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

by Tim Alberta

the great majority of what voters would hear from GOP politicians, came from the Old Testament. That never struck me as a coincidence. Jesus, in His three years of teaching, talked mostly about helping the poor, humbling oneself, and having no earthly ambition but to gain eternal life. Suffice it to say, the beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount (“Blessed are the meek . . . Blessed are the merciful . . . Blessed are the peacemakers”) were never conducive to a stump speech. This isn’t to suggest that Old Testament passages are somehow backward or illegitimate; many of these writings, timeless in their wisdom, have shaped my own views of the world. I just always found it strange that these Christians relied so infrequently on the words of Christ.

Evangelical leaders embraced Trump’s shortcomings. At a meeting of more than five hundred prominent Christian conservatives in June 2016 at the Marriott Marquis hotel in New York City, Trump was introduced by the likes of Franklin Graham (son of famed evangelist Billy Graham) and Mike Huckabee (a Baptist preacher turned populist Arkansas governor turned Fox News host turned Trinity Broadcasting Network host) as the latest in a long tradition of flawed men who were being used by God to advance His purposes. 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. Talking with attendees at the Marriott that day, I heard unceasing comparisons to David, to Solomon, and to King Cyrus, the Persian leader who protected the Israelite people despite not personally worshipping their Lord.

“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? If I went to the U.K., or most other places in the world, they would say it’s a cultural right. In America, many Christians believe it’s a God-given right. So, you can see how, even in that one small example, we start running into problems.”

Winans paused, measuring his words. “Again, I don’t want to dishonor anyone. But we give standing ovations inside the church, with the flag flying, to the person who’s been designated to go to war for America. And then we give a golf clap to the missionary. We give a golf clap to the ambassador we’re sending out, who represents the kingdom we’re supposed to have our citizenship in. And you have to wonder: Why? What’s going on inside our hearts?”

The pushback was private at first. Individual church members began calling Torres, texting him, emailing him, asking for a meeting. The conversations took on a familiar rhythm. The member would ask Torres if he knew about Floyd’s personal history; if he knew that Floyd was a drug addict and a convicted criminal. Then, after Torres would respond that it was irrelevant—that sinning and falling short of the glory of God, as all men do, is no defense for murder by the state—the member would interrogate Torres. Did he think America was a racist country? Why wasn’t he standing up for law enforcement? Would he denounce the rioting and looting on the news? Finally, the member would suggest an apology: Torres should confess his error to the church body and ask for forgiveness.

Torres felt defeated. This extremism represented nowhere near a majority of the church; the cabal numbered no more than twenty, a fraction of the hundreds of people who attended services every week. But these troublemakers were not a bunch of fringe, Easter-and-Christmas-Eve churchgoers. One of them worked on his staff. Another taught confirmation classes. Several were close friends—people he’d spent years praying with, laughing with, hanging around with. They had even gone on a trip together to the Holy Land. Now some of them were turning his church into a war zone. Torres was spiraling. For the first time, he began to question God.

Just the other day, Sanders told us, a friend who pastors a large congregation in Cleveland called him to vent. A longtime member of the church had asked for a meeting and broken some difficult news. “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.”

That the pro-life cause has become synonymous with Falwell, his Moral Majority, and its successor movements is evidence of careful storytelling and masterful salesmanship. But it does not stand up to factual scrutiny.

For his part, Falwell lauded Trump as “one of the greatest visionaries of our time” and “one of the most influential political leaders in the United States.” In front of his students, the university president saluted Trump for having “single-handedly forced President Obama to release his birth certificate,” and then awarded him an honorary doctorate.

Politics at Liberty was nothing new. But there was an edge to this event, a raw antagonism that felt unique. Falwell had grown more comfortable in his skin as the school’s leader; that skin was combative, conservative, Trumpian. A few years into Falwell’s tenure, and soon after Obama took office, Liberty stripped its College Democrats club of official recognition, denying it the use of university funds. Not long after that ordeal, Liberty blocked campus networks from accessing the website of Lynchburg’s newspaper, the News & Advocate, after it reported on the school’s reliance on federal financial aid. Eventually Falwell seized editorial control of Liberty’s student-run newspaper, the Champion, regularly censoring criticisms of his own views and favored political figures. 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.

there was one obstacle Moore couldn’t get beyond: the Church itself. As a teenager in the 1980s, he watched as the fervor of the religious right spread through his church community like a cancer, exposing moral opportunism and political hypocrisy and racial animus. Some of the people he’d once revered as mature believers were revealed to be spiritually empty. Their gods were not his God.

