I visited my primary doctor today and, as usual, she asked about my depression. I centered in on my being without a washer for over two months. Of course, she latched on to what I should do--I was at least a little gratified that she also included my health issues as a major reason to seek attention. That is just one of the "business" type issues that I've either been procrastinating about, or trying to deal with as I feel I can and not be so incoherent and angry in attempting to move forward.
When I first left work, I would just set my bills aside, not being able to deal with "business," activities, even if they were my own. Many times, I'd have to pay a penalty--at that time, it was worth it to me to be able to deal with something at the time I "wanted" to deal with it. After all, I'd been living with an impossible workload that ultimately led to job burnout and medical leave. In time, I took care of bills through auto-pay, which, has now begun to backfire occasionally. Those are the other issues that haunt me but, instead, I choose to escape into a book or television... Bottom line for me is that whenever I see the lack of responsibility of individuals and companies, especially after covid I "go a little crazy." Some people have come to a point where theyfeel they are no longer valued... Or, they have no way to deal with their own financial problems... While knowing that companies raised their prices and are keeping them raised far beyond the time that their losses from Covid, could have been captured. America is no longer a warm, friendly place--when you are happy to be properly acknowledged by a doctor, or a sales clerk in a drive-thru restaurant, then we realize more and more that something is wrong. Unions seem to have helped but that is just a small part of the nation's workers...
In any event, I've been doubting whether or not I should continue on my, seemingly, endless desire to learn what the "hell" is going on behind all this seeming madness and chaos... Should I stop and bury myself once again reviewing books that I will enjoy and hibernate here in my log cabin? I don't have an answer that I am sure about... but I wanted to document what has occurred. And let you all decide for me whether it is a God Incident that I should follow...
My eye caught the highest video above where a man who is apparently a known religious leader "shares the gospel" with Donald Trump. I watched it. It stated that it had been created, placing Trump into a one-on-one discussion between the two. There were many comments--everybody liked it. I didn't and so I wrote the following negative comment--the only one:
In my opinion, this "created" interview gives a sense of truth that has not occurred...And, in turn, it is misleading to those who are hearing it. We have to Seek the Truth of Jesus directly from Him... Truth has been so corroded by the former president and his followers. It is not fair, in my opinion, to further enforce that this man has acted on God's behalf with his violence, lies, and criminal acts all his life. You now hear people say that the Bible is above the Constitution. Yet the Bible says that we are to give what is right to give to our government, and to God what is right for Him. Use of Biblical words within the distorted political rhetoric from many politicians these days has certainly led to a division in America that is not what God--the God of Love wants... in my opinion. We are to place God above all and to love our neighbors as ourselves... These are the only two things needed, yet, violence and lies are being used to claim that this man who has been indicted has been given some type of role in saving America. I say to you, as His Spirit of warmth spreads across me, guiding my words. God does not and will not use violence to change America. He has seen what was done when man chose to have an Inquisition hundreds of years ago...killing those who would not become christians. That is historical truth... We as Christians are to share His love with others, not through violence, lies and forced governmental actions...We are simply to share His love to others, all others... Not just other white christians who have adopted an act that is certainly not a plan of His... We see how those in America are using violence against anybody who is different from white christians...That certainly is not how Jesus lived, moving from place to place with Love and Understanding.. and when a town (parts of America) chose not to listen to Him in love and go forth in love...then He dusted his feet off and went on to those who listened and Loved all who were created in His image. Each man, woman and child, who was to be born... God touches our Hearts and our Minds. He has given us Free Will to learn of his desire for love for our neighbors...We can then see the Truth, the Reality of What is going on in America as false prophets are implying that God is leading America's destruction of our democracy, of our freedom, of our open arms of those who need help... I have never heard of this man who put together this video. Nor do I care what is perceived by my post. I believe that God is speaking out through people, new people who have seen the growing separation within churches because of the hypocrisy... I profess nothing of whether I am wrong or right. All I ask is that YOU, yes You, if you doubt that Donald Trump who has been indicted for rape, for stealing the documents that are