When the journalist Tim Alberta’s father unexpectedly died, another ordeal awaited Tim. His father had pastored the Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian church in Michigan, where the Alberta family now gathered to honor his life alongside the congregation the father had nurtured. “None of us had slept much that week,” Alberta writes in his second book, The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. “So the first time someone made a glancing reference to Rush Limbaugh, it did not compute.” But the references kept coming. Soon, Alberta realized they were talking about him. He was promoting his first book, American Carnage, on the ascension of Donald Trump, and Limbaugh was displeased about what Alberta calls “unflattering revelations” about the former president. Now, members of his father’s congregation wanted to know if Alberta remained a Christian, whether he was “still” on “the right side.”
In his eulogy the next day, Alberta urged the Christians before him to seek out “discipleship and spiritual formation.” They could listen to his father’s old sermons, perhaps, or the pastors of the church could help them. “Why are you listening to Rush Limbaugh?” he asked them. “Garbage in, garbage out.” Hours later, a woman handed him a note from a church elder. In it, the elder expressed his disappointment. “I was part of an evil plot,” Alberta recalls, “to undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States.” He was guilty of something “tantamount to treason” against both God and country. If he investigated “the deep state” instead, he “would be restored.”
How did his father’s congregation get to this point? In Alberta’s new book, he tries to answer that very question. His journey spans the United States, taking him from Cornerstone to the sprawling campus of Liberty University with various stops at other churches, where the false virtues of ivermectin are preached from the pulpit and the pseudo-historian David Barton tells eager audiences that America is the Christian nation they imagine it to be. After one Barton event, an Ohio pastor tells him that pastors must preach politics. “What I could offer was a window into my faith tradition,” Alberta writes in the prologue. “It happens to be the tradition that is the most polarizing and the least understood; the tradition that is more politically relevant and domestically disruptive than all the others combined: Evangelicalism.”
American Evangelicalism is polarizing, certainly, but anyone who thinks it’s poorly understood is not paying attention. Evangelicals — usually white, conservative Evangelicals — are the subject of countless books and sweeping articles. We know at this point how the contemporary Christian right came to be; we know, too, the danger it poses. American Evangelicals form the core of Trump’s base. They generate such reliable interest because they wield power. Joe Biden is the president, but in a real way, America is still under the Evangelical boot. Roe v. Wade is gone thanks in part to Evangelical voters who helped win control of the U.S. Supreme Court, and further threats to abortion rights loom on the horizon. Conservative activists are stoking an anti-LGBTQ+ backlash in school districts across the country. Liberals rightly fear that this religious minority may help Trump get back into office.
There’s an appetite, then, for a whisperer, someone who can lay out the threat and offer up a solution. What distinguishes The Kingdom from other entries in the genre is Alberta’s dual role as a person of faith and a political journalist. He is a product of the church who became a critic from within. That’s fraught territory, and there’s much to explore. Alberta realizes that, in its current form, Evangelicalism poses a threat to the country, but he is consumed equally by the threat it poses to itself. From this angle, a political crisis can look like a spiritual one. To some people of faith, perhaps it’s both, but its earthly ramifications can’t be ignored. A less Trumpy but still conservative Evangelicalism would remain authoritarian and a threat to us all.
Like Alberta, I grew up in the church, but unlike him, I left it over a decade ago, repulsed by its rightward tilt. People I love and respect still belong to Evangelical churches, including my parents, who are not Trump voters but are staunchly anti-abortion. So while they’ve soured on their tradition’s relationship to the Republican Party, they still are not liberal by any definition. They resemble Chris Winans, who succeeded Alberta’s father as pastor. Anti-abortion but concerned by his congregation’s apparent jingoism, Winans experienced a personal crisis as church members fled, dissatisfied with his nonpartisan approach. “Then I started to wonder if Dad didn’t have some level of culpability in all of this,” Alberta writes — a brave statement to make about a parent he clearly adores. Later, Winans diagnoses his shrinking flock: “Too many of them worship America.”
Alberta’s confrontation with his father’s congregation had been years, even decades, in the making. “The notion of America declining as a nation due to diminished religiosity was nothing new: Church leaders had spent a half century warning that to ban prayer in public schools and to legalize abortion and to normalize drugs and pornography and unwedded sex was to invite God’s wrath, or at the very least, His indifference,” he writes. Though he doesn’t say so, these warnings were really about losing power. Diminished religiosity, as he puts it, could spell the defeat of the church, and if the church lost power, society was doomed. The alliance between Evangelicalism and the GOP was a true marriage of minds, which helps explain its durability. In such an environment, few can say they did not bear some culpability in the politicization of the church.
Alberta’s father might have been directly complicit. He had shown his church a video warning them that Obamacare was dangerous, voted for Trump largely because of abortion, and considered attacks on Trump to be an attack on his own character. Above all, “Dad’s kryptonite as a Christian — and I think he knew it, though he never admitted it to me — was his intense love of country.” Alberta’s father even banned Democratic politicians from a marine’s funeral in 2007. Alberta recalls the sermon: “‘I am ashamed, personally, of leaders who say they support the troops but not the commander-in-chief,’ Dad thundered from his pulpit at Cornerstone, earning a raucous standing ovation. ‘Do they not see that discourages the warriors and encourages the terrorists?’”
Nationalism always had a grip on the white Evangelical church. When I attended a conservative Evangelical college, I realized just how deeply those hatreds ran. Barack Obama’s election disturbed my classmates, maybe even frightened them. Here was a Black liberal with a suspicious name, and here was the loss of power they abhorred. In The Kingdom, Alberta reflects on the Obama years after speaking with Robert Jeffress, a megachurch pastor and prominent Trump supporter. White Evangelicals “had spent Obama’s presidency marinating in a message of end-times agitation. Something they loved was soon to be lost. Time was running out to reclaim it. The old rules no longer applied. Desperate times called for desperate — even disgraceful — measures,” he writes. Jeffress, he adds, “was inviting an obvious question: Once a person becomes convinced that they are under siege — that enemies are coming for them and want to destroy their way of life — what is to stop that person from becoming radicalized?”
You will know them by their fruits, the Bible says. Behold: conspiracy theories, prejudice, and fear; eventually, Donald Trump.
To his credit, for all the time Alberta spends with the radical Evangelical right, he is not desensitized to what he uncovers. Instead, he is scandalized. “Would a serious Christian see fit, I wondered, to condone this brutish behavior in any other area of life?” he writes of the Road to Majority conference where Trump had spoken to an enthralled audience. “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?” A “serious Christian” might not, as Alberta defines the term. He goes on to ask why these Christians accept a certain brutality in politics that they may not accept in other areas of their lives. “This compartmentalization of standards is toxic to the credibility of the Christian witness,” he writes.
That may be true. But from the outside, the very distinction looks like a mirage. People who consider themselves serious Christians have welcomed vulgar right-wing media into their homes for decades. They have listened to people like Jerry Falwell and Limbaugh launch “vicious ad hominem attacks” on their enemies, and they applauded every time. The abuse of power is acceptable to some Christians, who have driven out pastors and faithful professors and who have captured school boards and state legislatures and more, seeking power in the name of Christ. They can cite chapter and verse too. They believe they are serious.
Elsewhere, Alberta lends a surprising credence to political Evangelicalism. “There were reasonable concerns, following the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, that churches and religious nonprofits might be punished for acting in accordance with their traditional beliefs,” he says without offering any evidence for the claim. He goes on to quote Russell Moore, a high-profile Evangelical Trump critic who left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2021: “There are genuine threats to religious expression in America, Moore said, but a government crackdown on churches wasn’t among them.” What are these threats? We never find out.
Alberta invests his hopes for the church in a small remnant of Evangelicals who are dismayed by what their faith has become. They nevertheless appear conservative on issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. This sets up a greater problem, one that never really gets resolved in the book. On the subject of abortion, conservative Evangelicals are extremists, out of step both with medical science and public opinion. Even the remnant is complicit; if you think abortion is state-sanctioned murder, you cannot be apolitical. It’s a bit rich, then, to accuse your more partisan brothers and sisters of wrecking the faith: “Winning is a virtue. I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.” So do you, if you’re anti-abortion.
I still empathize with my parents and other Evangelicals who may be mourning the loss of an institutional Christian witness. That pain is real. Could it also save the church? I don’t know, but I don’t think so; the headwinds are too great. It may be the wrong question anyway. Perhaps ask, instead, whether there is anything worth salvaging about Evangelicalism. Toward the end of the book, Alberta returns to his father’s church, where Winans has discipled a smaller but steadier congregation. Alberta gives the last word to him — really to Christ, speaking through Winans. “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal,” Winans says, quoting Second Corinthians 4:18. Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, after all.
Remembering this could do the Evangelical church some real good. Alberta’s underlying idea, though, seems to be that the proper spirituality, in the form of serious discipleship or a return to the fundamentals of the faith, can help resolve the political crisis of the church. This sidesteps the authoritarianism that lives within Evangelicalism and fails to resolve the problem of the remnant, which clings to reactionary beliefs while it decries the debasement of the faith by politics. The remnant and the Trump brigade don’t belong to different categories. They exist on the same continuum, and it’s a short one at that.
American Evangelicals once struck their alliance with the right because they longed for power and feared the loss of it. Such a fate was to be avoided, no matter the cost. Now, it’s clear the costs are high indeed — for white Evangelicals and for the rest of us, too. We may benefit, temporarily, from a saner Evangelicalism, a tradition gripped less by Trump and more by spiritual concerns. But the most vulnerable citizens of this country will never be safe as long as millions believe there should be no right to abortion and no equality for LGBTQ+ people. Fail to acknowledge that and we’ll stay under the Evangelical boot for good.
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