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. “Every teacher will tell you, the bully on the playground is usually the most insecure boy. It’s a compensation mechanism. If the boy were truly confident, he wouldn’t need to throw his weight around,” Dickson said. “It’s the same with the Church. The bully Church is the insecure Church.”

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.”

Stetzer focused on what needed to be purged from evangelicalism—starting with the nastiness. The love of a merciful God “is not what we’re known for,” he said, but it could be again if Christians would check themselves. Without naming names, Stetzer was speaking to an obvious truth. This idea, promoted by the likes of Robert Jeffress, that the Church’s unpopularity has nothing to do with its ugly behavior, simply does not pass the smell test.

“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.”

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.”

For the next fifteen minutes Bolin did not mention the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, or the life everlasting. Instead he spouted misinformation and conspiratorial nonsense, much of it related to the “radically dangerous” COVID-19 vaccines. “A local nurse who attends FloodGate, who is anonymous at this time—she reported to my wife the other day that at her hospital, they have two COVID patients that are hospitalized. Two.” Bolin paused dramatically. “They have one hundred and three vaccine-complication patients.” The people around me gasped.

For years, Bolin had preached to a crowd of about one hundred on a typical Sunday. Then came Easter of 2020, when Bolin announced that he would refuse to comply with Michigan’s emergency COVID-19 shutdown orders and hold indoor worship services. When word got around Brighton—and around ultraconservative Livingston County—that one area pastor was defying the Democratic governor, FloodGate morphed from a church into a cause. Bolin became a small-time media celebrity. Local politicians and activists borrowed his pulpit to promote their causes, and, all the while, FloodGate’s attendance soared. Longtime members from other area congregations defected in droves to the small roadside church. By Easter of 2021, FloodGate was hosting 1,500 attendees every Sunday.

People could not stop talking about FloodGate. The church was a phenomenon in my hometown, and when I finally attended services there, I could see why. Bolin was less a pastor than he was a performer. He had traded his pulpit for a soapbox, riffing like it was open-mic night at a campus coffeehouse. He openly preyed on the political and cultural insecurities of his congregants. And it worked. The hardest part of witnessing all this was to see people I knew—people I respected and cared about from around the community—falling for this spiritual farce. Rather than being challenged and transformed by the gospel, they were now coming to church to have their worst impulses confirmed. Bolin was offering a tawdry translation of the message of Jesus Christ, and people adored him for it.

THE FIRST TIME I WALKED INTO THE SANCTUARY AT FLOODGATE, I didn’t see a cross. But I did see American flags—lots of them. There were flags on the screens behind the stage, flags on the literature being handed out. There was even a flag on the face mask of the single person I spotted wearing one.

While covering presidential campaigns, I had attended political rallies at churches across Iowa, South Carolina, Texas, and elsewhere. But I’d never seen anything quite like this. The parking lot swarmed with vehicles covered in partisan slogans. The narthex was jammed with people scribbling on clipboards. (I thought this was preemptive COVID contact tracing; they were actually enlisting volunteers for all manner of right-wing causes.) Inside the sanctuary, attendees wore MAGA caps and Second Amendment–related shirts. I didn’t see a single person carrying a Bible.

The real embarrassment was Bolin himself. Introduced at the beginning of the program as the “rock star” who disobeyed the government, the pastor seemed intent on showing just how uncouth one could be in the pulpit. Bolin began by suggesting that COVID-19 was “possibly being manipulated with the funding and blessing of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the man who put us in masks.” When he heard scattered boos, Bolin egged on the crowd: “That’s right, go ahead!” The sanctuary filled with vicious jeers. A minute later, the pastor was boasting about how far he’d taken his insults of Governor Whitmer. “Probably the most egregious thing I ever did,” Bolin said, chuckling, “was I did do a Nazi salute and called her ‘Whitler.’”

scanned the sanctuary. Not a single person seemed to register any objection, or even surprise, at this pastor boasting that he’d done a Nazi salute from the pulpit. In my ensuing visits to FloodGate, and in long conversations with Bolin, I never ceased to be aghast at what I heard. It became clear that this type of extreme political expression was central to his church’s identity—and to his own.

