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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tim Alberta
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March 10 - March 21, 2025
“What’s wrong with American evangelicals?” Winans thought a moment. “America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”
“At its root, we’re talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people,” Winans said. “If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel. 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. At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of
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“The freedoms in our Bill of Rights, we like to call them ‘God-given.’ Now, think about what that means in the context of gun control,” he said. “If someone’s trying to take away something God has given you, well, shoot, that’s pretty upsetting! But is there a God-given right to bear arms? Or is it a cultural right?
And I said, ‘What you’ve done is you’ve baptized your worldview and called it Christian.’”
“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.”
Jesus could have chosen to win the argument. He could have come down from the cross, as the jeering onlookers dared Him to do, proving that He really was the son of God; He could have confronted Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest, after the resurrection, proving that He really did rebuild the temple in three days. But He didn’t. Jesus chose to submit Himself to a brutal, dehumanizing death. Once resurrected, He chose to appear to His believers, instructing them to take a message of salvation to all the nations, emulating His example of lowliness and servanthood and self-sacrificial love.
“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.
Which assumes we were blessed until something went wrong. But that ignores that America has always been fallen. Because humanity has always been fallen.”
don’t want some meek and mild leader or somebody who’s going to turn the other cheek,” Jeffress told the host. “I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.”
It had happened so organically that he could not precisely account for it: Jeffress no longer cared about fighting evil with good. He just wanted to fight evil—period.
Far more revealing, however, was that he saw the persecution of Christians as sufficient to justify behavior that is antithetical to what Christ taught.
Christians volunteered to live in a negative world. Christians signed up to be under siege. The notion that some conjectural bullying of the American Church is a defense for the indefensible—while Christians worldwide are being harassed and hunted and even killed for their faith—would be comical if it weren’t so calamitous.
“The Bible definitely portrays a spiritual battle that’s ongoing. The problem is, a lot of Christians believe they’re engaging in that battle by promoting a political platform, and they treat that political battle as if the kingdom of God is at stake,” Winans told me. “But the kingdom of God isn’t at stake. The Bible clearly tells us that our struggle is not against flesh and blood. What Christ accomplished on the cross is not threatened by Donald Trump losing an election.”
One afternoon, while waiting in line at a pop-up kiosk selling coffee and pastries, 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.
Among them: “gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches . . . alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments . . . the government is run in part not by humans but by ‘reptilians’ and other aliens.”
Did he really think #FJB was an appropriate way to bring God back? Klucken shrugged. “People keep on asking for it,” he told me. “You’ve got to give the people what they want.”
This was what bothered me most about the Road to Majority conference. If Jesus warned us that what comes out of our mouths reveals what resides in our hearts, how can we shrug off lies and hate speech as mere political rhetoric?
“The normal state of the Christian life is, in some sense, to live in a state of homelessness. If we see that as our normal situation . . . then we can actually engage with the outside world and not be terrified when we’re out of step. We can be free.”
It’s a funny thing about loving your enemies: Once you love them, they cease to be your enemies. “That’s right. When you love somebody, regardless of their politics, it’s very difficult for them to hate you. And then you can have a real conversation,” Thomas said.
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.
When believers invoke eternal symbols to advance an earthly goal, those symbols become cheapened to the point of ultimately meaning nothing.
The Messiah Himself—who physically runs and hides from the people who desire to make Him king—dismisses the Pharisees by telling them, “Give back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,”
Why would the lieutenant governor of Idaho hold a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other during a staged protest of COVID-19 policies?
“In my world, nobody takes CT seriously,” Strang said. I asked him why not. “They think they’re woke.” “What does woke mean?” Strang frowned at me. “Well, we didn’t develop the term,” he said. “It’s pretty far left.”
“The crowd is going absolutely wild,” Zahnd recalled. “And I just heard Jesus saying, ‘Brian, Brian, why are you politicizing me?’”
“Christianity is inherently countercultural. That’s how it thrives. When it tries to become a dominant culture, it becomes corrupted. That’s been the case from the very beginning,” Zahnd said. “This is one major difference between Islam and Christianity. Islam has designs on running the world; it’s a system of government. Christianity is nothing like that. The gospels and the epistles have no vision of Christianity being a dominant religion or culture.”
“The idea that Jesus is some mascot for the donkeys or the elephants—it’s a catastrophe for the gospel.”
when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Trump press secretary who was running for governor of Arkansas, declared, “We will make sure that when a kid is in the womb, they’re as safe as they are in a classroom.”
“We’ve turned the other cheek, and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference,” Trump Jr. said. “But it’s gotten us nothing.”
Roys chuckled when I told her that. Here we were, a couple of veteran hard-boiled journalists, blinded by our biases to what should have been an obvious truth. It was more than bias, though. It was fear. We were afraid to see someone like Zacharias fall—not because of what it said about him, but because of what it said about us. Weren’t Christians supposed to hold themselves to a higher standard?
“Unity is a good thing. We are commanded to pursue it. But unity around the wrong thing is sin. And we want so badly to be unified that we get to a point where we excuse and enable sin,”
“Define your identity,” Denhollander replied. “If you do that, you will be able to stand up against abuses of your theology and speak out against your own community. You will be okay with not having a home, with not fitting in anywhere, because your identity is not tied to anything here.”
There is nothing here to reclaim. This country—a drop in the bucket, like all the nations—was never God’s to begin with, because “God does not show favoritism,” as Peter said, “but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right.” Attempts to devise some divine conception of the United States often end up demonstrating exactly the opposite.
