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

by Tim Alberta

In his book Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, historian George Marsden observed that in the decades following World War II an evangelical was “anyone who likes Billy Graham.”

In 1989, a 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.

“Evangelical” soon became synonymous with “conservative Christian,” and eventually with “white conservative Republican.”

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.

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.

The crisis of American evangelicalism comes down to an obsession with that worldly identity. Instead of fixing our eyes on the unseen, “since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal,” as Paul writes in Second Corinthians, we have become fixated on the here and now. Instead of seeing ourselves as exiles in a metaphorical Babylon, the way Peter describes the first-century Christians living in Rome, we have embraced our imperial citizenship. Instead of fleeing the temptation to rule all the world, like Jesus did, we have made deals with the devil.

What these groups shared was a prophetic certainty, promulgated by the evangelical movement for decades, that godless Democrats would one day launch a frontal assault on Christianity in America.

Turbocharging the chaos was Trump’s campaign for reelection. The sitting president of the United States was adamant that Democrats were plotting to rig the contest against him, and he made clear that the ramifications of this reached beyond electoral politics. Trump had campaigned in 2016 on a promise that “Christianity will have power” if he won the White House; now he warned that his opponent in the 2020 election, former vice president Joe Biden, was going to “hurt God” and target Christians for their religious beliefs. Embracing dark rhetoric and violent conspiracy theories, the president seized upon notions of America’s prophesied apocalypse, enlisting leading evangelicals to help frame a cosmic spiritual clash between the God-fearing Republicans who supported Trump and the secular leftists who viewed the forty-fifth president as the last obstacle standing between them and a conquest of America’s Judeo-Christian ethos.

“What’s wrong with American evangelicals?” Winans thought a moment. “America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”

The blueprint was obvious enough: Because the scriptures were filled with examples of great leaders who had grave personal failings, Trump could be considered an imperfect instrument of God’s perfect design for America.

he was an agent of the Almighty, born for such a time as this, ordained to fight on behalf of God’s people and their shining city on a hill.

And, of course, the rise of President Barack Obama, a man whom millions of evangelicals believed to be a secret Kenyan at best or a sleeper-cell Muslim extremist at worst. (Franklin Graham managed to both question Obama’s birthplace and speculate on his devotion to Islam.)

Pence would remind his audience what was at stake in the coming election. He would claim that their beloved nation was slipping away. Then, in a solemn tone, he would tell them it wasn’t too late. “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways,” Pence would say, quoting God’s voice in the Second Book of Chronicles, “then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” The crowd would roar in response.

the founders wanted nothing to do with theocracy. Many of their families had fled religious persecution in Europe; they knew the threat posed by what 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.”

the founders shared John Adams’s view that America was conceived not “under the influence of Heaven” or in conversation with the Creator, but rather by using “reason and the senses.”

“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.”

For much of American history, white Christians had all of those things.

The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements. Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.

The Second Amendment is among the most sacred of our national texts, a governing maxim regarded as infallible by the American right. I wondered aloud how many Christians could recite that language verbatim, compared with how many could do the same with one of God’s laws, say, the Second Commandment, which forbids worship of idols.

Dad would have preferred any of the other Republicans who ran in 2016. He knew that Trump was a narcissist and a liar; he knew that he was not a moral man. Ultimately Dad felt he had no choice but to support the Republican ticket, given his concern for the unborn and the Supreme Court majority that hung in the balance.

This was rebuking people for failing to unconditionally follow a president of the United States when the only authority we’re meant to unconditionally follow—particularly in a setting of stained-glass windows—is Christ Himself.

“The Church is supposed to challenge us,” Winans told me. “But a lot of these folks don’t want to be challenged. They definitely don’t want to be challenged where their idols are. If you tell them what they don’t want to hear, they’re gone. They’ll find another church. They’ll find a pastor who tells them what they want to hear.”

Today, politics is changing the definition of what a Christian is. We’re setting the Bible aside and using a different standard.”

Torres knew, when Trump charged the political scene in the summer of 2015, that things were going to get worse. The candidate was serving up a cocktail of discontent—one part cultural displacement, one part religious persecution, one part nationalist fervor—that would prove irresistible to certain people he pastored, people who were scandalized by shifting public norms and by the prospect of Christians losing their status in a secularizing America.