part of the government's archives and espionage, for falsifying his tax records for purposes of wealth and corruption, for attempting to overthrow the government through lies regarding the election and those people who run them, damaging their lives through their lies...and then, inciting an insurrection which was viewed by millions of people, documented by hundreds of books by those who were there within the Capitol, and those who fought off the attackers led by the past president, those who died because of the violence he refused to stop... This, then, is where we must ask ourselves. Why? Why? would God use violence... When all He wants of us to love the millions of people across His world and to help them from starving when in need, to help them in pain, when their bodies are hurt... Jesus calls on us to bring the children unto Him...not with guns to kill and control...but with love and acceptance. This is what I believe to be God's Truth...And, just for closing out on a national side of things, the present president has done more for America in the few years that he has been in office...working continuously, never doing much to shout out I've done this for you, you citizens of America...He works, he works, he works to do more each day, so much that every day we find out more about what he has done to help America, to help the world... I have been ashamed of what christians are doing, since I want to claim Christianity for myself. I've been a Christian for many years. Only now am I being asked to speak out, after over 70 years of not being involved in any significant manner other than by singing His praises... I weep for those who have been lied to by those who are seeking only power, political power, to do what they want as opposed to what is good for the country... Hamas has been condemned for their hatred... But, I ask you, what is different for those who attacked the capitol, allow guns to be sold indiscriminately, kill or threaten those who are not christians, What is different? What is different is that if you really were a follower of Jesus, you would never ever be involved in violence against any neighbor... Our responsibility is to share His love to all neighbors across the world... I ask you... What is the purpose of this video? I can only assume that it was meant to attempt to imply that the past president...cared... Evidence shows that he did not and does not care... Those who use God's name to attempt to overthrow a government are not acknowledging exactly why Jesus died... He expected to have all of us follow Him in His loving sufficient enough to care for those in need... This is my Truth. It is the Truth of Liz Cheney. It is the Truth of millions around the world who look to our present president for help and assistance in need--something that was totally ignored by the man that was placed in this video... I believe, to attempt to persuade those who do not have the capability of myself...to read, to watch, to learn, to listen, to consider, to acknowledge, and to realize... God is Truth and God would never have chosen a Liar, who continues to lie daily in all ways. to act on behalf of His people--All People.
But, later, after posting, I began to doubt myself. Was I being judgmental? Was I condemning those who support the past president? Should I delete this comment? Why or how did I ever get involved in all of this? My Free Will? If so, should I stop?
The next morning, I got up and started taking my morning pills, after turning on "The Last Word" which I watch the next morning. Before that news started at 10 PM, a brief few seconds of the previous MSNBC program was ending. It was with an author, and the commentator was thanking him, expressing her gratitude for his writing the book... and gave the name... I had the book already--It would be my next one... and the one I've been reading into early this morning...
Prologue
It was July 29, 2019—the worst day of my life, though I didn’t know that quite yet. The traffic in downtown Washington, D.C., was inching along. The mid-Atlantic humidity was sweating through the windows of my chauffeured car. I was running late and fighting to stay awake. For two weeks I’d been sprinting between television and radio studios up and down the East Coast, promoting my new book on the collapse of the post–George W. Bush Republican Party and the ascent of Donald Trump. Now I had one final interview for the day. My publicist had offered to cancel—it wasn’t that important, she said—but I didn’t want to. It was that important.
When the car pulled over on M Street Northwest, I hustled inside the stone-pillared building of the Christian Broadcasting Network. All in a blur, the producers took my cell phone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with news anchor John Jessup. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals. Despite being a lecherous, impenitent scoundrel—the 2016 campaign marked by his mocking of a disabled man, his xenophobic slander of immigrants, his casual calls to violence against political opponents—Trump had won a historic 81 percent of those white evangelical voters. But, as I’d written in the book, that statistic was just a surface-level indicator of the foundational shifts taking place inside the Church. A relationship that was once nakedly transactional—Christians trading their support, sans enthusiasm, in return for specific policies—had morphed into something else entirely.
