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

by Tim Alberta

“Anytime you have a group that feels as though it’s headed toward generational demise, it lashes out,” Brooks told Moore. “It puts up a fight. It refuses to give up what’s theirs.”

It was the SBC that in 1998 responded to Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky by passing a resolution that famously stated: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”

the Public Religion Research Institute commissioned a fascinating survey. It asked Americans of all faith backgrounds to answer the question: Could a politician who behaved immorally in their personal life still perform their public duties with integrity? Only 30 percent of white evangelicals said yes, the lowest of any group surveyed. This trend line was steady since the days of Bill Clinton’s impeachment: Conservative Christians still believed character was a prerequisite for public office.

In October 2016—the very week, in fact, that Jeffress sneered at the notion of turning the other cheek—the Public Religion Research Institute released a new survey that asked the same exact question. This time, incredibly, 72 percent of white evangelicals responded that, yes, a politician who behaved immorally in their personal life could still perform their public duties with integrity. Five years earlier, white evangelicals had registered the lowest rate of support for that idea; now they were registering the highest.

Some of Trump’s evangelical followers, he said, were “acting like nutcases” when they stormed the Capitol and spread conspiracy theories about vaccines. He called it a case of misplaced priorities. “They think they’re following in his footsteps—they don’t mean Jesus, they mean Donald Trump,” Jeffress clarified, chuckling.

Jeffress was inviting an obvious question: Once a person becomes convinced that they are under siege—that enemies are coming for them and want to destroy their way of life—what is to stop that person from becoming radicalized?

It was a slow process of marginalization, isolation, and then the ‘final solution.’ And I think you’re seeing that happen in America. I believe there’s evidence that the Biden administration has weaponized the Internal Revenue Service to come after churches.”

The judicial branch, French wrote in The Dispatch, had “expanded the autonomy of religious organizations to hire and fire employees . . . protected churches time and again from discriminatory regulations . . . [and] expanded the ability of religious institutions to receive state funds.”

There were genuine threats to religious expression in America, Moore said, but a government crackdown on churches wasn’t among them. Assuming pastors played by the rules that govern all nonprofits—namely, no endorsing political candidates from the pulpit—there would be no trouble.

Not only was the Biden administration not coming after churches; the Biden administration was actively looking the other way as churches broke the law.

Jeffress did concede one point. “I’ve said before, ‘You’d better be sure that if you’re suffering, you’re suffering for righteousness and not for your own stupidity,’” the pastor told me,

“I do think some of what we’ve categorized as Christian suffering is not suffering for righteousness. We’re supposed to be suffering for doing God’s will and what His word prescribes to do, not because government goes against my preferences.”

At present, Dickson said, the American Church is suffering from “bully syndrome.” Too many Christians are swaggering around and picking on marginalized people and generally acting like jerks because they’re angry and apprehensive.

Bunker’s message dovetailed with Dickson’s earlier theory about the world’s vanishing confidence in the Church. 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. Bunker argued that much of this bad behavior can be traced back to the Christian victimhood complex, which causes some believers to lash out against enemies real and imagined. Such behavior defies the words of Peter, and the very instruction of Jesus, who famously stated: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

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. “The work of the kingdom can’t be hit-and-run evangelism,” she said. 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.”

Reflecting on the sum total of his scholarship, Bacote said he felt confident sharing two basic observations about evangelicalism in the United States. The first is that too many American Christians are woefully under-discipled. The second—a by-product of the first—is that too many American Christians think of themselves as American Christians.

“They need help to understand that you can care for your country without worshipping your country,” Bacote said. “They also need help to understand that you can care for your country and seek good for your neighbors. Just because other people are getting something, doesn’t mean you’re losing something.”

“The ongoing opportunity for evangelicalism is to live up to the language that’s right there in the Bible,” he said, “which is love your neighbor as yourselves.”

At present the Church was imploding over the legitimacy of our elections system; the question of whether to confront racism in society; the etiquette of wearing masks during a lethal pandemic; the morality of vaccines; and the existence of a satanic cult of Democrats who cannibalize kids.

