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

by Tim Alberta

“I have a hundred of those conversations a week,” he said. “I don’t think that pastor is going to take things too far. Do you?”

The church that wades into politics with a voter registration drive might one day find its Sunday morning worship interrupted with “Headline News” like at FloodGate Church in Brighton, Michigan.

“I haven’t been there,” Connelly shrugged. Yes, I replied, he had been there. It was at FloodGate, the previous fall, that I first encountered their American Restoration Tour. And it turned out, Connelly and Barton had just been back to FloodGate for an encore presentation the week before this Ohio trip.

“Look, I don’t get to know all these pastors. I can’t remember them,” he said. “I can’t remember the name of th...

But it turned out he had twice recently visited a church that had plainly lost sight of its mission—and Connelly did not recognize it.

“Well, he’d be a unicorn in our crowd,” Connelly said. “I don’t know any other pastors like that.”

But Connelly had just been in San Diego with Charlie Kirk and a small army of pastors exactly like that.

and they were feeling it from people like Chad Connelly.

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.

But the holy of holies at this event—the only person treated with a Trump-like reverence—was the former president’s spiritual adviser: Paula White.

Much of the charismatic evangelical movement, which includes but is not limited to the Pentecostal denomination, subscribes to some variation of the prosperity gospel. Because

God saves us from eternal damnation through faith, the thinking goes, that same faith delivers us from poverty and sickness here on earth.

The prosperity gospel can be conveniently reverse engineered. Forget about the faith aspect: If you have lots of money, then clearly God has blessed you, and if God has blessed you, then clearly you are living a godly life.

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. Faith is about preserving our place in the body of Christ; fear is about protecting our own flesh and blood.

This compartmentalization of standards is toxic to the credibility of the Christian witness. Many evangelicals have come to view politics the way a suburban husband views Las Vegas—a self-contained escape, a place where the rules and expectations of his everyday life do not apply. The problem is, what happens in politics doesn’t stay in politics.

Approaching us was Winsome Sears, the recently elected lieutenant governor of Virginia.

He told Sears that she should tell of her upbringing as the daughter of an immigrant; about the “parental rights movement” she had helped champion in Virginia; about Biden “cutting and running” from Afghanistan; about the “radical agenda” that Democrats were forcing on Christians like them; about how the Republican triumph in Virginia the previous fall was “the foreshadowing of what can happen in America in one hundred and forty-three days.”

“We had the power to right every wrong and cure every ill.” But they didn’t change America—at least, not in the manner they had hoped.

“Everybody has a responsibility to do what they think is right,” he told me at the time. “This is what I think is right.”

Kinzinger told the New York Times he received a handwritten letter from his cousin, and signed by another eleven family members, accusing him of fighting for “the devil’s army” and betraying his fellow Christians.

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.”

He sat in silence for a little while. Then, as the check arrived, the congressman told us that he’d been reading that day from the apostle Paul’s final letter to his pupil, Timothy. “I’ve fought the good fight, I’ve finished the race, I’ve kept the faith,” he quoted. Kinzinger announced his retirement a few weeks later.

His wife, a serious Christian who did volunteer work for the National Prayer Breakfast, asked her husband to meet some of the men she knew through the organization.

“She said, ‘You won’t be a success until you thank God for losing your job,’” Thomas recalled. “She was right. My job was my god. It was the center of my life around which everything else, including my wife and kids, were to circulate.”

Like so many D.C. contemporaries, secular and Christian alike, Thomas was a political addict.

Until he didn’t. There was no Road to Damascus moment, Thomas says, that made him question his work with Falwell

Sr. Rather it was a steady accumulation of doubt, a growing sense of guilt about how 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. Thomas was all for trying to win elections. But invoking the wrath of God to collect twenty dollars from a retiree in Tulsa started to feel less like a strategy and more like a scam.

“We had this one fundraiser who was working both sides of the street, like a cheap hooker. His wife was a member of NOW”—the National Organization for Women, a feminist pro-choice group—“and he was raising money for her while also raising money for Falwell. He’d hit his goals, we’d go off to the bar and have a drink, and he would celebrate the stupidity of these people giving to him.”

“There’s always a threat.

‘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.’”

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.

This was the generation that would make or break American evangelicalism. These were the children of the Moral Majority.

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.

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.

but then hurriedly pivoted away from the subject, not wanting to elaborate on these or any of the other community welfare projects sponsored by First Baptist Dallas. “We’re not a sanctified social agency,” he said. “That’s not what I believe the Church is about.”

Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”—are

To be a Christian is to sacrifice not for the benefit of those we already have around our table but for the betterment of those we have never considered to invite.

It’s a funny thing about loving your enemies: Once you love them, they cease to be your enemies.

“For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him.”

His viral videos became ever less about Jesus Christ and ever more about Greg Locke: railing against medical authorities, jeering Biden, discrediting vaccines, protesting in D.C. on January 6.

That doesn’t mean I’m gonna take up arms against the government,” Locke assured me. Then he added: “I certainly believe in gun ownership. And I’ve told people, look, we still believe in our First Amendment right. If they show up at our tent to stop us, then we’ll meet them at the door with our Second Amendment right.” This rhetorical turnabout—making clear in one gulp of air that he draws the line at violence, then suggesting in the next that his congregants would shoot anyone who tried to prevent the church from convening—was representative of our longer conversation.

This was the new normal. They had chosen a permanent side. They had committed themselves to something bigger than an individual public health policy. No longer

could the culture wars be selected à la carte. Talking politics was now as much a part of church life as taking communion.

What binds them together—Locke and Bolin and the scores of other right-wing pastors I’d encountered over the past few years—is that they are now expected to be something more than mere church leaders. They are political handicappers, social commentators, media critics, information gatekeepers. And they have only themselves to blame: It turns out, when a pastor decides that churches should do more than just worship God, congregants decide that their pastor should do more than just preach.

Down this path, disaster waits. The pastor who finds himself offering religious justification today might find himself inventing it tomorrow.

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.

This explains why, long after leaving Global Vision, I could not rid myself of its violent imagery—all the guns and the paramilitary gear and the swaggering talk of the Second Amendment. Locke swore this rhetoric was defensive in nature. That’s always the case, until it isn’t.

The Russian leader practices “an eclectic theology,” he said, that cherry-picks whatever spiritual concepts support his ideological agenda.

Russia was using Christianity to define its enemies. It was the kind of identitarian programming that presaged some of history’s greatest crimes—and, in the case of Russia’s butchery in Ukraine, it would not have been possible without the blessing of the Church.

“She voted for Trump twice and said that he’s a very flawed human being, but the only way she could get herself motivated to block a truly evil woman”—i.e., Hillary Clinton—“was to think that God works with flawed human beings all the time to do a greater good.”