Tim Alberta Presents The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals In An Age of Extremism

 

Tim Alberta is the chief political correspondent for POLITICO Magazine and the author of The New York Times and Washington Post best-seller, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Donald Trump. And,

The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: Evangelicals in the Age of Political Extremism...

The pastor quoted one of my favorite verses, Mark 8:36. “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world,” Jesus asked, “yet forfeit their soul?”

LOOKING BACK, ZAHND IS GRATEFUL FOR LOSING MUCH OF HIS CONGREGATION all those years ago. Downsizing so dramatically allowed the pastor to connect with his people more intimately, to make sure everyone was on board with his mission and his message. This not only made for a healthier church; it insulated Word of Life from the turmoil of the Trump era. In fact, Zahnd told me, at a moment when many of his clergy counterparts were bleeding members from their churches, Word of Life was experiencing real growth for the first time in over a decade. The chief explanation: YouTube. This was not a COVID-specific phenomenon; Word of Life had begun streaming its services online years before the pandemic arrived. Zahnd was skeptical of the practice at first. He believed in gathering physically, in taking communion as one body, in the power of corporate worship. He wasn’t terribly interested in pastoring people thousands of miles away. But then he got to know some of them. He listened to their stories, heard their prayers. Online church wasn’t their preference, either. They would love to join a solid, unified, kingdom-first congregation in their community. “They just can’t find one,” Zahnd told me. “These people feel like they have nowhere to go. I just heard from someone yesterday who lives in Texas; apparently, the county she lives in voted for Trump in a higher percentage in 2020 than any other county in America. And she told me, ‘Pastor, I cannot find a normal church.’ What do I say to that?” Zahnd is happy, on some interim basis, to offer an online community to the displaced masses. But it’s not a sustainable solution to the problem of “normal church” scarcity. These people watching Zahnd online—particularly the less seasoned believers—need a permanent home. They need a pastor to love and disciple them; they need a church family to grow alongside them and hold them accountable. To this end, Zahnd is trying to help the only way he knows how: by mentoring young preachers. “I had these four pastors here yesterday, from a fairly large church in Oregon,” Zahnd said. “And I told them, ‘You’re going to have to lean into the great tradition. Don’t allow your preaching to be driven by the news cycles. Start paying attention to the Revised Common Lectionary; preach from that. Pay attention to the liturgical calendar; preach from that.’” Hours earlier, at the Word of Life entrance, a kindly old gentleman had handed me a church bulletin. The first thing I noticed was the date: “November 6, 2022. Twenty-Second Sunday After Pentecost.” Zahnd’s church observes days tied to the deaths of saints, sacred moments from scripture, and the onset of seasons such as Lent and Advent. American holidays—Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans Day—are not recognized. “What do those dates have to do with us?” Zahnd said with a shrug. “We’re the Church.” It’s not easy to break away from American traditions, Zahnd said. But if evangelicals are to regain lost standing, it’s necessary. “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.” The Bible, as Zahnd pointed out, is written primarily from the perspective of the underdog: Hebrew slaves fleeing Egypt, Jews exiled to Babylon, Christians living under Roman occupation. This is why Paul implored his fellow first-century believers—especially those in Rome who lived under a brutal regime—to both submit to their governing authorities and stay loyal to the kingdom built by Christ. It stands to reason that American evangelicals, themselves born into the bosom of imperial might, can’t quite relate to Paul and his pleas for humility, or Peter and his enthusiasm for suffering, never mind that poor vagrant preacher from Nazareth and his egalitarian rhetoric. The last shall be first? What kind of socialist indoctrination is that? “You see, the kingdom of God isn’t real to most of these people. They can’t perceive it,” Zahnd said. “What’s real is America. What’s real is this tawdry world of partisan politics, this winner-takes-all blood sport. So, they keep charging into the fray, and the temptation to bow down to the devil to gain control over the kingdoms of this world becomes more and more irresistible.” Zahnd has studied the rise and fall of Christian civilizations; he understands that, as the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us, “there is nothing new under the sun.” Still, it’s hard for him to accept just how quickly this particular American experiment went south. When he created Word of Life Church at age twenty-two, riding high on the generational momentum of the Jesus Movement, he was convinced that the United States was experiencing a real-time revival. Forty years later, he is witnessing the sort of crash that will be studied by pastors in the centuries to come. “I think about it every day. I can’t believe it came to this,” Zahnd said. “I’m totally baffled by it. I’m not depressed; I’m not unhappy. I’m just baffled.” The pastor was quick to clarify something. He’s not baffled by the 1,500 people who left his church almost two decades ago. He’s not baffled by the people who go to Greg Locke’s circus tent or listen to Paula White’s podcasts or buy VIP tickets to Mike Flynn’s ReAwaken America rally. These people are called sheep for a reason. 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.” I countered by telling Zahnd what these pastors would say about him—that he’s woke, that he’s lukewarm, that he’s a coward for not taking a stand and fighting to advance biblical principles in a broken world. “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.” He looked incredulous. “I talk about Jesus all the time. I talk about Jesus constantly. But I talk about Jesus in the context of His kingdom,” Zahnd said. “The idea that Jesus is some mascot for the donkeys or the elephants—it’s a catastrophe for the gospel.” The pastor told me he was offended—not upset, or hurt, or angry, but offended—by what the American Church had become. God does not tolerate idols competing for His glory, Zahnd said, and neither should anyone who claims to worship Him. “You can take up the sword of Caesar or you can take up the cross of Jesus,” Zahnd told me. “You have to choose.”

