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

by Tim Alberta

At once, the ears of Christian viewers everywhere perked up. Pence had knowingly bastardized a precious passage from the New Testament. The epistle to the Hebrews states, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” In addition to substituting “Old Glory” for “Jesus”—a stunt that was nothing short of blasphemous—Pence deliberately conflated the freedom of being reborn in Christ with the supposedly all-conquering civil liberties enjoyed by Americans. It was a rhetorical sleight of hand aimed at rousing the very sorts of star-spangled Christians who would threaten his life on January 6, and who, a year and a half later, were booing him at Reed’s conference.

This compartmentalization of standards is toxic to the credibility of the Christian witness. Many evangelicals have come to view politics the way a suburban husband views Las Vegas—a self-contained escape, a place where the rules and expectations of his everyday life do not apply. The problem is, what happens in politics doesn’t stay in politics. Everyone can see what these folks are doing. Just as you might stop taking marital advice from your neighbor if you saw cell phone footage of him paying for prostitutes and cocaine in Vegas, you might stop taking spiritual guidance from your neighbor if you saw him chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” at the Capitol Building.

An extreme example? Perhaps. But bankruptcy—spiritual and otherwise—happens slowly and then all at once. In 2016, Christians condoned their preferred candidate talking on the Access Hollywood tape about grabbing women by their vaginas, because the election was a binary choice and the Supreme Court was at stake; by 2022 Christians walked around wearing “Fuck Joe Biden” on their chests because in politics the rules of decency, never mind the maxims of Christianity, do not apply.

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? If Christians are called to reflect the awesome power of a God who renews minds and transforms hearts—who dwells within us, seeking our complete devotion to Him, commanding us to lead lives of tr...

This was a microcosm of Reed’s entire event. Character didn’t matter. Truth didn’t matter. Honor and integrity didn’t matter. Those were means, and all that mattered was the ends: winning elections. To achieve that end, Reed and his disciples were willing to invoke the name of Jesus Christ, the son of God, and argue that He was on their side.

But unlike nonbelievers, Christians have a code of conduct that is specific and exacting and unambiguous. Reed’s assertion that “individual Christians” could interpret that code however they wished amounted to the kind of moral relativism that had inspired evangelicals to break away from mushy, mainline Christianity in the first place.

Reed’s piece was especially telling. Its headline: “We Can’t Stop Now.” Listing their many victories in recent years, Reed boasted of how he and his allies had defeated pro-gambling initiatives in numerous states. It would be another six years before Reed was exposed for taking millions of dollars in laundered payments from Indian tribes who enlisted him to mobilize Christian voters against rival gambling initiatives in nearby states. This was but one part of the sweeping scandal that took down and imprisoned Reed’s close friend, lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Although Reed had technically broken no laws (if duplicity were criminal, he’d be serving a life sentence) the revelations confirmed many a suspicion about the man and his movement.

Pence, I reminded Thomas, described himself as “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican—in that order.” To lead with that identifier—to profess publicly, time and again, that you’re a follower of Jesus before anything else—is to invite and deserve perpetual scrutiny. Unlike all the craven, self-indulgent schemers who had surrounded Trump, the vice president knew the difference between right and wrong. He deserved to be held to a higher standard. Pence did the courageous and honorable thing on January 6, but he was the one who’d spent four years ignoring and excusing all the abuses of power and violent rhetoric and authoritarian impulses that set January 6 into motion.

Thomas was all for trying to win elections. But invoking the wrath of God to collect twenty dollars from a retiree in Tulsa started to feel less like a strategy and more like a scam.

There are millions of Christians in America who follow these commands with rigor. But there are millions more who do not—or who, at best, follow them selectively and inconsistently. I recalled what Pastor John Torres told me about his congregation at Goodwill Church in the Hudson Valley: Some of his most politically feverish people were also his most generous. 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.

“When you ask the average person, what do you think it means to be a Christian? They’ll say, pro-Trump, Republican, right-wing, anti-abortion, don’t like gays. They’ll go down the list,” Thomas told me. “Well, why would they say that? Because that’s what we’re modeling before the world. Those are our public priorities—not these other things, which get so little attention from man but all the attention from God.”

That sounded harsh, and perhaps Thomas was utilizing some hyperbole to make his point. But he wasn’t wrong. Unlike the Catholic Church, which at least offsets its scandals with bountiful, centralized, highly visible social programs—for the hungry, the disabled, the drug addicted, the abused, the sick, and anyone else who needs help—the evangelical Church is not exactly synonymous with charity. This isn’t because evangelicals are not themselves charitable; to the contrary, research has shown time and again that Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, are more generous with donations than their non-religious peers. It’s really a matter of emphasis—as influenced by theology. Whereas Catholics stress the “works” that must accompany faith, Protestants adhere to ...

