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

by Tim Alberta

The great obstacle to saving souls, I suggested, wasn’t drag queen performances or Critical Race Theory. It was the perception among the unbelieving masses—the very people these evangelicals were called to evangelize—that Christians care more about reclaiming lost social status than we do about loving our neighbor as ourselves.

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.

This speech—like the entire Road to Majority event—had been executed with a double meaning. Yes, there was incessant talk about a radical “woke agenda” that was advancing Critical Race Theory and transgenderism and the like. But for every warning of progressivism run amok there was a rebuke of conservatism gone soft; pastors and politicians freely labeled as “cowards” anyone who shared their values but refused to go to war for them. The enemy wasn’t simply those godless secularists on the left, but those gutless Christians on the right.

There’s a reason that scripture warns so often and so forcefully against fear: It is just as powerful as faith. But whereas faith keeps our eyes steadily fixed on the eternal, fear disrupts us, disorients us, drives us to prioritize the here and now. Faith is about preserving our place in the body of Christ; fear is about protecting our own flesh and blood.

I replied by mentioning how Jesus told Pontius Pilate, before His execution, that His kingdom was not of this world. “No. It is of this world,” Maldonado told me. “God gave us this country. We are the keepers of this kingdom. And right now, we are allowing the enemy to take it from us.”

Would a serious Christian see fit, I wondered, to condone this brutish behavior in any other area of life? Would they condone vicious ad hominem attacks if they were launched at the office? Would they condone the use of vulgarities and violent innuendo inside their home? Would they condone blatant abuses of power at their local school or nonprofit or church? If the answer is no, then why do they accept it in politics? Because politics is about the ends, not the means. Since the ends are about power—the power to legislate, the power to investigate, the power to accumulate more power—the means are inherently defensible, even if they are, by any other measure, utterly indefensible.

“When Trump mentioned Pence and the evangelical audience booed their brother in Christ, I said to myself, this is the final compromise,” Thomas told me. “Here is your brother. Here is a man who worships the Lord that you claim to worship. Here is a man who goes to church every Sunday. Here is a man who has had only one wife and never been accused of being unfaithful. And you’re booing him? As opposed to a serial adulterer? A man who uses the worst language you can think of and does every other thing you oppose? Explain that to me from a biblical perspective. Please.”

The moment Pence thought for himself, choosing the rule of law over the ego of a president, Trump’s minions turned on him.

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.

You were either faithful to Trump or you were his nemesis.

Later that night, after the complex had been cleared and multiple Americans had died, Kinzinger was sickened to see 147 of his Republican colleagues vote against certifying the results of the election—essentially bowing to the demands of the terrorists who’d stormed the cathedral of American democracy hours earlier.

“She said, ‘You won’t be a success until you thank God for losing your job,’” Thomas recalled. “She was right. My job was my god. It was the center of my life around which everything else, including my wife and kids, were to circulate.”

Almost forty years later, Thomas still felt ashamed. This practice of preying on unwitting believers was central to the business model of the Moral Majority and its successor groups.

“There’s always a threat. Look at Tucker Carlson every single night: ‘They’re out to get you.’ And it works,” Thomas said. “One time, I actually asked one of our fundraisers, ‘Why don’t you ever send out a positive letter about what you’re doing with people’s donations?’ And he looked at me with this cynical look. He said, ‘You can’t raise money on a positive. If the goal is bringing in money, you have to scare them.’”

American evangelicals have a talent for what some theologians call “baptizing the past.” That means propagating the tale of George Washington asking a chaplain to dunk him in the icy waters at Valley Forge when no supporting historical record exists; insisting that Thomas Jefferson was a God-fearing humanitarian when he was in fact a slaveholding epicurean deist; seizing upon Lincoln’s appropriation of scripture to paint him as an evangelical when he was known to mock revivalists and rarely attend church; and one day, no doubt, citing photos of Trump in an Oval Office prayer circle to argue that the forty-fifth president was himself an earnest follower of Christ.

Thomas searched the scriptures to find validation for what he and his friends were doing. What he found instead was a rebuke—and a call to repent.

Years of social science had demonstrated the degree to which young people, even and especially young believers, were alienated from organized religion by the perception of its ulterior motives. Their parents, desensitized by decades of incremental boundary crossing inside the Church, didn’t think anything was wrong. But these kids sure did. This was the generation that would make or break American evangelicalism. These were the children of the Moral Majority.