Trump was no longer “the lesser of two evils,” a grin-and-bear-it alternative to four years of President Hillary Clinton and three pro-choice Supreme Court justices. Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why? 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!”
But that wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be accurate. The truth is, I knew lots of Christians who to varying degrees supported the president, and there was no summarily describing their diverse attitudes, motivations, and behaviors. They were best understood as points plotted across a vast spectrum. At one end were the Christians who maintained their dignity while voting for Trump—people who were clear-eyed in understanding that backing a candidate, pragmatically and prudentially, need not lead to unconditionally promoting, empowering, and apologizing for that candidate.
At the opposite end were the Christians who willfully jettisoned their credibility while voting for Trump—people who embraced the charge of being reactionary hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a playboy turned president.
Most of the Christians I knew fell somewhere in the middle. They had all to some extent been seduced by the cult of Trumpism: convinced of the false choices that accompanied his rise, drained of certain convictions in the name of others, infected with a relativism that rendered once-firm standards suddenly quite malleable.
Yet to composite all of these people into a caricature was misleading. Something more profound was taking place. Something was happening in the country—something was happening in the Church—that we had never seen before. I had attempted, ever so delicately, to make these points in my book. Now, on the TV set, I was doing a similar dance. Jessup seemed to sense my reticence. Pivoting from the book, he asked me about a recent flare-up in the evangelical world.
In response to the Trump administration’s policy of forcibly separating migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, Russell Moore, a prominent leader with the Southern Baptist Convention, tweeted, “Those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion, especially those seeking refuge from violence back home.” At this, Jerry Falwell Jr.—son and namesake of the Moral Majority founder, and then-president of Liberty University, one of the world’s largest Christian colleges—took great offense.
“Who are you @drmoore?” he replied. “Have you ever made a payroll? Have you ever built an organization of any type from scratch? What gives you authority to speak on any issue?” This being Twitter and all, I decided to chime in. “There are Russell Moore Christians and Jerry Falwell Jr. Christians,” I wrote, summarizing the back-and-forth. “Choose wisely, brothers and sisters.” Now Jessup was reading my tweet on-air.
“Do you really see evangelicals divided into two camps?” the anchor asked. I stumbled a bit. Conceding that it might be an “oversimplification,” I warned still of a “fundamental disconnect” between Christians who view issues through the eyes of Jesus versus Christians who process everything through a partisan political filter. It was painful. As the interview wound down, I knew I’d botched an opportunity to state plainly my qualms about the American Church. Truth be told, I did see evangelicals divided into two camps—one side faithful to an eternal covenant, the other side seduced by earthly idols of nation and influence and exaltation—but I was too scared to say so.
My own Christian walk had been so badly flawed. And besides, I’m no theologian; Jessup was asking for my journalistic analysis, not my biblical exegesis. Better to leave the heavy lifting to the professionals. Walking off the set, I wondered if my dad might catch that clip. Surely somebody at our home church would see it and pass it along. I grabbed my phone, then stopped to chat with Jessup and a few of his colleagues.
As we said our farewells, I looked down at the phone, which had been silenced. There were multiple missed calls from my wife and oldest brother. Dad had collapsed from a heart attack. There was nothing the surgeons could do. He was gone. THE LAST TIME I SAW HIM WAS NINE DAYS EARLIER. THE CEO OF POLITICO, my employer at the time, had thrown a book party at his Washington manor, and Mom and Dad weren’t going to miss that. They jumped in their Chevy and drove out from my childhood home in southeast Michigan. When he sauntered into the event, my old man looked out of place—a rumpled Midwestern minister, baggy shirt stuffed into his stained khakis, rubbing elbows with Beltway power brokers in their customized cuff links—but before long he was the star of the show, holding court with diplomats and Fortune 500 lobbyists, making them howl with irreverent one-liners. It was like a Rodney Dangerfield flick come to life. At one point, catching sight of my agape stare, he peeked over, gave an exaggerated wink, then delivered a punch line for his captive audience. It was the high point of my career.
