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

by Tim Alberta

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.”