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

by Tim Alberta

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.

Two things can be true. First, most of America’s founding fathers believed in some deity, and many were devout Christians, drawing their revolutionary inspiration from the scriptures. Second, the founders wanted nothing to do with theocracy. Many of their families had fled religious persecution in Europe; they knew the threat posed by what George Washington, several weeks into his presidency in 1789, described in a letter to the United Baptist Churches of Virginia as “the horrors of spiritual tyranny.” Washington was hardly alone: From skeptics like Benjamin Franklin to committed Christians like John Jay, the founders shared John Adams’s view that America was conceived not “under the influence of Heaven” or in conversation with the Creator, but rather by using “reason and the senses.”

“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. If you tell them what they don’t want to hear, they’re gone. They’ll find another church. They’ll find a pastor who tells them what they want to hear.” None of this is new. 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.”

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

In early 2017, a month into Trump’s presidency, the Public Religion Research Institute asked a sample of Americans which religious group they thought faced more discrimination in the United States, Muslims or Christians. The general public was twice as likely to pick Muslims in response; non-religious respondents were three times as likely. Both white Catholics and white mainline Protestants agreed, in overwhelming fashion, that Muslims face more discrimination in the United States than Christians. Only one group of respondents dissented from this view: white evangelicals.

“The people who talk about how wonderful persecution is,” he said, “are those who’ve never experienced it.”

“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.”

“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.” These answers aren’t difficult to find, Bacote told me. Christians just need to start looking.

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

The Trump conversion experience—having once been certain of his darkness, suddenly awakening to see his light—is not to be underestimated, especially when it touches people whose lives revolve around notions of transformation. And yet it reflects a phenomenon greater than Trump himself. 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.

Jesus did not take lightly the question of veracity. Contrasting Himself with Satan—“the father of lies”—Jesus described Himself as truth incarnate, and told His disciples that “the truth will set you free.” This should be a terrifying thought for any professing Christian: Spreading lies is not only antithetical to the example of Christ; it is doing the devil’s work.

Would a serious Christian see fit, I wondered, to condone this brutish behavior in any other area of life? Would they condone vicious ad hominem attacks if they were launched at the office? Would they condone the use of vulgarities and violent innuendo inside their home? Would they condone blatant abuses of power at their local school or nonprofit or church? If the answer is no, then why do they accept it in politics? Because politics is about the ends, not the means. Since the ends are about power—the power to legislate, the power to investigate, the power to accumulate more power—the means are inherently defensible, even if they are, by any other measure, utterly indefensible.

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? If Christians are called to reflect the awesome power of a God who renews minds and transforms hearts—who dwells within us, seeking our complete devotion to Him, commanding us to lead lives of truth and love that might shine His light in a darkened world—how can there be a special exemption for politics?

“One time, I actually asked one of our fundraisers, ‘Why don’t you ever send out a positive letter about what you’re doing with people’s donations?’ And he looked at me with this cynical look. He said, ‘You can’t raise money on a positive. If the goal is bringing in money, you have to scare them.’”

American evangelicals have a talent for what some theologians call “baptizing the past.” That means propagating the tale of George Washington asking a chaplain to dunk him in the icy waters at Valley Forge when no supporting historical record exists; insisting that Thomas Jefferson was a God-fearing humanitarian when he was in fact a slaveholding epicurean deist; seizing upon Lincoln’s appropriation of scripture to paint him as an evangelical when he was known to mock revivalists and rarely attend church; and one day, no doubt, citing photos of Trump in an Oval Office prayer circle to argue that the forty-fifth president was himself an earnest follower of Christ.

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.”

The notion that God was “calling” on Christians to “take back” their country—especially by force—is laughably incompatible with the teachings of Christ. It was Jesus who subverted the authorities with teachings of obedience and edicts of nonviolence; it was Jesus who mocked His captors for brandishing weapons as they arrested Him. “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me?” He asked.

The pastor who finds himself offering religious justification today might find himself inventing it tomorrow. In the darkest chapters of Church history—the Crusades and Inquisition, the slave trade and sexual abuse scandals—the common denominator has been a willingness on the part of Christian authority figures to distort scripture for what they perceive to be some greater good.

Religion and politics are natural enemies; both provide a sense of belonging and self-actualization to the masses. Tension between the two is healthy and necessary. When one appropriates the other, history shows that oppression—leading to death and human suffering at a woeful scale—is the inevitable result.

In his view, there are 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.

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

“Christianity is inherently countercultural. That’s how it thrives. When it tries to become a dominant culture, it becomes corrupted. That’s been the case from the very beginning,” Zahnd said.

The forty-fifth president had foundationally altered the expectations and incentive structures within American Christendom. 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.

Simply put, Trump the elder created a new moral-political framework in which people like Kirk and Eric Metaxas and John Zmirak convince evangelicals to distrust any believer who dares stray from their absolutist ideology. They do so by fomenting fears of a crushing, coordinated assault on Christianity—and by attacking anyone who refuses to adopt a militant posture in response.

Alas, the irony of it all. Churches had been so preoccupied with safeguarding their reputations that they behaved in ways that destroyed their reputations.

Jesus possessed a uniquely pessimistic view of human nature. Having taken on flesh to redeem a fallen mankind, He saw how people continually tried to justify themselves rather than repenting and seeking renewal in God’s grace. He especially saw this among religious people. There is a reason why Jesus is harder on the Pharisees than He is on the unbelieving masses. There is a reason why Paul demands we rebuke sinful church leaders “before everyone, so that the others may take warning.” Throughout scripture, God demands a greater accountability from those in positions of spiritual influence.

There were, as some of his professors liked to say, “two Liberties.” One was a presentable, outward-facing university that trained champions for Christ. The other was an insular, unstable, paranoid family business run by sycophants who weaponized spirituality against any person or idea that might threaten their hold on power.