The book was getting lots of buzz; already I was being urged to write a sequel. Dad was proud—very proud, he assured me—but he was also uneasy. For months, with the book launch drawing closer, he had been urging me to reconsider the focus of my reporting career. Politics, he kept saying, was a “sordid, nasty business,” a waste of my time and God-given talents. Now, in the middle of the book party, he was taking me by the shoulder, asking a congressman to excuse us for just a moment. Dad put his arm around me and leaned in. “You see all these people?” he asked. “Yeah.” I nodded, grinning at the validation. “Most of them won’t care about you in a week,” he said. The record scratched. My moment of rapture was interrupted. I cocked my head sideways and smirked at him. Neither of us said anything. I was bothered. The longer we stood there in silence, the more bothered I became. Not because he was wrong. But because he was right. 
Now on TBR List
“Remember,” Dad said, smiling. “On this earth, all glory is fleeting.” Now, as I raced to Reagan National Airport and boarded the first available flight to Detroit, his words echoed throughout my entire body. There was nothing contrived about Dad’s final admonition to me. That is what he believed; that is who he was. Once a successful New York financier, Richard J. Alberta had become a born-again Christian in 1977. Despite having a nice house, beautiful wife, and healthy firstborn son, he felt a rumbling emptiness. He couldn’t sleep. He developed a debilitating anxiety. Religion hardly seemed like the solution; Dad came from a broken and unbelieving home. He had decided, halfway through his undergraduate studies at Rutgers University, that he was an atheist. And yet, one weekend while visiting family in the Hudson Valley, my dad agreed to attend church with his niece, Lynn. He became a new person that day. His angst was quieted. His doubts were overwhelmed. Taking communion for the first time at Goodwill Church in Montgomery, New York, he prayed to acknowledge Jesus as the son of God and accept Him as his personal savior.
Dad became unrecognizable to those who knew him. He rose early, hours before work, to read the Bible, filling a yellow legal pad with verses and annotations. He sat silently for hours in prayer. My mom thought he’d lost his mind. A budding young journalist who worked under Howard Cosell at ABC Radio in New York, Mom was suspicious of all this Jesus talk. But her maiden name—Pastor—was proof of God’s sense of humor. Soon she accepted Christ, too. When Dad felt he was being called to abandon his finance career and enter the ministry, he met with Pastor Stewart Pohlman at Goodwill. As they prayed in Pastor Stew’s office, Dad says he physically felt the spirit of the Lord swirling around him, filling up the room. He was not given to phony supernaturalism—in fact, Dad might’ve been the most intellectually sober, reason-based Christian I’ve ever known—but that day, he felt certain, the Lord anointed him. Soon he and Mom were selling every material item they owned, forsaking their high-salaried jobs in New York and moving to Massachusetts so he could study at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. For the next few decades, they toiled in small churches here and there, living off food stamps and the generosity of fellow believers. By the time I arrived in 1986, Dad was Pastor Stew’s associate at Goodwill. We lived in the church parsonage; my nursery was the library, where towers of leather-wrapped tomes had been collected by the church’s pastors dating back to the mid-eighteenth century. A few years later we moved to Michigan, and Dad eventually put down roots at a recent start-up, Cornerstone Church, in the Detroit suburb of Brighton. It was part of a minor denomination called the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) and it was there, for the next twenty-six years, that he served as senior pastor. Cornerstone was our home. Because Mom also worked on staff, leading the women’s ministry, I was quite literally raised inside the church: playing hide-and-seek in storage areas, doing homework in the office wing, bringing high school dates to Bible study, even working as the church janitor during a year of community college.
I hung around the church so much that I decided to leave my mark: At nine years old, I used a pocket knife to etch my initials into the brickwork of the narthex. Cornerstone wasn’t a perfect church. The older I got, the more skeptical I’d grown of certain individuals and attitudes and activities there. But it was my church. The last time I’d been there, eighteen months earlier, I’d spoken to a packed sanctuary at Dad’s retirement ceremony, armed with good-natured needling and PG-13 anecdotes.
