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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tim Alberta
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November 19 - November 29, 2024
God has His own kingdom; no nation in this world can compare. God has His own power; no amount of political, cultural, or social influence can compare. God has His own glory; no exaltation of earthly beings can compare.
What these groups shared was a prophetic certainty, promulgated by the evangelical movement for decades, that godless Democrats would one day launch a frontal assault on Christianity in America.
“What’s wrong with American evangelicals?” Winans thought a moment. “America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”
“A LOT OF PEOPLE BELIEVE THERE WAS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION OF this country. A biblical conception of this country,” Pastor Winans told me. “And that’s the source of a lot of our problems.”
“If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel. You believe the sorts of promises made to Israel are applicable to this country; you view America as a covenant that needs to be protected. You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance. At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we’re called to be.”
“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.”
Dad really did believe this; 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.
The disciples didn’t get it. Even as Jesus stunned His would-be executioner, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, with words that changed history—“My kingdom is not of this world”—they were crushed and inconsolable, believing the prophecy of a promised ruler had died along with Him. It wasn’t until Jesus reappeared to them, describing how the prophecy was in fact now fulfilled, that the disciples realized what real power looks like. “Once they finally understood, after Jesus was crucified and raised from the dead and ascended into heaven, it changed their faith,” Winans said. “And here’s the
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During Obama’s eight years in office, Torres observed more and more partisan hubbub inside the church. Some of it was harmless enough. But some of it was unhealthy and even unsafe: the murmurs of Obama as a Muslim Manchurian candidate, appointed by Satan himself, on a mission to destroy America and American Christianity.
even the perception of choosing political sides had fractured Goodwill. The only certainty was that there would be more uncertainty: elections, wars, acts of God. Torres knew that he needed to set the eyes of his flock on Jesus. What he didn’t know was how to keep them there.
Peter was pursuing victory in the world; Jesus was promising victory over the world.
“All the winning in this world doesn’t make a difference. If you beat your opponent—if you crush them in some political argument—what do you have to show for it? A better country?” the pastor asked, shaking his head. “You think so, but you don’t.”
In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution affirming the procedure under a generous range of circumstances. (W. A. Criswell, the SBC ex-president and legendary pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, one of America’s leading megachurches, approved: “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person.”) In 1973, Barry Garrett, the D.C. bureau chief for Baptist Press, reacted to the Roe decision by writing that the Supreme Court had “advanced the cause of religious liberty, human equality and
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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. It’s not [the] Christ-like behavior that Liberty has spent 40 years promoting with its students.”
As a teenager in the 1980s, he watched as the fervor of the religious right spread through his church community like a cancer, exposing moral opportunism and political hypocrisy and racial animus. Some of the people he’d once revered as mature believers were revealed to be spiritually empty. Their gods were not his God.
Before the 1980s, Moore said, “there were two ways of evangelizing. You could focus on end-times prophecy, which a lot of people did; or you could talk about marriage and parenting, using practical advice, talking about how the Church could help your family,” Moore said. “But by the nineties, being a real Christian meant voting Republican. And suddenly, the easiest way to reach people, by far, was through political identification.”
“But Jesus looks at those valid natural affections and warns us that they cannot be the most important thing,” he told me. “What the New Testament emphasizes is that once those affections are secondary, then you’re able to better love them because they don’t come first.”
“Winning at politics while losing the gospel is not a win,” he added, sending evangelical Twitter into a frenzy. “Trading in the gospel of Jesus Christ for political power is not liberty but slavery.”
the SBC that in 1998 responded to Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky by passing a resolution that famously stated: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”
“There’s a tendency in fallen human beings to take secondary identities that are important and make them ultimate. In Galatians 3, Paul warns explicitly against doing that,” Moore said. “From my earliest memories, my identity was as a Southern Baptist. But that could never fulfill me like the identity of the gospel.”
This is a gift of immeasurable generosity: The orphan, who had nothing, receives an inheritance of eternal life. And yet the orphan reaches back and cries out, terrified of leaving behind the life they knew. “What you can do for the orphan,” Moore said, “is realize that you were once an orphan yourself.”
The first lesson Jeffress learned about Trump is that he prefers people to be either hot or cold. Loyal backers and loyal haters alike have utility to the man; the people he cannot stand are lukewarm, with him one day and against him the next, their assessments subject to some pesky moral standard.
“I just do not believe that we as conservative Christians can expect him to stand strong for the issues that are important to us,” 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.” Five years later—almost to the day—Jeffress taped an interview with National Public Radio. The Access Hollywood tape had just dropped. Trump’s character was under assault and his campaign was on life support. Prominent evangelicals, such as Russell Moore, were openly questioning how anyone who had
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Jeffress no longer cared about fighting evil with good. He just wanted to fight evil—period.