This is the juncture at which most evangelicals would pause, reflecting on their crusade against Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Bolin was part of it. But he rejects the comparison. Clinton, he argued, was a serial liar with a long history of being accused of sexual misconduct. Before I could pick my jaw up off the floor and ask how that differentiates Clinton from Trump, Bolin started rattling off fantastical, fever-dream allegations against not just Clinton, but against the current president, Joe Biden, too, describing the whole of the Democratic Party as sinister and predatory.

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.”

The Trump conversion experience—having once been certain of his darkness, suddenly awakening to see his light—is not to be underestimated, especially when it touches people whose lives revolve around notions of transformation. And yet it reflects a phenomenon greater than Trump himself. 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.

Vern told me that COVID, and Winans’s decision to shutter Cornerstone, should not be considered in a vacuum. Godless government bureaucrats have been scheming for years to silence conservative, Bible-preaching churches, he explained. The pandemic was just a dry run. Any pastor who folded in the face of this pressure, Vern said, wouldn’t be able to protect their congregation when the real test came.

Nancy grumbled that Democrats had done more to restrict Christians from worshipping during COVID-19 than they had done to prevent illegal immigrants from crossing the southern border.

“We’re compassionate. We want to help the people already here. We want to keep this country strong,” he said. “Our compassion is focused on not taking us down a path to socialism.”

The more we talked, the clearer it seemed that the Hoffners’ problem with Cornerstone wasn’t COVID-19 protocols. The language they used—about immigrants, about America, about Trump and Biden and the duty Christians have to engage in political combat—was precisely the sort of thinking that Winans was trying to disciple out of his congregants.

“And I remember telling them, ‘The harder thing to do is what I’m doing,’” the pastor said. “This is how you lose people. How you gain people is, you pick a tribe, raise the flag, and be really loud about it. That’s how you gain a bunch of numbers. That is so easy to do. And it cheapens the gospel.”

“We didn’t leave the church. The church left us,” Tony told me. “COVID, the whole thing, is the biggest lie perpetrated on humanity that we’re ever going to see in our lifetime. And they fell for it.”

Tony and Linda told me that FloodGate’s style, as well as Bolin’s fiery messages on topics like vaccines and voter fraud, changed the way they view their responsibilities as Christians. “This is about good against evil. That’s the world we live in. It’s a spiritual battle, and we are right at the precipice of it,” Tony said.

I could see why Vern and Nancy chose to leave Cornerstone. People like the Hoffners—and the Myerses, and the DeFelices—were no longer interested in distinguishing between the political and the spiritual. With the country on the brink of defeat at the hands of secularists and liberals, churches could not afford to stay neutral. An attack on Trump, Tony DeFelice told me, was indeed an attack on Christianity. He believed the 2020 election was stolen as part of a “demonic” plot against Christian America. And he was confident that righteousness would prevail: States were going to begin decertifying the results of the last election, he insisted, and Trump would be returned to office before the conclusion of Biden’s first term.

In the time I spent listening to Bolin preach, sitting with him for interviews, and following his Facebook page, I recorded dozens of political statements that were either recklessly misleading or flat-out false. Whenever I would challenge him, asking for a source, Bolin would either cite “multiple articles” he had read or send me a link to a website like Headline USA or Conservative Fighters. Then he would concede that the claims were in dispute, and indicate that he didn’t necessarily believe everything he said or posted.

This was a dangerous practice for anyone, let alone someone trusted as a teacher of truth. Jesus did not take lightly the question of veracity. Contrasting Himself with Satan—“the father of lies”—Jesus described Himself as truth incarnate, and told His disciples that “the truth will set you free.” This should be a terrifying thought for any professing Christian: Spreading lies is not only antithetical to the example of Christ; it is doing the devil’s work.

Throughout his decades of public life—working for the Republican Party, forming alliances with powerful politicians, becoming a darling of Fox News, launching a small propaganda empire, preaching at churches like First Baptist Dallas, carving out a niche as the American right’s chosen peddler of nostalgic alternative facts—Barton had never been shy about his ultimate aims. He is an avowed Christian nationalist who favors theocratic rule; moreover, he is a so-called Dominionist, someone who believes Christians should control not only the government but also the media, the education system, and other cultural institutions. This is what the “American Restoration Tour” was all about: restoring a version of America that never existed.