Now I would need to give a very different speech. Arriving at home, I met Mom in the entryway. She buckled into my arms. The high school sweethearts were a few months from celebrating their fiftieth wedding anniversary. We held each other in that entryway for a long time. Finally, I suggested she get some rest. Keeping Mom steady as we climbed the staircase, I could still smell Dad’s aftershave. When we reached the master bedroom, I noticed the door across the hall was swung open. It was Dad’s study. I reached in and flicked the light switch. There, on a coffee table in front of the small sofa, was a Bible and yellow legal pad. We walked over and sat on the sofa. The pen he’d used hours earlier rested atop the legal pad. There were scribbled notes and observations.
But at the very top of the page, in his most careful penmanship, Dad had written one verse: “Do not cast me away when I am old; do not forsake me when my strength is gone.” Mom and I looked up at one another. In his final hours on earth, my father, who was seventy-one years old, had been meditating on Psalm 71. I tucked her into bed. We said a prayer. Then I turned off the lights and walked down the hall, opening the door to my childhood bedroom. Unfolding my laptop, I tried to get started on a eulogy. But the words would not come. I shut the laptop, lay down, and wept.
STANDING IN THE BACK OF THE SANCTUARY, MY THREE OLDER BROTHERS and I formed a receiving line. Cornerstone had been a small church when we arrived as kids. Not anymore. Brighton, once a sleepy town situated at the intersection of two expressways, had become a prized location for commuters to Detroit and Ann Arbor. Meanwhile, Dad, with his baseball allegories and Greek linguistics lessons, had gained a reputation for his eloquence in the pulpit. By the time I moved away in 2008, Cornerstone had blossomed from a few hundred members to a few thousand. Now the crowds swarmed around us, filling the sanctuary and spilling out into the narthex, where tables displayed flowers and golf clubs and photos of Dad. I was numb. My brothers, too. None of us had slept much that week.
So the first time someone made a glancing reference to Rush Limbaugh, it did not compute. But then another person brought him up. And then another. That’s when I connected the dots. Apparently, the king of conservative talk radio had been name-checking me on his program recently—“A guy named Tim Alberta”—and describing the unflattering revelations in my book about President Trump. Nothing in that moment could have mattered to me less. I smiled, shrugged, and thanked them for coming to the visitation. They kept on coming. More than I could count. People from the church—people I’d known my entire life—were greeting me, not primarily with condolences or encouragement or mourning, but with commentary about Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump. Some of it was playful, guys remarking how I was the same mischief-maker they’d known since kindergarten. But some of it wasn’t playful. Some of it was angry; some of it was cold and confrontational. One man questioned whether I was truly a Christian. Another asked if I was still on “the right side.” All while Dad was in a box a hundred feet away. It got to the point where I had to take a walk.
A righteous anger was beginning to pierce the fog of melancholy. It felt like a bad dream inside of a bad dream. Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn my father. I was in the company of certain friends that day who would not claim to know Jesus, yet they shrouded me in peace and comfort. Some of these card-carrying evangelical Christians? Not so much. They didn’t see a hurting son; they saw a vulnerable adversary. That night, while fine-tuning the eulogy I would give the following afternoon, I still felt the sting. My wife perceived as much. The unflappable one in the family, she encouraged me to be careful with my words and cautioned against mentioning the day’s unpleasantness. I took half of her advice. In front of an overflow crowd on August 2, 2019, I paid tribute to the man who taught me everything—how to throw a baseball, how to be a gentleman, how to trust and love the Lord. Reciting my favorite verse, from Paul’s second letter to the early church in Corinth, Greece, I told of Dad’s instruction to keep our eyes fixed on what we could not see. Reading from his favorite poem, about a man named Richard Cory, I told of Dad’s warning that we could amass great wealth and still be poor. Then I recounted all the people who’d approached me a day earlier, wanting to discuss the Trump wars on AM talk radio. I spoke of the need for discipleship and spiritual formation. I proposed that their time in the car would be better spent listening to Dad’s old sermons. If they needed help finding biblical listening for their daily commute, I suggested with some sarcasm, the pastors here on staff could help. “Why are you listening to Rush Limbaugh?” I asked my father’s congregation. “Garbage in, garbage out.” There was nervous laughter in the sanctuary. Some people were visibly agitated. Others looked away, pretending not to hear. My dad’s successor, a young pastor named Chris Winans, wore a shell-shocked expression. No matter. I had said my piece. It was finished. Or so I thought.