It wasn’t just anger over COVID protocols; it was sheer derangement. People were trafficking in conspiracies over everything from the global elites who’d planned the pandemic to the global elites who sacrificed children and drank their blood for sustenance. (Often, they were one and the same.)

One of them secretly audiotaped a meeting with Torres—to the great satisfaction of the cabal—in which the pastor shared that he’d been reading a book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibram X. Kendi, an academic and civil rights activist. This was a smoking gun. The cabal went to Goodwill’s board of elders and alleged that Torres was a Marxist who was teaching Critical Race Theory. They demanded he be fired. Rebuffed by the elders, the cabal wrote a letter to the EPC denomination repeating the claims and seeking Torres’s removal from the church.

Everyone’s got some of their members saying: ‘He’s woke. He’s teaching Critical Race Theory. He’s a liberal, a socialist, a Marxist,’” Torres said. “It was actually pretty funny. Because we’re all realizing, these words don’t mean anything anymore. They’re just smears.”

“It seems harsh, doesn’t it? ‘Get behind me, Satan!’” Torres said, wincing as he repeated the quote. “Jesus is saying this to Peter, but He’s speaking to the belief system inside of Peter. And that belief system is inside all of us.” Indeed, the “things of man” Peter worried about twenty centuries ago are the same things that preoccupy us today: wealth, prestige, control. All of this, Torres said, competes with Jesus for our hearts. Everything to which we attach significance in this life—family, country, politics, bodily health, even the clothes we wear and the food we eat—can become a substitute religion.

“The two churches had none of the same five key principles—not even close. 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.’”

Whereas it was once feared that sinister geopolitical forces would target America as a means to extinguishing its holy light to the world, the narrative began to shift as the Moral Majority gained clout in the 1980s.

The enemies aren’t those outside of the Church; it’s people in your church who don’t think exactly the way you do.”

“When I spent some years living in Canada, I became friends with a renowned Canadian sociologist,” Sanders said. “He would always say—he wrote books on this—that ‘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.’” Sanders shrugged. “Americans always think they deserve to win. And so, naturally, the Church has become about winning, too.”

“They might have been watching Tucker Carlson all week. But they’re still going to write a check on Sunday morning. That’s the best of the American Christian psyche—even if it’s also the worst of the American Christian psyche.”

“All the winning in this world doesn’t make a difference. If you beat your opponent—if you crush them in some political argument—what do you have to show for it? A better country?” the pastor asked, shaking his head. “You think so, but you don’t.”

The Supreme Court’s 1962 ruling in Engel v. Vitale, which banned prayer in public schools, inflamed the intensifying fights over curriculum relating to evolution, history, and human sexuality. Falwell began floating his belief that public schools should be abolished entirely. Detecting a secular plot to brainwash the next generation, fundamentalists yanked their kids out of local K–12 programs and launched alternative Christian academies at a frenetic clip, foreshadowing the antipathy toward public education that evangelicals have come to practice at a massive scale today.

In June 1979, Falwell took a brief leave from his revamped “I Love America” tour—it was now playing at state capitol buildings from coast to coast, earning huge crowds and enormous revenues—to meet with a group of prominent conservative activists. Among them were Howard Phillips, a free-market advocacy wonk and Jewish convert to evangelicalism, and Richard Viguerie, a campaign strategist who had perfected direct-mail technology as a means of mobilizing Christian voters. The organizer was Paul Weyrich, a Catholic journalist turned political insider who in 1973 had cofounded the Heritage Foundation, which would become Washington’s leading conservative think tank.

When the discussion turned to tactics—they would target Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, even conservative atheists, an evolution of the co-belligerent construct—Weyrich told Falwell there was a “moral majority” of Americans on their side. Falwell glanced over at his staff. “That’s the name of our organization,” he said.

And so Falwell would launch the Moral Majority with a focus on pornography, homosexuality, drug use, rising divorce rates, secularism in public schools, and, above all, abortion.