But here, addressing the potential future power brokers of Washington, he was even more explicit: All the weakness of our earthly affiliations—to family, to political parties and cultural tribes, even to churches—highlights the strength of our eternal identities.

Refreshing to hear about the generations after the moral majority

“If the gospel is true, that means the gospel is not a means to an end. It’s not a tool to excite nationalistic passions, or to form social bonds, or to teach civics. The gospel is the announcement that God has raised the crucified Jesus from the dead and seated Him in the heavenly places at the right hand of God as the heavenly ruler of the cosmos. If that is true, then every other allegiance is subordinate,” Moore said, his voice now rising. “Jesus teaches us to pray by asking first of our Father, holy and set apart, for the coming of the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. And only then does He turn to the question of our daily bread.”

A good place to start, Moore suggested, is for Christians to worry less about perceived enemies and more about supposed allies. I knew just what he meant: Today’s evangelicalism preaches bitterness toward unbelievers and bottomless grace for churchgoing Christians, yet the New Testament model is exactly the opposite, stressing strict accountability for those inside the Church and abounding charity to those outside it.

“When I talk to atheists and agnostics, most of them are genuinely curious. Some of them are really, really angry. But I know that 99.9 percent of the time they’re not angry about theism. They’re angry at some parent who used religion in a destructive way, or a pastor who hurt them . . . . This is a person Jesus loves, a person for whom Jesus died, a person who is hurting,” Moore said. “My responsibility is not to try to win the argument. My responsibility is to stand in [God’s] place and say, ‘Come, all you who are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest.’”

“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.”

The irony was that Thomas himself was no stranger to the culture wars. Even after Blinded by Might, he continued publishing a column that regularly took polarizing positions on already-divisive subjects. Yet he wasn’t a villain to the left. This was a man who called Ted Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi friends; a man who wrote conservative op-eds by day and dined with the country’s most prominent progressives by night. What was his secret? “I want to be like Jesus. He ate with ‘publicans and sinners’—or, as I like to say, Republicans and Democrats,” Thomas said, beaming mischievously. “He hung out with tax collectors and prostitutes. That’s what I want to be known for. I want them to see Him in me, so that they will be attracted to Him. That is the purpose of my life.”

This is the gospel we are to proclaim both in word and in deed: To be a Christian is to sacrifice not for the benefit of those we already have around our table but for the betterment of those we have never considered to invite.

The church had been established on the concept of “radical compassion,” but now it was known as just plain radical. Whatever money Global Vision raised for the hurting was being dwarfed by the proceeds Locke generated by inflicting pain onto others. Suddenly the reward found in loving one’s enemies seemed trivial relative to the reward found in hating them.

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?

But those masses weren’t necessarily wise to the game Locke is playing. The thousands of people making the pilgrimage to Mt. Juliet every week aren’t aware that Locke actually thinks QAnon is a joke, or that he actually wishes people didn’t bring guns to his church, or that he actually believes “Christian nationalism” is a contradiction in terms. They aren’t aware of any of that because Locke doesn’t tell them. Like so many celebrity shot-callers on the Christian right, Locke sees this charade for what it really is, but does everything possible to make sure that his followers don’t.

As the country emerged from the fog of 2020, pastors who had defied the government—especially those pastors who made a show of it, then watched attendance double and donations triple as a result—learned what Locke already knew: This was the new normal. They had chosen a permanent side. They had committed themselves to something bigger than an individual public health policy. No longer could the culture wars be selected à la carte. Talking politics was now as much a part of church life as taking communion.

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.

Russia wasn’t merely using Christianity to endorse its ambitions. Russia was using Christianity to define its enemies. It was the kind of identitarian programming that presaged some of history’s greatest crimes—and, in the case of Russia’s butchery in Ukraine, it would not have been possible without the blessing of the Church.

“The world was uniting but Yugoslavia was falling apart,” recalled Volf, a lanky, bald-pated professor, his accent still distinctly Eastern European. “What we experienced was a religiously motivated reassertion of ethnic identities.” The result was a decade of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

None of this is unprecedented. Religion and politics are natural enemies; both provide a sense of belonging and self-actualization to the masses. Tension between the two is healthy and necessary. When one appropriates the other, history shows that oppression—leading to death and human suffering at a woeful scale—is the inevitable result.