Much of what drives evangelicals here is “fear that we’re losing our country, fear that we’re losing our power,” Dickson said. “And it’s so unhealthy. We should think of ourselves as eager dinner guests at someone else’s banquet. We are happy to be there, happy to share our perspective. But we are always respectful, always humble, because this isn’t our home.”

And then the pastor said something that made it all click. Bolin believes Trump was not a Christian when he ran for president, “but became born again during his presidency, under the influence of Mike Pence and other Christians in his orbit.”

Modern evangelicalism is defined by a certain fatalism about the nation’s character. The result is not merely a willingness to forgive what is wrong; it can be a belief, bordering on a certainty, that what is wrong is actually right.

The great obstacle to saving souls, I suggested, wasn’t drag queen performances or Critical Race Theory. It was the perception among the unbelieving masses—the very people these evangelicals were called to evangelize—that Christians care more about reclaiming lost social status than we do about loving our neighbor as ourselves. I relayed what Chris Winans, the pastor of my hometown church, had said about evangelicals: “Too many of them worship America.”

Unsavory alliances would need to be forged. Sordid tactics would need to be embraced. The first step toward preserving Christian values, it seemed, was to do away with Christian values.

There was an openly apocalyptic tone to the proceedings. This wasn’t about airing some policy differences or praying for a restoration of certain values. The purpose of this conference, it quickly became evident, was first to establish as fact that forces of darkness—namely Democrats and deep-state bureaucrats, corporate elites and Hollywood fiends—were targeting Christianity in America, and then, once successful, to incite God’s people to strike back.

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?

“There’s always a threat. Look at Tucker Carlson every single night: ‘They’re out to get you.’ And it works,” Thomas said. “One time, I actually asked one of our fundraisers, ‘Why don’t you ever send out a positive letter about what you’re doing with people’s donations?’ And he looked at me with this cynical look. He said, ‘You can’t raise money on a positive. If the goal is bringing in money, you have to scare them.’”

American evangelicals have a talent for what some theologians call “baptizing the past.” That means propagating the tale of George Washington asking a chaplain to dunk him in the icy waters at Valley Forge when no supporting historical record exists; insisting that Thomas Jefferson was a God-fearing humanitarian when he was in fact a slaveholding epicurean deist; seizing upon Lincoln’s appropriation of scripture to paint him as an evangelical when he was known to mock revivalists and rarely attend church; and one day, no doubt, citing photos of Trump in an Oval Office prayer circle to argue that the forty-fifth president was himself an earnest follower of Christ.

Today’s evangelicalism preaches bitterness toward unbelievers and bottomless grace for churchgoing Christians, yet the New Testament model is exactly the opposite, stressing strict accountability for those inside the Church and abounding charity to those outside it.

“When he told them not to associate with someone who is immoral, he wasn’t saying that with the implications of the world, but of someone who bears the label as a Christian,” Moore explained. In the words of Paul: “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside.”

“When I talk to atheists and agnostics, most of them are genuinely curious. Some of them are really, really angry. But I know that 99.9 percent of the time they’re not angry about theism. They’re angry at some parent who used religion in a destructive way, or a pastor who hurt them . . . . This is a person Jesus loves, a person for whom Jesus died, a person who is hurting,” Moore said. “My responsibility is not to try to win the argument. My responsibility is to stand in [God’s] place and say, ‘Come, all you who are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest.’” He concluded, “There is no one, no matter how upset we are with their opinions and their actions, who is impossible to reach with the grace of God.”

These kids don’t want to be caught up in the ‘us versus them’ thing. They have friends who have different points of view, and they think they have to hate them to go to church.” He continued, “The great fault in the evangelical movement today, is that we’re disobedient to the commands of the one we claim to follow. What were those commands? Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Care for widows and orphans. Visit those in prison. Seek first the kingdom of God.”

