history, the forty-fifth president transformed evangelical from spiritual signifier into political punch line, exposing the selective morality and ethical inconsistency and rank hypocrisy that had for so long lurked in the subconscious of the movement.

The perception of Catholics and mainline Protestants was, among secular respondents, still a net positive, while those same respondents registered overwhelmingly negative feelings toward evangelicals. (On the bright side, evangelicals still held positive views of themselves; as the Christianity Today headline reassured: “Evangelicals Are the Most Beloved US Faith Group among Evangelicals.”)

A body of recent polling has shown a surge in the number of Christians who self-identify as mainline Protestants—and a corollary drop in those who call themselves evangelicals. (Some go by “ex-vangelical.”)