A few hours later, after we had buried Dad, my brothers and I slumped down onto the couches in our parents’ living room. We opened some beers and turned on a baseball game. Behind us, in the kitchen, a small platoon of church ladies worked to prepare a meal for the family. Here, I thought, is the love of Christ. Watching them hustle about, comforting Mom and catering to her sons, I found myself regretting the Rush Limbaugh remark. Most of the folks at our church were humble, kindhearted Christians like these ladies. Maybe I’d blown things out of proportion.
Just then, one of them walked over and handed me an envelope. It was left at the church, she said. My name was scrawled across it. I opened the envelope. Inside was a full-page-long, handwritten screed. It was from a longtime Cornerstone elder, someone my dad called a friend, a man who mentored me in the youth group and had known me for most of my life. He had composed this note, on the occasion of my father’s death, to express just how disappointed he was in me. I was part of an evil plot, the man wrote, to undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States. My criticisms of President Trump were tantamount to treason—against both God and country—and I should be ashamed of myself. However, he assured me, there was still hope. Jesus forgives and so does he. If I could use my journalism skills to investigate the “deep state,” he wrote, uncovering the shadowy cabal that was sabotaging Trump’s presidency, then I would be restored. He said he was praying for me. I felt sick. Silently, I passed the letter to my wife. She scanned it without expression. Then, in a violent spasm, she flung the piece of paper into the air and with a shriek that made the church ladies jump out of their cardigans, cried out: “What the hell is wrong with these people?” IN SEARCH OF ANSWERS TO THAT QUESTION, I TOOK DAD’S ADVICE AND pivoted away from political journalism. There would be no sequel to the Trump book.
Moving my young family back to Michigan a few months after the funeral, I knew there was another project that demanded my attention. Dad had implored me to apply my talents to subjects of more eternal significance, and I could think of nothing more eternally significant than the crack-up of the American evangelical Church. This would not be an examination of Christianity writ large. Whatever the problems plaguing the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the Black Church, the rainbow-flag-flying progressive Church—and there are many—these are distinctive and diverging faith traditions. What I could offer was a window into my faith tradition. 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. To a certain extent, definitional overlap does exist. Some Catholics self-identify as evangelical given the social connotations. Some nonwhite Christians count themselves as evangelicals due to denominational background or theological disposition (though research shows that Black Christians are far likelier to identify as “born again” than evangelical). A look at the broader Christian Church would be incomplete without investigating and contextualizing these convergences. Yet a look at the broader Christian Church would not yield a satisfying explanation of the turmoil within its commanding faction of conservative white protestants. However imperfect the designation, for brevity’s sake, these are the evangelicals whom I set out to chronicle following my father’s death. 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. (Indeed, Martin Luther invoked the Latin translation of the term when breaking from the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century.)
During the first so-called Great Awakening in colonial America, clergymen shared a conviction to evangelize the masses—believing and unbelieving alike—with a purifying fervor. By the early nineteenth century, evangelicalism had become “by far the dominant expression of Christianity in the overwhelmingly Protestant United States,” according to the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College. Even as evangelicalism exploded, its definition remained somewhat ambiguous. In his book Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, historian George Marsden observed that in the decades following World War II an evangelical was “anyone who likes Billy Graham.” When Graham himself was asked to define the term, he responded: “Actually, that’s a question I’d like to ask somebody, too.”