A new standard had been set in Republican politics. That which had animated the party for much of its modern history—an educated, moneyed, socially moderate, culturally coastal sensibility—was suddenly and unceremoniously out of style.

The Moral Majority had taken over the Republican Party. But Falwell wanted more. He wanted America.

Clinging to relevance in increasingly transparent and pitiful fashion, Falwell had, by the turn of the century, reduced himself to a caricature, more a punch line than a provocateur. He reacted to actress Ellen DeGeneres’s coming out by calling her “Ellen Degenerate.” He ranted about Tinky Winky, an animated purple creature on the toddler-aged TV show Teletubbies who was supposedly homosexual despite a lack of reproductive organs. He predicted that the Antichrist would be arriving soon and added: “of course he’ll be Jewish.” He said the September 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed three thousand people were “probably deserved” because of how America had turned away from God, and blamed “the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians”—as well as the ACLU—for inviting such devastation on the country.

Trump had been in the public eye for decades: the brash New York billionaire who stamped his name on skyscrapers, paraded mistresses through the tabloids, and ultimately scored a hit reality television show. More recently, he had become a mascot for right-wing Republicanism. Having fronted the noxious crusade to expose then-president Barack Obama as illegitimate—Trump bragged about bankrolling an investigation in Hawaii, and speculated that Obama wasn’t just foreign-born, but was a foreign-born Muslim—the future president enjoyed a cult following among a segment of the conservative base. Trump had passed on a run for the White House in 2012, then shamed the eventual GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, into appearing onstage with him to accept his endorsement. Now, with Romney headed toward a defeat at the hands of Obama, Trump had come to Liberty to lay the groundwork for a future campaign.

In December 2015, the month before Trump made his triumphant return to Convocation, Falwell shocked the student body with his remarks about a recent shooting carried out by a Muslim couple in California. “If more good people had concealed-carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in,” said the university president.

In an interview with the Washington Post on Super Tuesday, as primary voters went to the polls in Virginia and numerous other states, DeMoss let it rip. “Donald Trump is the only candidate who has dealt almost exclusively in the politics of personal insult,” he said. “The bullying tactics of personal insult have no defense—and certainly not for anyone who claims to be a follower of Christ. That’s what’s disturbing to so many people. It’s not [the] Christ-like behavior that Liberty has spent 40 years promoting with its students.”

Within a few days, DeMoss had resigned from both the Executive Committee and the board of trustees. The news jolted the extended Liberty family and particularly chilled those on campus—students, faculty, and administrators alike—who found themselves in disagreement with Falwell’s vision for the school. If he could to this to Mark DeMoss, he could do it to anyone. There was no such thing as checks and balances. It was less a presidency than it was an autocracy. Falwell was untouchable.

Early in his presidency, Prevo told Scott Lamb, Liberty’s then–chief communications officer, in a recorded phone call that electing Republicans to office was one of the university’s “main goals.”

Prevo replaced McFarland with Tim Lee, a double-amputee Vietnam veteran and outspoken MAGA enthusiast.

Olson seemed thrown, even a bit offended, by the question. I couldn’t blame him. Here was an outsider, someone he barely knew, chipping away at the assumptions that had formed the foundation of his life. The longer we spoke, however, the more introspective he became. “I think I’m probably doing the thing we’ve always done here: telling myself a story,” Olson said. “The stories Liberty tells itself about the founding are only half-true.

“I have to wonder if my unwillingness to challenge the family business of Liberty is because of my own family. I want to protect my wife and kids, provide for them, keep them comfortable,” Olson said. “But in prioritizing those things—in keeping quiet to protect the family, so to speak—am I doing the very thing Liberty has done all along?” This comparison—Liberty as a mafia, the Falwells as ruthless dons—was so provocative that Olson looked surprised with himself for having invited it.

Before the 1980s, Moore said, “there were two ways of evangelizing. You could focus on end-times prophecy, which a lot of people did; or you could talk about marriage and parenting, using practical advice, talking about how the Church could help your family,” Moore said. “But by the nineties, being a real Christian meant voting Republican. And suddenly, the easiest way to reach people, by far, was through political identification.”