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

by Tim Alberta

To expose the shallowness of these secular religions, Hovorun told us, “they need to be deconstructed theologically.” That term, deconstruct, had come to represent a great rift within American evangelicalism.

What made the old monster so difficult to slay, Volf told me over lunch afterward, was that it feasted on the trembling heart of man. Jesus instructed His followers to “take heart!” because He had overcome the troubles of this world. But most of us don’t listen. Christians remain just as susceptible to panicky groupthink and identity-based paranoia as anyone else.

“I’m so excited,” she told me. “Can you believe Jack Posobiec is here?”

A conspiracist luminary, Posobiec rose to fame on the far right in 2016 by championing #Pizzagate, the internet rumor that alleged Hillary Clinton and a cabal of top-ranking Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring from the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a trendy pizza joint in Washington, D.C.

He spread the despicable lie that Seth Rich, a young Democratic staffer who’d been murdered one night in Washington in 2016, was killed as part of a cover-up after he’d leaked sensitive party documents.

Posobiec helped to popularize the phrase “stop the steal,”

This cannot be viewed in a narrowly political context: Mastriano, who described himself as an agent of God’s will, felt unbound from the pesky laws and procedures that govern American elections.

prayed that God would empower Republicans to “rise up with boldness” and “seize the power” before Joe Biden’s inauguration.

“I’m tired of this ‘separation of church and state’ junk,”

“The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church.”

“I’m a proud Christian Nationalist. These evil people are even calling me a Nazi because I proudly love my country and my God,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia congresswoman, tweeted in the summer of 2022, less than a year before the Daily Beast reported that she called Boebert a “little bitch” while the two argued over whose impeachment resolution of President Biden should take precedence.