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

by Tim Alberta

The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements.

The church in Ohio, they left no room for anything that was different from their experience: white, conservative, midwestern, American. They had totally lost sight of people who aren’t like them. And I said, ‘What you’ve done is you’ve baptized your worldview and called it Christian.’”

Leading voices on the religious right argued that Christ’s kingdom could be advanced only if American believers were willing to fight for it. By the time the Iron Curtain fell, and the United States was left standing as the world’s sole superpower, it was clear to evangelicals that the only enemy left to defeat was the one within.

And it wasn’t Nancy Pelosi they were after; it was Mike Pence. A fellow believer. This is the biggest change I’ve observed in the last few years. The enemies aren’t those outside of the Church; it’s people in your church who don’t think exactly the way you do.”

“I’m afraid we have to leave the church after all these decades,” the man said, “because you’re not interpreting the Bible in light of the Constitution.”

‘Americans always want to be number one. They always go for the gold. Canada shoots for bronze, settles for fourth, then talks about how well they represented themselves.’”

“When Jesus said that a man should leave his father and mother, it wasn’t just about getting married and starting a new family,” Olson told me. “It was an instruction, I think, to challenge the things you’re taught in your upbringing—with the things you’re taught in your upbringing.”

“Adrian Rogers would always say, ‘The hope of the world is America. The hope of America is the Church. The hope of the Church is evangelical revival. And the hope of evangelical revival is the Southern Baptist Convention.’ So, pretty quickly, you’ve gotten to a place where you believe the SBC is the hope of the world,” Moore said. “I just don’t think that’s true anymore. And, as I look back, I’m realizing that maybe I never did.”

I heard the woman behind me broadcasting her disgust at seeing Starbucks was being served. “They put baby parts in their coffee,” she told her friends. (They stayed in line and got bottled waters.)

Perhaps sensing my skepticism, Maldonado said that Christians had a responsibility before God to expose voter fraud because “Jesus Himself was the first politician to walk the earth.” I

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.

unlike nonbelievers, Christians have a code of conduct that is specific and exacting and unambiguous. Reed’s assertion that “individual Christians” could interpret that code however they wished amounted to the kind of moral relativism that had inspired evangelicals to break away from mushy, mainline Christianity in the first place.

He observed, “Next to Jesus, the best thing that ever happened to this world is the United States of America.”

“The worst one I ever saw was where Jerry compared himself to Jesus. It actually said, ‘Now I know what it was like for Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane,’” Thomas said. “And I told him, ‘Jerry, you can’t say that.’ And he said, ‘Huh, it must have gone out without my approval.’ But nothing went out without his approval. That’s just how radical we had become. We had no problem saying that Jesus would have been a Republican. Even though his kingdom’s not of this world.