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

by Tim Alberta

British scholar named David Bebbington posited that evangelicals were distinct because of four principal characteristics: Biblicism (treating scripture as the essential word of God); Crucicentrism (stressing that Jesus’s death makes atonement for mankind possible); Conversionism (believing that sinners must be born again and continually transformed into Christlikeness); and Activism (sharing the gospel as an outward sign of that inward transformation). This framework—now commonly called the “Bebbington quadrilateral”—was widely embraced, including by the National Association of Evangelicals. But it also drew its share of criticisms.

By the 1980s, with the rise of the Moral Majority, a religious marker was transforming into a partisan movement. “Evangelical” soon became synonymous with “conservative Christian,” and eventually with “white conservative Republican.”

What the devil tempted Jesus with two thousand years ago, and what he tempts us with today, are cheap counterfeits. 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. These are nonnegotiable to the Christian faith. One of the Bible’s dominant narrative themes—uniting Old Testament and New Testament, prophets and disciples, prayers and epistles—is the admonition to resist idolatry at all costs. Jesus frames the decision in explicitly binary terms: We can serve and worship God or we can serve and worship the gods of this world. Too many American evangelicals have tried to do both. And the consequences for the Church have been devastating.

he believed that God’s relationship with Israel was somehow parallel to God’s relationship with the United States.

George Washington, several weeks into his presidency in 1789, described in a letter to the United Baptist Churches of Virginia as “the horrors of spiritual tyranny.” Washington was hardly alone: From skeptics like Benjamin Franklin to committed Christians like John Jay, the founders shared John Adams’s view that America was conceived not “under the influence of Heaven” or

“There’s a pretty consistent pattern in scripture of what that looks like: I want to be in power, I want to have influence, I want to be prosperous, I want to have security. And even if God gives me some of those things, I’ll try to achieve even more through worldly means.”

it’s easy to see why so many evangelicals believe that our country is divinely blessed. The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements.

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.

Winans pointed out the window. “God told us, this place is not our promised land,” he said. “But they’re trying to make it a promised land.”

Clearly