It’s certainly possible for believers to have warm hearts and misplaced priorities. The problem is, the first two commands Thomas cited—love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you—are simply incompatible with the culture-warrior mentality so many otherwise kind and benevolent evangelicals have adopted. The public doesn’t see their support of single moms or their donations to African clean-water initiatives. What they do see is a belligerence that overshadows those good deeds and in fact makes the possibility of them seem remote.

This is the gospel we are to proclaim both in word and in deed: To be a Christian is to sacrifice not for the benefit of those we already have around our table but for the betterment of those we have never considered to invite.

“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. “Do you want to convert them, or do you want to condemn them?”

Evangelicals have successfully accumulated a type of power that would condemn their enemies and protect their kingdom here. Yet they have squandered the real power that God offers us.

Most evangelicals don’t think of themselves as Locke’s target demographic. He has suggested that autistic children are subjugated by demons. He organized a book-burning event to destroy occult-promoting Harry Potter novels and other books and games. He called President Biden a “sex-trafficking, demon-possessed mongrel.”

The same thing was happening in America today, Locke warned. The enemy—liberals—had devised a plot to separate Christians from God, by weaponizing a fake “plandemic” to close down the Church. And all too many Christians were content to let it to happen.

In the darkest chapters of Church history—the Crusades and Inquisition, the slave trade and sexual abuse scandals—the common denominator has been a willingness on the part of Christian authority figures to distort scripture for what they perceive to be some greater good.

After all, the success of Putinism and Trumpism owes to a literal demonizing of the other—casting adversaries as not just wrong or obnoxious but as wicked and diabolical. Because these political-religious movements depict opponents as evildoers, it is intrinsically difficult to defeat them on theological grounds.

History might repeat itself, Volf warned, if we don’t heed the words of Karl Barth, the legendary Swiss theologian who prosecuted the theological case against Hitler and Nazism. If the Church is to practice the teachings of Christ, Barth wrote, it must be “an unreliable ally” to every social, political, and government order of this world.

Among the weightiest biblical concepts is aphiemi, which means to detach, to abandon, to leave alone, to let go. Simply put, many American evangelicals cannot let go. They cannot detach themselves from national identity or abandon the notion that fighting for America is fighting for God. Hence the creeping allure of “Christian nationalism.”

In the name of objectivity, it’s worth recalling what a known atheist, George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and 1984, said differentiated patriotism from nationalism. “Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally,” Orwell wrote. “Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.”

Zahnd sees a reckless abdication of duty on the part of the people in charge. They are, as Jesus said of the Pharisees, blind guides, leading their followers to fall into a pit. “You are forming your people in anger and hate. You are helping to intensify their capacity to hate other people,” Zahnd said. “You are giving them permission to carry around this permanent rage.”

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.

Republicans now supported liberalized abortion laws at rates higher than Democrats did just two decades earlier. How could this have happened? One explanation is that too many evangelicals have taken the path of least resistance. Holding up signs is easy. Posting on Facebook is easy. Voting for a candidate is easy. But providing sustained support to babies and their mothers—by donating disposable income, by volunteering for long shifts at that clinic in a rough part of town, by considering adoption of a newborn with fetal alcohol syndrome—is much, much harder.

It’s worth wondering how different this debate might look a half century later had millions of single-issue voters invested in something other than electoral politics as a solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancy.

The pro-life movement has not won the public argument—and, arguably, it hasn’t really tried. The message of abortion as a moral evil, as an affront to the loving God who made humanity in His own image, has proven curiously ineffective. Why? For one thing, that message seems wildly inconsistent with the politics otherwise practiced by those who claim the “pro-life” mantle.

The scandal is that Christians, someplace deep in their hearts, possess that categorical, Christlike love. But they have been conditioned to subdue it. They have been taught to selectively practice habits that are meant to be universal. They have been acclimatized to applaud when Myers talks about the danger of dehumanizing people—like Hitler with “vermin” or abortionists with “fetuses”—but ignore the implications that challenge their own prejudices, like migrants as “aliens” or Democrats as “demons” or LGBTQ youth as the “lesbian in a wheelchair.”

Simply put, Trump the elder created a new