He didn’t think it was a fair fight, either, though for somewhat different reasons. Whereas I was suggesting that the silent majority needed to speak up, Volf wasn’t sure they were a majority anymore at all.

Tellingly, much of the modern evangelical lobby had condemned deconstructionism writ large, claiming (wrongly) that it was some progressive political device and fearing (rightly) that it would stir uneasiness in their churches.

The power to raise taxes is not the power to raise Jesus from the dead; the power to seat senators is not the power to seat Jesus at the right hand of the Father. Every biblical reference to power—every prayer, every reflection, every instruction—affirms that God is all-powerful, and that to the extent He vests that power in man, it is to proclaim God’s kingdom, God’s power, and God’s glory.

“Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally,” Orwell wrote. “Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.”

What about the light of our nation flickering? What about this being the most important election of our lifetimes? The pastor rolled his eyes. “They’ve said that during every election for the last two hundred years.”

MAYBE IT WAS THE SIGHT OF PEOPLE WEARING “JESUS IS A BADASS” shirts cheering expletive-laden calls for violence against political opponents, but something told me that devotion to the Reformation-era creed of Soli Deo Gloria—“to God alone be glory”—was not what brought these folks to Branson. No amount of singing or praying or Bible quoting from the religious leaders onstage could conceal the true aims of this event. They may have honored the Almighty with their lips, but their hearts were far from Him indeed.

What the Jews couldn’t comprehend, Zahnd said, is that Haggai was prophesying a different kind of kingdom, a different kind of temple. He was telling of Jesus and His eternal sovereignty. The people were so attached to their identity, to the tangible glories of earthly power, that they missed the greater thing promised them.

Zahnd’s tone became more direct. “The writer of Hebrews understands that the glory of the latter temple is not a nation of this world, but the unshakable kingdom of Christ,” he told us. “If you place your hope in the politics of this world, you will be greatly shaken.”

When Christians achieve something of substantial value, be it a megachurch or a publishing empire, the impulse to self-glorify can become overpowering. But it must be resisted. Because the dynamic is very much binary: You can glorify God or glorify yourself, but not both.

Zahnd’s church observes days tied to the deaths of saints, sacred moments from scripture, and the onset of seasons such as Lent and Advent. American holidays—Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day—are not recognized. “What do those dates have to do with us?” Zahnd said with a shrug. “We’re the Church.”

Zahnd has studied the rise and fall of Christian civilizations; he understands that, as the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us, “there is nothing new under the sun.” Still, it’s hard for him to accept just how quickly this particular American experiment went south. When he created Word of Life Church at age twenty-two, riding high on the generational momentum of the Jesus Movement, he was convinced that the United States was experiencing a real-time revival. Forty years later, he is witnessing the sort of crash that will be studied by pastors in the centuries to come. “I think about it every day. I can’t believe it came to this,” Zahnd said. “I’m totally baffled by it. I’m not depressed; I’m not unhappy. I’m just baffled.”

I countered by telling Zahnd what these pastors would say about him—that he’s woke, that he’s lukewarm, that he’s a coward for not taking a stand and fighting to advance biblical principles in a broken world. “Taking a stand,” Zahnd scoffed. “There’s this false assumption of action we’re called to take. The task of the Church is simply to be the Church. All of this high-blown rhetoric about changing the world—we don’t need to change the world. We’re not called to change the world. We’re called to be the world already changed by Christ. That’s how we’re salt; that’s how we’re light.”

In the year after Trump left office, polling repeatedly showed there was one demographic group most likely to believe that the election had been stolen, that vaccines were dangerous, that globalists were controlling the U.S. population, that liberal celebrities were feasting on the blood of infants, that resorting to violence might be necessary to save the country: white evangelicals.

The explanation was straightforward: Exit polling showed that for whatever concerns independent voters had about Warnock’s policies, they were even more concerned about Walker’s character and judgment.

Consider the pro-life cause. Millions of evangelicals identify as single-issue voters, having formed their political sentience around stopping what they see as the moral atrocity of killing unborn babies.

It’s worth wondering how different this debate might look a half century later had millions of single-issue voters invested in something other than electoral politics as a solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancy.

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?

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.