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

by Tim Alberta

I couldn’t understand was how, over the next couple of years, he became an apologist for Trump’s antics, dismissing criticisms of the president’s conduct as little more than an attempt to marginalize his supporters. 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.

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.”

Sanders—an older white evangelical himself—said it’s hardly coincidental that most of the churches in chaos are old, white, and evangelical. These are the congregations, he said, that have spent decades marinating in rhetoric of “Armageddon for the Church, enemies coming for us.”

The public hasn’t turned against Christians because they act better than the rest of the world, she said. The public has turned against Christians because they act worse than the rest of the world.

The next generation of would-be believers, Bunker warned, is watching us. “They want to know if we love Jesus first”—more than money, more than social status, more than a political party, more than a country.

If Christians want to win souls for Jesus, they can start by showing grace to those who don’t deserve it; by showing kindness to the culture; by seeing in everyone, especially our enemies, “the image and likeness of God.”

Reed shrugged. “But I’ve been doing this a long time,” he assured us. “You just have to face reality that in politics, that happens.” IN POLITICS. 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.

Just as you might stop taking marital advice from your neighbor if you saw cell phone footage of him paying for prostitutes and cocaine in Vegas, you might stop taking spiritual guidance from your neighbor if you saw him chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” at the Capitol Building.

In 2016, Christians condoned their preferred candidate talking on the Access Hollywood tape about grabbing women by their vaginas, because the election was a binary choice and the Supreme Court was at stake; by 2022 Christians walked around wearing “Fuck Joe Biden” on their chests because in politics the rules of decency, never mind the maxims of Christianity, do not apply.

Character didn’t matter. Truth didn’t matter. Honor and integrity didn’t matter. Those were means, and all that mattered was the ends: winning elections. To achieve that end, Reed and his disciples were willing to invoke the name of Jesus Christ, the son of God, and argue that He was on their side.

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.

“When you ask the average person, what do you think it means to be a Christian? They’ll say, pro-Trump, Republican, right-wing, anti-abortion, don’t like gays. They’ll go down the list,” Thomas told me. “Well, why would they say that? Because that’s what we’re modeling before the world. Those are our public priorities—not these other things, which get so little attention from man but all the attention from God.”

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.

there are consequences when religious doctrine becomes infected with political ideology.

once you get to a point where you can say anybody’s conduct can be excused because God has a larger plan and uses flawed vessels, then what is left of an actual Christianity at that point?”

In the year after Trump left office, polling repeatedly showed there was one demographic group most likely to believe that the election had been stolen, that vaccines were dangerous, that globalists were controlling the U.S. population, that liberal celebrities were feasting on the blood of infants, that resorting to violence might be necessary to save the country: white evangelicals.

winning a political battle first requires winning the public argument.

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.