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Many of you know that I've been reading a lot of non-fiction books. It has never been about politics for me, although I have developed an interest in keeping up with what is going on in America... For most of my time over the last decade, I have devoted all of my time in providing reviews for books. Requests for those reviews came from both individual authors and from PR agencies, publishers, and even Author's Den for whom I provided reviews when they initially began to include that benefit on their site... I've lived, slept, and eaten through hundreds of books, mostly fiction, but some non-fiction. All of this is to quickly say that I had never heard of the author, Tim Alberta, which to me means that I would be better prepared to be objective in my review(s)... Some of you may have noted my post where I have been including more of my personal opinions within my reviews, hopefully to provide information, as well as to share my opinion on things of importance...

My first introduction to the past president was through a leaked video where he laughingly talked about grabbing women...and being able to get away with it because he was a celebrity. Well, I had some choice words about that. I had never watched The Apprentice, and so I would not consider him a celebrity I had come to know. I believe that is a major advantage I had since I had no predisposition of the soon candidate. I was registered as an Independent. Being part of a political party bore no interest to me. As long as the country was functioning fairly smoothly, I figured that if I hadn't voted for a given election for various reasons, I had no right to complain... All that has now changed, of course and I have shared many of my thoughts and opinions here.

But my own concern began when I learned that the Evangelical Christians were backing/supporting Trump. I was astonished. Then when I was told that if I were a Christian, I had to be a Republican... Well, that was just not the way I had learned from history!

As I began to gather information for a review as I usually do, checking to see if a book trailer video was available, I discovered that there many, many videos about this particular author and his books. I chose the first three, based upon length and topic. Which leads me to the point that I also will be reading Alberta's first book during which time, the video about Joe Biden being the man for the time was made.

Alberta chose to write these books because he is an insider... His father was an Evangelical Pastor, and he had grown up in the church. On a broader sense, what that meant to me was that much of the conversations and church-related activities would have been known by the author, which was a very important factor to me. Because, I found, in starting to read his latest book, I was pulled back into my early years as a Christian woman. Through his extensive research, Alberta has reviewed the historical life of those from the Church who were actively involved as pastors of major churches, especially those with a television based audience...This, then, was my own beginning of how and when we evolved into where we are today.

The beginning of the Moral Majority by Jerry Falwell was one I remembered... I had also been involved at the beginning as the change was made to "separate the church and the state. Until I started to think of being a citizen of a larger country, I was first opposed to that, as naïvely as a simple Christian woman might automatically be. Thankfully, I was an individual who considered change logically... I had been approached as it related to having stores open on Sundays. My thought was first on the fact that many people had to work shifts, such as in a hospital, and might need to shop on Sunday, even if a Christian... And, of course, I remembered the stories about Jesus in his parables. So I supported, at least in my mind, the separation.

However when Falwell began his crusade within the political realm, I saw it as concerning. In the book, Alberta shares a personal story of a contributor, Olson, who was about to consider where he might go for higher education...

