The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory Quotes

“What you've done is you've baptized your worldview and called it Christian.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“What’s wrong with American evangelicals?” Winans thought a moment. “America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“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”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“He continued, “The great fault in the evangelical movement today, is that we’re disobedient to the commands of the one we claim to follow. What were those commands? Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Care for widows and orphans. Visit those in prison. Seek first the kingdom of God.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“In a modern evangelical culture that punishes uncertainty—where weakness is wokeness, where indecision is the wrong decision—asking pastors to provide all the other answers is a recipe for institutional ruin. Because what their congregants crave, more and more, is not so much objective religious instruction but subjective religious justification, a clergy-endorsed rationale for living their lives in a manner that might otherwise feel unbecoming for a Christian.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“Scripture has a funny way of cutting political leaders down to size.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“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?”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“This is the great failing of today’s evangelical lobby. Instead of testifying confidently to the presence of a supreme and sovereign God—a celestial chess master rolling His eyes at our earthly checkerboard—Christian conservatives have acted like toddlers lost at the shopping mall, panicked and petrified, shouting the name of their father with such hysteria that his reputation is diminished in the eyes of every onlooker.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“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.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“You can take up the sword of Caesar or you can take up the cross of Jesus,” Zahnd told me. “You have to choose.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“Why should we care that we're losing power on this earth when God has the power to forgive sins and save souls? And why should we obsess over America when Jesus has gifted us citizenship in heaven?”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“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.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“I’m trying to square this,” he said to Volf. “How can Christianity accommodate itself to such appalling anti-Christian conduct? And once you get to a point where you can say anybody’s conduct can be excused because God has a larger plan and uses flawed vessels, then what is left of an actual Christianity at that point?” Volf could only shake his head, searching for the words. “I think you’ve identified the problem really well,” the professor said.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“American evangelicals have a talent for what some theologians call “baptizing the past.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“When Christians are discipled primarily by society, inevitably they look to scripture for affirmation of their habits and behaviors and political views.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements. Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“We in the United States have such an inadequate view of what a Christian is called to be,” Newell told me. “The Bible tells us that we are broken beyond repair—all of us—and that Christ came to heal us. Churches are supposed to be hospitals for the sick. And once we’re healed, we’re supposed to be helping others get healthy, too.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“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. Many of their families had fled religious persecution in Europe; they knew the threat posed by what George Washington, several weeks into his presidency in 1789, described in a letter to the United Baptist Churches of Virginia as “the horrors of spiritual tyranny.” Washington was hardly alone: From skeptics like Benjamin Franklin to committed Christians like John Jay, the founders shared John Adams’s view that America was conceived not “under the influence of Heaven” or in conversation with the Creator, but rather by using “reason and the senses.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“It’s a funny thing about loving your enemies: Once you love them, they cease to be your enemies.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“Jesus's words to Pilate echo throughout all of scripture. True power is not reflected in kingdoms, administrations, or campaigns, because these things are counterfeits of God's original, supreme authority. 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.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“No, Zahnd is baffled by the so-called shepherds. Scripture says God demands more from these Christian leaders. And yet, whether it’s Strang platforming the MyPillow lunatic, or Liberty University’s leadership trading evangelism for electioneering, or the pastor down the road in St. Louis, a onetime friend who now leads his Sunday services with a fifteen-minute political segment called “Ron’s Rants,” Zahnd sees a reckless abdication of duty on the part of the people in charge. They are, as Jesus said of the Pharisees, blind guides, leading their followers to fall into a pit. “You are forming your people in anger and hate. You are helping to intensify their capacity to hate other people,” Zahnd said. “You are giving them permission to carry around this permanent rage.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“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.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“At present, Dickson said, the American Church is suffering from “bully syndrome.” Too many Christians are swaggering around and picking on marginalized people and generally acting like jerks because they’re angry and apprehensive. “Every teacher will tell you, the bully on the playground is usually the most insecure boy. It’s a compensation mechanism. If the boy were truly confident, he wouldn’t need to throw his weight around,” Dickson said. “It’s the same with the Church. The bully Church is the insecure Church.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“Pence had knowingly bastardized a precious passage from the New Testament. The epistle to the Hebrews states, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” In addition to substituting “Old Glory” for “Jesus”—a stunt that was nothing short of blasphemous—Pence deliberately conflated the freedom of being reborn in Christ with the supposedly all-conquering civil liberties enjoyed by Americans.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“As a believer in Jesus Christ—and as the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community—I had long struggled with how to answer this question. 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!”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“How can Christianity accommodate itself to such appalling anti-Christian conduct? And, once you get to a point where you can say anybody's conduct can be excused because God has a larger plan and uses flawed vessels, then what is left of an actual Christianity at that point?”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“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? Surely even the most devoted anti-abortion advocate could spot the problem when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Trump press secretary who was running for governor of Arkansas, declared, “We will make sure that when a kid is in the womb, they’re as safe as they are in a classroom.” Indeed, America set another new record for school shootings in 2022, and the evangelical movement was silent.”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

“If a mega church pastor is exposed for misconduct—if he and his staff are proven to be liars, bullies, scoundrels, enablers of abuse—then what good is the testimony of thousands of people who insist that pastor brought them closer to Christ? One must take a comically small view of God to believe that these people could not have drawn closer to Christ while attending another church—one not guilty of systemic misbehavior. After all, was it the pastor who had brought them closer to Christ or was it the work of the Holy Spirit? Does Jesus need the help of our broken institutions, or do our broken institutions need the help of Jesus?”
― Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism