I heard Tim Alberta interviewed on Fresh Air back in November of 2023. His interview grabbed my attention as I remain eager to hear Evangelical voices critical of what's been happening to the Church in the Trump era.
And so out of curiosity I picked up his book - The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in An Age of Extremism and was immediately 'pulled in' as they say. It was really a very interesting read and his compilation of reporting narratives and interviews was compelling. During the early stages of the book I became convinced that I would want everyone I knew to read it. But then at some point the book shifted and began to lose its way, leaving me with very mixed feelings.
I finished the book and since then I've been going through it again on Sunday mornings as my family listens to it during our long ride to church services. I definitely felt like it was warranted and would generate some good thought and discussions - and it has.
Unfortunately the book also has some serious shortcomings and as such I probably wouldn't endorse it and I would be careful to whom I recommended it. A second read amplified my mixed feelings and turned them into serious doubts.
Alberta travels around the United States and reveals just how far things have progressed in terms of Right-wing politics, militancy, and the like. It's must-read material to be sure. The Trump Cult has overtaken Evangelicalism and Alberta is rightly appalled by what has happened and how few people seem to see it and exhibit the conviction to make a stand. But there are some resisters and it is through the course of these interactions that we discover that Alberta isn't altogether doctrinally sound himself.
One need not be Right-wing to hold to 'conservative' views of Scripture and the culture - though this is admittedly fuzzy ground as in some ways I'm not conservative at all. If by conservative one means patriotic or nationalist - then no, I'm not conservative. I refer to the New Testament as the standard, not American cultural norms or politics. I'm not a patriot or a capitalist but my wife stays home out of conviction and we home-schooled our children. I'm not interested in flag waving or free markets but unlike Alberta I also reject feminism and many of the other cultural norms he willingly embraces - and often without a second thought.
I speak in terms of values surrounding money, standard of living and the like. He realizes the Christian Right has a real problem when it comes to what the New Testament teaches about the poor or about power but his follow-through is tepid at best.
His theology is not as liberal as the Mainline churches but I struggle to identify him as a theological conservative. He is in the end an Evangelical and that movement is (generally speaking) so bankrupt that I find most of the time he's treating symptoms more than dealing with problems at a fundamental level.
I grew frustrated with examples of moderation. I don't considered the Right-wing opinions of Cal Thomas to be moderate or tempered by Scripture. He realized that the quest for power was flawed and that the Church is compromised when it ventures down that road. Nevertheless Thomas hasn't re-thought or reconsidered much of anything in terms of how he views the world. He's still a cheerleader for the Right and the values of capitalism, militarism, and Empire.
Russell Moore has changed his tune from twenty years ago. Alberta is correct in dismissing those who label him as 'left wing' or 'woke', but in many respects I'm guessing he's still pretty far to the Right. At least he was during the Bush years. I respect his courage to call out Trumpism and face the attacks of false teachers like Franklin Graham, but in the end, I can't really get too excited about Moore. These figures represent the same flag-waving values of the American Empire - just turned down a bit and seemingly 'moderate' when compared to the Trump movement and its flirtations with outright fascist ideology and certainly its ethos.
One of the most glaring omissions in the book is with regard to Israel. Motivated by Dispensational Theology, American Evangelicalism is doctrinally and morally blind when it comes to the modern state of Israel. Having not understood the New Testament, this movement continues to support what is functionally a fascistic regime and one presently engaged in genocide. The movement is dripping in blood in terms of its political activism and its support for the most extreme elements within Israeli society. Alberta ignores this but instead goes after the Trumpite GOP for its refusal to support the Ukraine War. I found his engagement with foreign policy myopic, frustrating, and at times offensive.
Generally speaking, in addition to just embracing the assumptions of mildly progressive American middle-class values, Alberta just more or less echoes mainstream US narratives about itself and its wars. He has no problem with Christians in political office or the military and he fails to call out the way in which Evangelicals and the Right in general treat slain American soldiers as martyrs, and veterans and active duty members as virtual saints. He slams Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church but fails to see that American Evangelicalism is little different - especially under the likes of Bush and Trump.
He calls out Russian policies and war crimes but simply ignores US Evangelical support for America's crimes in Iraq and the butchery of Bush's larger complex of Middle Eastern conflicts which resulted in well over a million dead.
We can reject the many egregious conspiracy theories but the answer is not to simply embrace the narratives provided by the Establishment on the evening news. And sometimes there are hints of truth that are spun out of control by bad actors and corrupt agents seeking to enrich themselves - Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, and Tucker Carlson come to mind. But this doesn't mean that absolutely everything they say is wrong or without basis. If he had given an honest account of the events surrounding the DNC files and Wikileaks I might be willing to listen to his rejection of the idea that Seth Rich was assassinated. But given that he framed it in an inaccurate, over-simplified and maybe dishonest manner - I wasn't too interested.
I was not very impressed with his grasp of American political history and his ability to identify where all of this came from. It's not something new. The cancer in the American Right goes back to the founding of the post-war GOP and the rise of what was then Neo-Evangelicalism - a movement explicitly rejecting Fundamentalist separatism. One thinks of McCarthyism, the John Birch Society, and the way in which the party collaborated with World War II-era fascists. The party, inspired by the likes of MacArthur, McCarthy, and Goldwater promoted a kind of fanatical militarism. Nixon had been part of this too but he tempered and triangulated his strategic views even while he sabotaged the peace talks in 1968 and intensified the war in Indochina. His policies of Detente along with the failures in Vietnam and the economic woes - born of war debt and capitalist failures led to the rise of Reagan and the resurgence of aggressive 'rollback' policies vis-à-vis the USSR. The Watergate era led to distrust and the Congress attempted to rein in the CIA and other clandestine tools in the White House and Pentagon arsenals. And so Reagan turned to unofficial channels spawning the Iran-Contra episode and other dark chapters of war and criminality that have been already forgotten or explained away by hack historians. The scope of this is way beyond David Barton and his ilk but I wonder if it's too big for Alberta. He seems unwilling to see the systemic rot or grasp the magnitude of the problem in terms of American society. The end result of such an inquiry does not lead to modern (let alone reinvigorated) Evangelicalism but to Separatism - something the former movement abhors and has been opposed to since its inception after World War II.
The Reagan-Bush era and the failures and compromises of the Christian Right opened the door to Bill Clinton who was denounced as a Baby Boomer, pot-smoking, hippie, communist that would ruin America. The Culture War was declared with vigour and two years later the GOP captured the House of Representatives and politics took a very nasty turn. The cancer had metastasized.
The
second Bush was supported in his crusade and his destruction of the
US Constitution - power was all that mattered by then. His policies
were disastrous and led to the rise of Obama (another pseudo-leftist
like Clinton) and with Sarah Palin and others leading the charge, the
GOP took another dark and radical turn with the arrival of the Tea
Party and Donald Trump. Along the way, the Evangelical movement
embraced psychology, divorce, and feminism and increasingly lost its
way in terms of doctrine and ethics. By the time the movement got
behind Trump, the old arguments about integrity and character no
longer mattered. The cancer had become terminal. The story of Liberty University and the Falwells looms large.
Figures like Russell Moore touch on these themes but only at a surface level. Failing to grasp the magnitude of the problem, Alberta's analysis is flawed as are his solutions. He fails to see that at a basic level Evangelicalism is simply acculturated Christianity. It is this culture's version of Roman Catholicism - the same kind of corrupt syncretism that dominated the Middle Ages, but merely in a different context and thus with a different style.
But this too presents a dilemma for Evangelicals as they wish to capture the institutions of society rather than exist as a counter-culture in a state of antithesis. They don't want to be sectarians resisting the corruption of the False Church. That's a formula for social denigration and a loss of status. That's a formula for small churches and that's why few pastors have the spine to call out the heretical FOX-driven epistemology that dominates their churches. If they take it on, their churches will empty and they will lose their positions.
The New Testament doesn't present the Church as a dominating force in society but a persecuted remnant - strangers and foreigners living out counter-cultural values. This was true in the supposed 'Christian' culture of the Middle Ages and it's just as true today in the abomination that some fools call 'Christian America'.
Albert presents the problem in a rather compelling fashion but cannot deliver. The answer is not found in fixing liberty, or in the likes of Denhollander, Roys, the Asbury Revival, or in the embrace of egalitarianism.
It's certainly not found in hiring outside secular institutions to monitor the Church - turning to Egypt for help and treating the Church just like another institution in society. What a bankrupt ecclesiology.
This unfortunate chapter of outsourcing and collaboration in the name of resisting Trumpism in the Church has been called out (in a rather inane manner) by the likes of Megan Basham in Shepherd's for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. She's right to expose how some of the Evangelicals have collaborated with Silicon Valley - something Alberta seems to think a wise turn. But the problem is whatever these 'progressive' Evangelicals have done has been outdone one-hundred times over by the 'conservatives' who have partnered with Wall Street, the Koch Brothers, Big Oil, and countless other interests. This renders Basham an absurd figure and many have called her out for this and yet it doesn't vindicate Alberta and his flawed thinking on these points.
So
how to fix this mess? The obvious answer is a return to the
Scripture. These False Teachers need to be exposed and called out and
repentance demanded. They need to be removed from office.
The Church will shrink - probably in a rather staggering manner.
This
of course will not happen. These
wealthy interests wield too
much power and their resources are near inexhaustible. Their
allies and their ecclesiastical
empire would be toppled. Without something akin to a Reformation in
which these forces (these
traitors to Zion) are
actively opposed - there will be no change.
There's no fixing this apart from active opposition which means an
abandonment of Evangelicalism. Alberta
doesn't even entertain such notions nor does he recognize the real consequence of all this. It's called apostasy but that's a concept most Evangelicals are unable to grasp. Their theology lacks the categories for it.
The book is definitely worth reading but Alberta's solutions are almost as problematic as the problems he identifies. I was frustrated by its numerous factual mistakes and its over-focus on the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC is by my estimation flawed at its foundation and so in some respects I consider the focus a waste of time. Fixing the SBC will fix nothing.
The book had so much promise only to disappoint and worst of all because of the tack he pursues, his enemies will feel vindicated in continuing their course. What a shame.
Once again, we face a dilemma. A growing number of churches are falling into egalitarianism and bit by bit embracing the ethos of modernist theological liberalism. Many others are abandoning Christianity on the other side - paying lip service to the New Testament even while they distort its reading and Judaize its doctrines and swap the Kingdom for the values of the nationalist Right and its mammon worship. In many cases the ethical inversion they practice is as foreign to its pages as that of the progressive Evangelicals and even the Mainline. They're all transforming the Church in different ways into caricatures of Babylon.
There are some Confessional bodies trying to navigate this but the cancers are present in their midst as well. I just recently encountered a PCA pastor who's all 'Trumped' up, lists all of his guns in Facebook posts, and wants to talk about 'resistance'. We are at a watershed and yet how few understand the crisis of the hour. Alberta helps by shining a light on some of the cancer but he cannot identify it and has no salve to cure this wound.
See also:
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/whats-left-to-say-about-evangelicals/