Barton was so loose with his facts, so lazy with his analysis, that he made Bolin look meticulous by comparison. At one point, Barton told the story of a Black evangelist named Harry Hosier, who traveled the American frontier preaching to farmers in the early 1800s. Asserting that Indiana residents, “Hoosiers,” had inherited their nickname from a Black Christian—a claim that is not factual—Barton marveled at the people who somehow believe that America has a problem with racism.

Wright didn’t want The Founders’ Bible merely because Barton was his favorite author and historian. He wanted it, Wright explained, because the book wouldn’t be available for much longer. The government was coming for books like this, and it was coming for people like him. Under President Joe Biden, Wright said, bureaucrats would soon mobilize to “curtail our rights and our free speech and freedom of religion.”

The way for Christianity to permeate the culture, he insisted, was by tackling these great debates of our time: abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism. I didn’t bother questioning why Connelly always listed the same narrow set of topics; the answer was apparent. Talking about other clear-cut biblical issues—such as caring for the poor and welcoming the refugee and refusing the temptation of wealth—did not animate the conservative base ahead of an election. (Or, relatedly, manifest as moral imperatives nearly as often on Fox News.)

There were more pressing questions on my mind. Connelly’s organization was called “Faith Wins,” but what did that even mean? Could faith really win or lose something? It all just felt so trivial. If we believe that Jesus has defeated death, why are we consumed with winning a political campaign? Why should we care that we’re losing power on this earth when God has the power to forgive sins and save souls? And why should we obsess over America when Jesus has gifted us citizenship in heaven?

Pastors and church officials and evangelical leaders were feeling the pressure to classify Jesus as a registered Republican—and they were feeling it from people like Chad Connelly.

Thoroughly flustered now, Connelly argued that if pastors didn’t address current events head-on, the Christians in their care would resort to “secular sources” to form their political viewpoints. The way to ensure that Christians vote biblical values, he said, was for pastors to preach politics. This struck me as completely backward. If pastors were doing their job—going deep in the word, discipling their flocks, stressing scripture and prayer above social media and talk radio—their people wouldn’t need to be infantilized with explicit partisan endorsements. Those Christians would know how to vote biblically, because they would know their Bible.

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.

For three days I watched Christians pray—not for God’s will to be done, or for the forgiveness of their trespasses, or to be led away from temptation, but for a “red wave” in the upcoming election. The only thing more disingenuous than the appeal was its connotations of eternal significance.

Gohmert closed this particular rant by thanking God for His many blessings, including that “Merrick Garland isn’t on the Supreme Court.” (Surely the Maker of heaven and earth was similarly relieved that Senate Republicans had blocked one of Obama’s judicial nominees.)

He was right. These people were scared. They were scared, in part, because of economic and cultural instability. But mostly they were scared because people like Reed were trying to scare them; people like Reed needed to scare them. Sure, the Bible’s most frequently cited command is “Fear not,” but remember, Reed is no preacher. He’s a political organizer. The job of a political organizer is to win campaigns. To win campaigns, Reed realized long ago, his most valuable tool was fear. And so, in Nashville, Reed unleashed a pack of starved partisan animals to feast on the fright of Christians. For three days, Reed looked on as thousands of believers were told that their children were being groomed; that their communities were under invasion; that their guns were going to be confiscated; that their medical treatments were suspect; that their newspapers were lying to them; that their elected officials were diabolical; that their government was coming after them; that their faith was being banned from public life; that their leader was being unjustly persecuted on their behalf; that their nation was nearing its end.

“We’re in trouble,” said Lydia Maldonado, a pastor from South Florida. “God was kicked out of the White House as soon as Trump left office. When Trump left the White House, he took God with him.”

Maldonado told me she’d run for state representative in 2020, but her election “was stolen” just like Trump’s was. Perhaps sensing my skepticism, Maldonado said that Christians had a responsibility before God to expose voter fraud because “Jesus Himself was the first politician to walk the earth.” I replied by mentioning how Jesus told Pontius Pilate, before His execution, that His kingdom was not of this world.

To be clear, Pence had brought some of this madness on himself. Instead of using his credibility as a mature believer to steer his party away from the sacrilegious God-and-country claptrap being pushed by Trump and his party throughout 2020, the vice president had joined in. “Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents,” Pence declared during a speech to the Republican National Convention. “Let’s fix our eyes on the author and perfecter of our faith and freedom, and never forget that where the spirit of the Lord is there is freedom. And that means freedom always wins.”