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

by Tim Alberta

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.

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.

crisis of American evangelicalism comes down to an obsession with that worldly identity. Instead of fixing our eyes on the unseen, “since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal,” as Paul writes in Second Corinthians, we have become fixated on the here and now. Instead of seeing ourselves as exiles in a metaphorical Babylon, the way Peter describes the first-century Christians living in Rome, we have embraced our imperial citizenship. Instead of fleeing the temptation to rule all the world, like Jesus did, we have made deals with the devil.

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

“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.”

Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.

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.”

“I have affection for America. I’m glad I live here. But my citizenship is not here. It cannot be here,” he said. “We’re clinging to something in America that is a sad parody of what Jesus has already won. We have a kingdom awaiting us, but we’re trying to appropriate a part of this world and call it a kingdom.”

Indeed, the “things of man” Peter worried about twenty centuries ago are the same things that preoccupy us today: wealth, prestige, control. 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.

The preacher’s admonition was straightforward: By setting their minds on the things of man, Christians are telling Jesus to get behind them.

‘What you’ve done is you’ve baptized your worldview and called it Christian.’”

Evangelicals had mortgaged the future of the Church on extrabiblical causes,

“Winning at politics while losing the gospel is not a win,” he added, sending evangelical Twitter into a frenzy. “Trading in the gospel of Jesus Christ for political power is not liberty but slavery.”

“The genius of evangelicalism is the breadth of it. The hazard is the lack of depth. A lot of these people are just not going deep enough.”

When Christians are discipled primarily by society, inevitably they look to scripture for affirmation of their habits and behaviors and political views. “But if the Bible is the word of God, then God ought to be interrogating those things. That’s why Jesus came: to fix your vertical relationship with God,” Bacote said. “He wants your whole life. He wants to transform who you are.” We were sitting in Bacote’s fifth-floor

The first is that too many American Christians are woefully under-discipled. The second—a by-product of the first—is that too many American Christians think of themselves as American Christians.

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.

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.

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.

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?