I was reminded of a conversation with Robert Jeffress at First Baptist Dallas. After touring his quarter-billion-dollar facility, complete with the designer coffee shop and hundred-foot-tall fountains, I asked Jeffress what his church was doing to serve the community in Dallas. It seemed a fair question. Extravagant wealth aside, he and his church were constantly in the news for their political activities; surely he would also want to be known for helping his fellow man. Jeffress mentioned a homeless shelter and a women’s health center—commendable projects both—but then hurriedly pivoted away from the subject, not wanting to elaborate on these or any of...

Not long ago, Locke was a small-time Tennessee preacher. Then, in 2016, he went viral with a selfie video, shot outside his local Target, skewering the company’s policies on bathrooms and gender identity. The video collected more than 18 million views and launched Locke as a distinct evangelical brand. Casting himself on social media as a lone voice of courage within Christendom, he soon aligned himself with figures like Trump henchman Roger Stone, propaganda filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, and right-wing rabblerouser Charlie Kirk to gain clout as one of the evangelical world’s staunchest Trump supporters. All the while, his congregation swelled—moving from their old church building, which seated 250, into a large outdoor tent, then into an even bigger tent, and eventually into the current colossus. The tent holds three thousand people and would be the envy of both Barnum and Bailey.

Not that one might expect theology from a guy whose claim to fame was portraying a bootlegger who named his Confederate-themed car “General Lee,” but this was a curious take on scripture. The notion that God was “calling” on Christians to “take back” their country—especially by force—is laughably incompatible with the teachings of Christ. It was Jesus who subverted the authorities with teachings of obedience and edicts of nonviolence; it was Jesus who mocked His captors for brandishing weapons as they arrested Him. “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come out with swords and clubs to capture me?” He asked.

After a series of meandering anecdotes that lacked any coherent theme, Schneider finally made clear why he’d come to Global Vision, asking people to go to JohnSchneider.com and support him. Before playing their final song, Schneider’s musical partner, a man named Cody, plugged his own album for sale. Then, after an awkward segue into describing the campaign against Jesus in America, he announced they would be closing with a patriotic song. Its title: “Rise Up.”

The payoff came with COVID-19. Refusing to close Global Vision, and publicly degrading any pastor who decided differently, Locke portrayed himself as an avenger fueled by religious vindication, the lonely voice of boldness inside a retreating American Christendom. His following kept increasing and he kept pushing the limits. His viral videos became ever less about Jesus Christ and ever more about Greg Locke: railing against medical authorities, jeering Biden, discrediting vaccines, protesting in D.C. on January 6. In one of his most-viewed videos of 2020, the pastor accosted a Dunkin’ Donuts employee who asked him to wear a mask inside the store.

But, as Locke had just told me, he did think Trump’s reelection was stolen. He did subscribe to certain beliefs, about vaccines and globalist schemes and a deep-state regime, that are commonly described as conspiracy theories. Might he grasp why some people who heard him preach with such authority and conviction—about the central truth of Jesus and about the peripheral truth of these other matters—were merging the two beliefs systems into one?

In his epistle, James likens the human tongue to a small rudder that directs a massive ship. Locke didn’t seem to grasp this concept, shrugging off concerns about his deranged commentary while simultaneously complaining that he was misunderstood. There was, I suggested, one surefire way to prove his detractors wrong. If Locke stopped mixing priorities, wouldn’t people stop thinking he had his priorities mixed up?

What binds them together—Locke and Bolin and the scores of other right-wing pastors I’d encountered over the past few years—is that they are now expected to be something more than mere church leaders. They are political handicappers, social commentators, media critics, information gatekeepers. And they have only themselves to blame: It turns out, when a pastor decides that churches should do more than just worship God, congregants decide that their pastor should do more than just preach.

This might be precisely what some pastors had always hoped for, the opportunity to guide and shape every aspect of their congregants’ lives. But spiritually speaking, this is a doomed proposition. Pastors already struggle to provide all the answers written down inside their book. In a modern evangelical culture that punishes uncertainty—where weakness is wokeness, where indecision is the wrong decision—asking pastors to provide all the other answers is a recipe for institutional ruin. Because what their congregants crave, more and more, is not so much objective religious instruction but subjective religious justification, a clergy-endorsed rationale for living their lives in a manner that might otherwise feel unbecoming for a Christian.

