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

by Tim Alberta

Derived from the Greek euangelion, which means “good news” or “gospel,” the English word evangelical was typically used to distinguish reformed Protestants, with their revivalist aims, from the staid customs of Catholicism.

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.”

One of the Bible’s dominant narrative themes—uniting Old Testament and New Testament, prophets and disciples, prayers and epistles—is the admonition to resist idolatry at all costs. 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.

The 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.

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

Two things can be true. First, most of America’s founding fathers believed in some deity, and many were devout Christians, drawing their revolutionary inspiration from the scriptures. Second, the founders wanted nothing to do with theocracy.

For the first time, significant numbers of young adults who had been raised in diverging traditions—Pentecostals with their emphasis on charismatic expression, fundamentalists with their old-fashioned rituals, Southern Baptists with their cultural etiquette, mainline Protestants with their social awareness—were amalgamating under a shared, if loosely defined, label: “evangelicals.”

Given how the country had turned on Republicans after Watergate, Falwell was destined to be disappointed in 1976. 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.

Before the 1980s, Moore said, “there were two ways of evangelizing. You could focus on end-times prophecy, which a lot of people did; or you could talk about marriage and parenting, using practical advice, talking about how the Church could help your family,” Moore said. “But by the nineties, being a real Christian meant voting Republican. And suddenly, the easiest way to reach people, by far, was through political identification.”

“They need help to understand that you can care for your country without worshipping your country,” Bacote said. “They also need help to understand that you can care for your country and seek good for your neighbors. Just because other people are getting something, doesn’t mean you’re losing something.”

The Trump conversion experience—having once been certain of his darkness, suddenly awakening to see his light—is not to be underestimated, especially when it touches people whose lives revolve around notions of transformation. And yet it reflects a phenomenon greater than Trump himself.

Unsavory alliances would need to be forged. Sordid tactics would need to be embraced. The first step toward preserving Christian values, it seemed, was to do away with Christian values.

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.

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.

Trumpism and the American evangelical movement. Was deconstruction even possible without atonement from the people who’d been part of the problem? We probably shouldn’t expect any sweeping, transformational contrition from the likes of Robert Jeffress or Greg Locke. Maybe the best we could hope for was a course correction at the grassroots level, a model of reconciliation in miniature, some wrongs made right by the rank-and-file pastors who’d led their churches into crisis. The problem with this hope: Most of these pastors couldn’t see the crisis at all.

“Christianity is inherently countercultural. That’s how it thrives. When it tries to become a dominant culture, it becomes corrupted. That’s been the case from the very beginning,” Zahnd said. “This is one major difference between Islam and Christianity. Islam has designs on running the world; it’s a system of government. Christianity is nothing like that. The gospels and the epistles have no vision of Christianity being a dominant religion or culture.”

Slavery would not have been abolished by bumper stickers and annual marches with hashtags. The struggle for civil rights was powered by people who were unrelenting in their on-the-ground activism, who toiled in the trenches without reward, who did dangerous and unpleasant work with humility and grace. These fights were waged block by block, city by city, to rally public consciousness to the cause.

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?

“When you lose sight of your identity, it’s easy to lust after power, and to justify the moral compromises necessary to achieve it.”

Evangelicals by and large no longer seemed to care whether their preferred candidate had a biblical worldview, much less a command of scripture. Even at a place like Liberty—especially at a place like Liberty—politicians saw the pointlessness in talking about servanthood, about humility, about unity and peace and love for thy neighbor. The market for such a message had long since disappeared. The demand was for domination, and Republicans like Trump and DeSantis were happy to supply it. Their appeal to evangelicals had everything to do with acting like champions and nothing to do with acting like Christ.

To some evangelicals, the purpose of the Church is to “own the libs” with an aggressive, identitarian conservatism. They might cloak their ambitions with biblical language—like Ralph Reed at his Faith and Freedom conferences or Charlie Kirk at his flag-waving sanctuary symposiums—but that facade isn’t sustainable.

secure. More than any figure in American history, the forty-fifth president transformed evangelical from spiritual signifier into political punch line, exposing the selective morality and ethical inconsistency and rank hypocrisy that had for so long lurked in the subconscious of the movement. To be fair, this slow-motion reputational collapse predated Trump; he did not author the cultural insecurities of the Church. But he did identify them, and prey upon them, in ways that have accelerated the unraveling of institutional Christianity in the United States.

Finite games are defined by several criteria: known players, fixed rules, and a zero-sum objective. Think of a baseball game.

Infinite games, on the other hand, are defined by the opposite criteria. There are known and unknown players. The rules are flexible and can change. The objective is to constantly improve, to be better than one’s own self, because the game has no conclusion. Education is an obvious example: There is no winning at education; only learning, growing, maturing.