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

by Tim Alberta

Trump had won a historic 81 percent of those white evangelical voters. But, as I’d written in the book, that statistic was just a surface-level indicator of the foundational shifts taking place inside the Church.

It would have been easy to say something like: “Well, John, most evangelicals are craven hypocrites who adhere only to selective biblical teachings, wield their faith as a weapon of cultural warfare, and only pretend to care about righteousness when it suits their political interests. So, it’s no surprise they would ally themselves with the likes of Donald Trump!” But that wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be accurate.

At the opposite end were the Christians who willfully jettisoned their credibility while voting for Trump—people who embraced the charge of being reactionary hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a playboy turned president.

But at the very top of the page, in his most careful penmanship, Dad had written one verse: “Do not cast me away when I am old; do not forsake me when my strength is gone.” Mom and I looked up at one another. In his final hours on earth, my father, who was seventy-one years old, had been meditating on Psalm 71.

Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn my father. I was in the company of certain friends that day who would not claim to know Jesus, yet they shrouded me in peace and comfort. Some of these card-carrying evangelical Christians? Not so much. They didn’t see a hurting son; they saw a vulnerable adversary.

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).

To the present day there remains no real consensus around what it means to be an “evangelical.”

By the 1980s, with the rise of the Moral Majority, a religious marker was transforming into a partisan movement. “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.

Jesus frames the decision in explicitly binary terms: 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.

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.

Christian imagery was ubiquitous at the scene in Washington: rioters forming prayer circles, singing hymns, carrying Bibles and crosses. The perversion of America’s prevailing religion would forever be associated with this tragedy;

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

All these examples, and the great majority of what voters would hear from GOP politicians, came from the Old Testament. That never struck me as a coincidence.

There was justifiable alarm among many Christians when Trump clinched the GOP presidential nomination. The immorality in his personal life aside, Trump had spent his campaign inciting hatred against his critics, hurling vicious ad hominem insults at his opponents, boasting of his never having asked God’s forgiveness, and generally behaving in ways that were antithetical to the example of Christ.

For decades, the religious right had imposed exacting moral litmus tests on public officials, taking particular glee in tormenting the forty-second president, Bill Clinton, whose duplicity and womanizing allegedly made him unfit for office. Godly character, they had told us, was a requirement when it came to running the country. Ignoring the sins of Trump was not a sustainable approach.

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 vowed to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, a prospect packed with spiritual and geopolitical implications Trump almost certainly did not grasp, even if he was keen on the electoral upside.

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.”

was a risky application of scripture. God is speaking in that passage to Solomon, the king of Israel, after the dedication of the temple in Jerusalem. This is a specific word of forewarning, issued at a uniquely sacred moment, from God to the ruler of His covenant nation. For Pence to appropriate this language and apply it in the context of an American political campaign dozens of centuries later meant one of two things: Either the Republican nominee for vice president didn’t know his Bible history; or he did, and he believed that God’s relationship with Israel was somehow parallel to God’s relationship with the United States.

That offering—of grace, salvation, citizenship in an eternal kingdom—ought to be enough to quell the temporal desires of those who identify as Christians. But it often isn’t, Winans said, and for the same reason that God’s covenant wasn’t enough for the ancient Israelites thousands of years earlier. “God’s people have always been tempted to be like the rest of the nations. It was true back then, and it’s true now,” Winans told me. “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.”

“At its root, we’re talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people,” Winans said. “If you believe that God is in covenant with America, then you believe—and I’ve heard lots of people say this explicitly—that we’re a new Israel. You believe the sorts of promises made to Israel are applicable to this country; you view America as a covenant that needs to be protected. You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance. At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we’re called to be.”

“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?

We have a kingdom awaiting us, but we’re trying to appropriate a part of this world and call it a kingdom.” Winans pointed out the window. “God told us, this place is not our promised land,” he said. “But they’re trying to make it a promised land.”