Down this path, disaster waits. The pastor who finds himself offering religious justification today might find himself inventing it tomorrow. 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 ...

This explains why, long after leaving Global Vision, I could not rid myself of its violent imagery—all the guns and the paramilitary gear and the swaggering talk of the Second Amendment. Locke swore this rhetoric was d...

“I’m trying to square this,” he said to Volf. “How can Christianity accommodate itself to such appalling anti-Christian conduct? And once you get to a point where you can say anybody’s conduct can be excused because God has a larger plan and uses flawed vessels, then what is left of an actual Christianity at that point?”

I struggled with his logic. Why should Christians allow the coarsening of the world to justify the coarsening of Christianity itself?

I tried to clarify. He was citing concerns about the decaying standards of American life—sexualized curricula, drag shows, transgender bathrooms, the works—to explain why the future of American Christendom depended on cartoonish heretics like Lindell and Flynn and Trump. Forget about what the world is getting wrong. Aren’t Christians called to a higher standard?

But even the former president wasn’t about to stoop to hanging around this crowd. (As Strang said, there has to be a standard.) So, Clark recruited Eric Trump—not the most articulate or entertaining of Trump’s progeny, but a Trump progeny nonetheless—to speak in Branson. He strode onto the stage like he’d just knocked down the walls of Jericho himself. Cheers cascaded down from the rafters. No man had ever been celebrated so much for accomplishing so little.

“Winning is a virtue,” Dana Loesch, a conservative Christian talk-show host, said on her program. “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”

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. If one is driven to electoral advocacy by the conviction that mankind bears the image of God, why stop at opposing abortion? What about the shunning of refugees? What about the forced separation of babies from their mothers? What about the hollowing out of programs that feed hungry kids? What about the lifelong incarceration of nonviolent offenders and the wrongful execution of the innocent? What about the Darwinist health-care system that prices out sick people and denies treatment to poor people and produces the developed world’s highest maternal mortality rate? What about the fact that, in 2020, guns had become the number one cause of death for children in the United States? Surely even the most devoted anti-abortion advocate could spot the problem 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.” Indeed, America set another new record for school shootings in 2022, and the evangelical movement was silent.

The other problem with the pro-life message: the messengers. Can we really expect Americans to take lessons on virtue from a president who brags about grabbing women by their vaginas? Can we really expect voters to entertain the argument of unborn lives having inherent dignity coming from a man who lies about having ended unborn life himself? Evangelicals can rationalize all this—going on about “binary decisions” and “the lesser of two evils” until they convince thems...

It’s not just a lack of confidence that undermines the Christian witness, but a carelessness, a casual way of communicating the Lord’s priorities. If a politician claims God’s support, and that politician goes on to lose, can we blame unbelievers for concluding that God lost, too? And if God lost something as trivial as a political campaign, how can He possibly triumph over the grave?

Donald Trump promised a transactional relationship with evangelical voters: He would give them pro-life policies in exchange for their unconditional support. That transaction went through, but the receipt isn’t pretty. Abortion rates spiked during his presidency. The celebration that accompanied toppling Roe v. Wade was short-lived. In 2022, for the first time in memory, Democrats were the single-issue voters when it came to abortion, turning out in historic numbers to support abortion rights. It proved to be decisive, swinging dozens of competitive races against the Republican Party. The only thing more predictable than this crushing defeat of the pro-life movement was its immediate scapegoating by Trump himself.

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.”

“I’m really tired of this talk about how these poor people don’t trust anything anymore. Oh no—you trust. You just trust all the wrong stuff. You trust awful people, with awful intentions, for no good reason other than they tell you what you want to hear,” French seethed. “You come home after work, put on Fox News, and leave it on until you go to bed. You trust Fox News—despite the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, the election bullcrap, all the revisionist history on January 6. You sit there for hours, listening to this garbage, rotting your soul. And then you turn around and say, ‘Why would I trust the New York Times?’ Really? Why would you trust Tucker Carlson?”

We all agreed that these ideological die-hards whom French was describing were not a majority of the evangelical movement. There is a difference between the people who prefer the 6 p.m. hour of programming at Fox News to those of its cable rivals, and the people who marinate in right-wing misinformation all day long. That latter group, everyone estimated, was still no more than 15 or 20 percent of most church congregations they knew of. The problem is, as Moore pointed out, “That vocal minority will always push around a timid majority. The people who care the most usually get what they want.”

But the Bible is a book of brutal candor. Man’s sinful nature stars from Genesis through Revelation. No one—not Abraham or Moses, not Peter or even Paul—is spared. The only flawless character is Christ. And that is the entire point.