In 1989, a British scholar named David Bebbington posited that evangelicals were distinct because of four principal characteristics: Biblicism (treating scripture as the essential word of God); Crucicentrism (stressing that Jesus’s death makes atonement for mankind possible); Conversionism (believing that sinners must be born again and continually transformed into Christlikeness); and Activism (sharing the gospel as an outward sign of that inward transformation). This framework—now commonly called the “Bebbington quadrilateral”—was widely embraced, including by the National Association of Evangelicals. But it also drew its share of criticisms. Efforts to formulate a more effective definition have failed time and again.
To the present day there remains no real consensus around what it means to be an “evangelical.” There was a time when this etymological confusion proved a strength, prompting a growing number of Protestants to set aside organizational rivalries and join beneath a common decentralized banner. Yet such ambiguity was ripe for exploitation. Powerful people began to sense that if doctrinal differences were so easily set aside, then perhaps there was something else—not just something spiritual, but something cultural—that united these evangelicals. And indeed there was. 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.” This is the ecosystem in which I was raised: the son of a white conservative Republican pastor in a white conservative Republican church in a white conservative Republican town. My dad, a serious theologian who held advanced degrees from top seminaries, bristled at this reductive analysis of his religious tribe. He would frequently state from the pulpit what he believed an evangelical to be: someone who believes the Bible is the inspired word of God and who takes seriously the charge to proclaim it to the world.
From a young age, I realized that not all Christians were like my dad. Other adults who went to our church—my teachers, baseball coaches, friends’ parents—didn’t speak about God the way that he did. Theirs was a more casual Christianity, a hobby more than a lifestyle, something that could be picked up and put down and slotted into schedules. Their pastor realized as much. Pushing his people ever harder to engage with questions of canonical authority and trinitarian precepts and Calvinist doctrine, Dad tried his best to run a serious church. There were no spiritual shortcuts at Cornerstone. Every Sunday of my life had begun with the congregation reciting, in one voice, the ancient Church creeds, the lyrical doxology, and the scripture passage from that week’s sermon. Then, before Dad began preaching, we would stand and pray with the words Jesus taught His disciples:
Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever Amen That penultimate verse—the kingdom, the power, and the glory—has haunted me since childhood. Its magnificence can be appreciated only in the context of the possessive pronoun Thine. (This is inspired by the King James Version; henceforth, in these pages, scripture will be presented in the New International Version.) That word, Thine, implies something more than mere ownership; it connotes exclusivity. Everything that Satan offered Jesus in the wilderness—to give Him power over all the kingdoms of the world and the glory that comes with it—Jesus rejected. Why? Because the only authentic version of those things belongs to God. What the devil tempted Jesus with two thousand years ago, and what he tempts us with today, are cheap counterfeits. 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. These are nonnegotiable to the Christian faith. 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. Christians are always falling short of God’s standard. I have been an offender of the worst sort. If not for grace—His unlimited, unconditional grace—I would be condemned in my sins, doomed to permanent separation from my Creator. But grace is precisely the gift I have received, and, along with me, countless millions of Christians around the world. Perfection is not our mandate. Sanctification, the process by which sinners become more and more like Christ, is what God demands of us. And what that process requires, most fundamentally, is the rejection of one’s worldly identity. “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me,” Jesus says in the Book of Matthew. “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” 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. 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.
Why? Or as my wife might ask: What the hell is wrong with us? In search of answers, I would spend much of the next four years embedded inside the modern evangelical movement. I toured half-empty sanctuaries and standing-room-only auditoriums; I shadowed big-city televangelists and small-town preachers and everyday congregants. I reported from inside hundreds of churches, Christian colleges, religious advocacy organizations, denominational nonprofits, and assorted independent ministries. Each of these experiences offered a unique insight into the deterioration of American Christianity. But the farther I traveled from home, the clearer it became: The best explanation for what afflicts the Church was evident at my church.
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Just as the author of this book, which is already proving to be exactly what I needed to read, I, like the author, surely at his father's death, did some deep thinking about where and what he was doing in, first, writing American Carnage and then almost immediately moving on to the book spotlighted here.
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