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

by Tim Alberta

moral-political framework in which people like Kirk and Eric Metaxas and John Zmirak convince evangelicals to distrust any believer who dares stray from their absolutist ideology. They do so by fomenting fears of a crushing, coordinated assault on Christianity—and by attacking anyone who refuses to adopt a militant posture in response.

Moore chuckled. “There’s been this amazing shift. It used to be the parents coming to me, worried sick about what their kids were watching and listening to, asking what they could do to pull them back,” he said. “Now, almost everywhere I go—this just happened at a church I visited the other night—it’s the kids coming to me. They say their evangelical parents have gone totally crazy, binge-watching Fox News or Newsmax or One America News, and they want to know how to pull them back.”

Many right-wing pastors simply cannot stomach the notion of their churches being accountable to secular actors—legal bodies, law enforcement agencies, media outlets—because their vision for Christianity is one of absolute supremacy. The Church, in their view, answers to no one but God; they are the authority to which the rest of culture must answer.

In February 2023, a landmark national survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and Brookings Institution found that roughly two-thirds of white evangelicals either explicitly supported the notion of Christian nationalism or were sympathetic to it. The share of white evangelicals who expressed support for certain ideas—that the government should declare Christianity the state religion; that being Christian is an important part of being an American; that God has called on Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of society—dwarfed that of white mainline Protestants, white Catholics, and Protestants of color. The research established a clear link between Christian nationalist ideology and racism, xenophobia, misogyny, authoritarian and anti-democratic sentiments, and an appetite for political violence. The most remarkable finding: Nearly 90 percent of white adherents to Christian nationalism agreed that “God intended America to be a new promised land” run by “European Christians.”

Champions of Christian nationalism would have you believe that these efforts to rule the country are inherently theological; that they are in service of a broader effort to reclaim America for God. This is a lie. Christian nationalism is a contradiction in terms: Paul told the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” This assurance—that anyone who accepts Christ becomes a part of the Abrahamic family, residents of the promised New Jerusalem—transcends all known racial, ethnic, and national identities.

More than any figure in American history, the forty-fifth president transformed evangelical from spiritual signifier into political punch line, exposing the selective morality and ethical inconsistency and rank hypocrisy that had for so long lurked in the subconscious of the movement.

Evangelical has become an impediment to evangelizing. The people to whom we are witnessing—our friends, neighbors, coworkers—are completely and categorically repelled by that word. They sense that it has nothing to do with the teachings of Christ and everything to do with social and political power.

Expanding on that final point, Winans asked us to compare two theoretical versions of the Church. In the infinite version, he explained, “the goal of the Church is to be a faithful presence for Jesus in the culture.” In the finite version, “the goal is to win the culture wars.”