Dad really did believe this; he believed that the constant attacks on Trump’s character were ipso facto an attack on the character of people like himself, which I think, at some subconscious level, created a permission structure for him to ignore the shows of depravity.

To his even greater credit, whenever he turned political, especially around election time, he was quick to emphasize the proper Christian perspective. “God doesn’t bite his fingernails over any of this,” he would say. “Neither should you.”

This was something else. This was taking the weight and the gravity and the eternal certainty of God and lending it to an ephemeral and questionable cause. 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.”

The two pastors and the eager apprentice discussed and debated every theological, historical, cultural, and political topic imaginable. Disagreement was common—and enjoyable. Each of them had come from unique backgrounds; each of them had unique views of the Church and the country and the world. Uniformity of belief was necessary in but one sense: Jesus Christ had died for their sins and was resurrected for their justification before God.

‘I know you might not have voted for Barack Obama, but there’s something about little Black girls running through the hallways of the White House, calling it home, that has a profound spiritual effect on us. And I just want to communicate that to my brothers in the clergy.’

Torres had never looked at the social media accounts of his members. Now he found himself open-mouthed, stunned and sickened by what he was seeing. 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.

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.

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.

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.’”

Sanders shrugged. “Americans always think they deserve to win. And so, naturally, the Church has become about winning, too.”

“Exactly,” he said. “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.”

“The whole idea of a Messiah coming was that he was going to arrive and there wouldn’t be a living Roman anywhere. It was going to be a bloodbath. All the Romans were gonna be dead,” Torres replied. “And yet Jesus had a very different program. His kingdom is so different from what we envision as a kingdom. We think in terms of beating the other side, of winning the argument. The problem is, if you win the argument, you’ve won nothing.”

“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.”

Not long after the founding of Thomas Road, Falwell had expanded his telecast into four states plus Washington, D.C., and was reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers each Sunday. By the mid-1970s, Falwell’s Old-Time Gospel Hour was shown on more stations throughout the United States than any single telecast.

Historians and religious scholars had long understood the American story in the context of its “Great Awakenings.” The first broke out in the British American colonies during the 1730s. With echoes of the Protestant Reformation—which had destabilized the aristocratic Roman Catholic Church two centuries earlier—frontier preachers democratized the revival process, calling for a renewed focus on holiness and individual salvation. The second awakening, in the 1790s, offered similar revivals but with far greater breadth, its emphasis on converting the unchurched, spawning myriad new Christian organizations and associations that became central to the young nation’s civic life. The third awakening—generally thought to be the least impactful, at least theologically speaking—stressed missionary work and moral activism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. It gave rise to the Prohibition movement and the so-called Social Gospel, which presented Christianity as a cure to poverty and other societal ills.

“The Scopes Trial” became shorthand, iconographic of the twentieth century’s embrace, even worship, of technology and science.

So in the year of the bicentennial, Falwell initiated a public relations blitz aimed at capitalizing on love of country and exploiting fears of secularism.

Carter won the election, but with the culture wars beginning to rage, Falwell sensed an opening to turn Democratic rule into a referendum on American morality.

He was not shy about his ultimate aims. The school would promote Christian values, certainly; but even more so, it would grow big enough and strong enough to reverse the leftward currents in academia that were running downstream into the rest of American life.

The implications, political and spiritual, were profound. Whereas Falwell had once treated theology as the imperative—prioritizing saving the individual soul, believing that America’s redemption was downstream from mass conversion—he was now operating in reverse, setting aside religious differences and working with non-Christians toward a supposed national salvation. In this sense, Falwell was a mirror image of Billy Graham, who in the early stages of his career had stressed patriotism and courted political power, only to later back away from both.

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.

They needed an issue set that would satisfy the lowest common denominator of their socially conservative constituency. 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.

In 1968, Christianity Today, the flagship evangelical publication founded by Graham, convened a symposium of some two dozen theologians who ultimately could not agree whether abortion is sinful.

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.