Could a politician who behaved immorally in their personal life still perform their public duties with integrity? Only 30 percent of white evangelicals said yes, the lowest of any group surveyed. This trend line was steady since the days of Bill Clinton’s impeachment: Conservative Christians still believed character was a prerequisite for public office. In October 2016—the very week, in fact, that Jeffress sneered at the notion of turning the other cheek—the Public Religion Research Institute released a new survey that asked the same exact question. This time, incredibly, 72 percent of white
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make sense of how millions of evangelicals, himself included, had so casually discarded the code that guided their political engagement for a generation—Jeffress offered two words. They were the same words I’d heard Trump speak to evangelical audiences during his presidency. Words that Jeffress, no doubt, had whispered into the president’s ear. “Under siege.”
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.
“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first,” Jesus told His disciples, according to the Book of John. “If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also.”
“We’ve got to remember there is nothing too hard for God,” she said. “If you’re sitting here, in your right mind, you’re a walking miracle. You weren’t too hard for God—with your messed-up, jacked-up self. So listen, make a little room for a child of God. Make a little room for a misfit. Make a little room for that single mother . . . . Make a little room for that kid who is mentally burdened with their sexuality. Because here’s the reality: We can be mad all we want, at the quote-unquote liberal agenda, but unless the people of the gospel have a better way, we have nothing to talk about.”
“Here’s the reality. The last few years, I and many others have expressed concern that people of God seem to be radiating something other than the gospel in too many places in too many ways,” Stetzer said. Multiple people shouted “Hallelujah!” in unison. Nodding, Stetzer continued: “I believe we’ve got to call God’s people back to radiating the beauty of the gospel.”
If we believe that Jesus has defeated death, why are we consumed with winning a political campaign? Why should we care that we’re losing power on this earth when God has the power to forgive sins and save souls? And why should we obsess over America when Jesus has gifted us citizenship in heaven?
The way to ensure that Christians vote biblical values, he said, was for pastors to preach politics. This struck me as completely backward. If pastors were doing their job—going deep in the word, discipling their flocks, stressing scripture and prayer above social media and talk radio—their people wouldn’t need to be infantilized with explicit partisan endorsements. Those Christians would know how to vote biblically, because they would know their Bible.
losing, in the eyes of men like Connelly and Barton, was no longer an option. “The stakes are too high,” Connelly told me at one point, to cede any ground to the opposition. 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.
There’s a reason that scripture warns so often and so forcefully against fear: It is just as powerful as faith. But whereas faith keeps our eyes steadily fixed on the eternal, fear disrupts us, disorients us, drives us to prioritize the here and now.
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?
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.
Was all this nationalistic talk from the American evangelical Church just that—talk? Or was it indicative of a serious effort to restructure the relationship between the state and the country’s dominant religion? And if it was the latter, why weren’t sane Christians doing more to stop it?
there are consequences when religious doctrine becomes infected with political ideology.
The best antidote to bad religion, as Volf noted, is good religion.
it’s worth recalling what a known atheist, George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, said differentiated patriotism from 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.”
The quest for political clout was not a deviation from their faith in Jesus; it was a demonstration of it.
It’s the false glory of the kingdoms of this world that the devil offered to Jesus in the wilderness temptation, and Jesus rejected,”
“These people feel like they have nowhere to go. I just heard from someone yesterday who lives in Texas; apparently, the county she lives in voted for Trump in a higher percentage in 2020 than any other county in America. And she told me, ‘Pastor, I cannot find a normal church.’ What do I say to that?”
“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. “This is one major difference between Islam and Christianity. Islam has designs on running the world; it’s a system of government. Christianity is nothing like that. The gospels and the epistles have no vision of Christianity being a dominant religion or culture.”
Zahnd sees a reckless abdication of duty on the part of the people in charge. They are, as Jesus said of the Pharisees, blind guides, leading their followers to fall into a pit. “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.”
“The idea that Jesus is some mascot for the donkeys or the elephants—it’s a catastrophe for the gospel.”
“You can take up the sword of Caesar or you can take up the cross of Jesus,” Zahnd told me. “You have to choose.”
“This is a tough business. The difference between football and politics is you don’t have a helmet. And there are no rules. You can cheat,” Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina, said from the stage.
Simply put, evangelicals hate feeling like outcasts, and are quick to uncritically follow those who make them feel accepted, relevant, enlightened.
“In the absence of a belief in God, in the absence of moral absolutes . . . the only binding imperative left is power and physical force,”