When it was his time to speak, however, Falwell warned the crowds that nothing was promised to them. America was under assault from secular liberal elites and godless government bureaucrats, and Christians needed to start fighting back. “The nation was intended to be a Christian nation by our founding fathers,” Falwell thundered. “This idea of ‘religion and politics don’t mix’ was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country!” Falwell offered a reading from the Second Book of Chronicles: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, and forgive their sin, and will heal their land.” When the program ended, fireworks spewed forth from the mountaintop, illuminating the flags and church steeples that dotted the landscape below. Everything Falwell was selling, Olson bought. “I fell in love,” he recalled decades later, “with the idea of Liberty.” That enthusiasm was soon curbed. When the Olsons returned to Lynchburg after Labor Day, excited to move their oldest son into his new home, they were dismayed to find themselves at a boarded-up hotel in a tough part of downtown. The condemned building was all that Liberty could offer its newest students. Olson flopped a mattress onto the floor and unloaded boxes of his clothing and books, assuring his parents that he would be fine. They drove off with tears in their eyes—not tears of joy, but tears of concern and bewilderment. The July Fourth celebration was suddenly a distant memory; this seedy neighborhood in downtown Lynchburg bore no resemblance to that bucolic scene on Liberty Mountain. Their son had signed up to be part of something he didn’t fully understand. Olson had reason to worry, too. He could not have known that Falwell would soon emerge as one of the most consequential figures of the late twentieth century; that his synthesizing of Christianity and conservatism would roil America’s political landscape and radicalize its Protestant subculture; that his small school in Lynchburg, Virginia, would eventually develop into a multibillion-dollar behemoth and, become the embodiment of both the great promise and wasted potential of the evangelical Church. None of this was conceivable to the college freshman sleeping in that condemned hotel. Studying his surroundings, Olson simply wanted to know: Did Falwell have a vision?

~~~

Alberta reviews a number of those in high leadership of the Evangelical Church. Of course, I recognized Jim Bakker, who was now divorced and remarried but there in the crowd... I began to look for the one leader with whom I had been personally involved. Billy Graham. I am attended a number of his crusades in our area, even singing in the choir in one. Now I was wondering whether he, too, had succumbed to what was happening... Thankfully, I read:

The most celebrated evangelist of the twentieth century, Graham took his “crusades” to hundreds of nations and preached to millions of people. Whatever his initial political inclinations—warning against the evils of communism in the 1950s, allying himself with Richard Nixon in the 1960s—Graham grew openly suspicious of partisanship as his career wore on. He distanced himself from the religious right, eschewed the Moral Majority, and became known as “America’s pastor,” the man who met with and prayed over every U.S. president spanning nearly seventy years. Before his death, Graham repented for his early political activism, saying he’d “crossed the line” in ways that harmed his witness for Christ. Still, even in his most unscrupulous moments, Graham was a paragon compared to the self-seekers who would follow him, from the televangelists of the 1970s and ’80s all the way to the Ralph Reeds and Greg Lockes of today. There was no foaming, mad-as-hell partisanship to be found at a Graham rally. There certainly were no guns, no calls for violence, no swarms of people dressed—and visibly ready—for combat.

Indeed, I can remember the Spirit of God over us as George Beverly Shea would sing "How Great Thou Art..." On then would the call for coming forward to Learn more of Jesus... and we would sing in the choir as those individuals stayed and were meeting with Crusader staff as they learned just how to come to know and be saved by our Lord... However, Franklin Graham had become part of those individuals who were supporting Trump...and, I remember, I was shocked as, during Covid, I learned that Franklin's ministry received a subsidy from the Government! How, I wondered could this major evangelistic group have deserved a government grant?! Now I know...

Unfortunately, the book gets harder and harder to read... Soon the author takes us into rallies which were being held across the nation. I was reminded of how Jesus got angry, his only time, when money was being made as part of a religious event... And as I read, I found myself changing my own mind as book after book about Trump were being discussed and sold. I wanted them all Banned! Me, an Individual who speaks often about not banning books... Instead, all I could think was that they would surely be blasphemous! 

Here, too, was, perhaps the major reason that Trump is acting as he is now... He has purposely been made an idol, a leader--albeit--a cult leader, but one that has been firmly taken into the lives as republicans join with evangelicals to produce some type of pseudo-religion that has no correlation with the teachings of Jesus...

Franklin Graham even posed with him for photos at the White House. For that long-ago-troubled kid who dreamed of becoming Billy Graham—and who’d since been shunned by many of the most respected voices in evangelicalism—this must have felt like divine validation. Locke achieved this legitimacy without surrendering to the evangelical establishment. In fact, Locke made the evangelical establishment surrender to him. Prior to COVID-19, his delusional anti-leftist shtick made him an outcast in the evangelical world. But when the virus arrived, and the question of shutting down became a defining litmus test for churches nationwide, Locke went from pariah to prophet. As the country emerged from the fog of 2020, pastors who had defied the government—especially those pastors who made a show of it, then watched attendance double and donations triple as a result—learned what Locke already knew: This was the new normal. They had chosen a permanent side. They had committed themselves to something bigger than an individual public health policy. No longer could the culture wars be selected à la carte. Talking politics was now as much a part of church life as taking communion. “I don’t think there’s any going back,” Locke told me. “That train’s left the station.” Extremism in American churches is nothing new; recall Westboro Baptist Church, the Kansas congregation that achieved notoriety at the turn of the century by hoisting signs claiming that God hates Jews, gays, and dead soldiers. But Locke embodies a distinct Trump-era phenomenon. The most revealing part of my trip to Global Vision was the peculiar sort of indifference I felt at the end of the service. There was nothing sui generis--inique--about Locke. He said the same things I’d heard from other pastors on my trips around America. Atmospherics aside—it’s not every day you worship inside a tent next to a pistol-toting man wearing an Alex Jones shirt—the substance was familiar and predictable to the point of tedium. Of course, this would come as a shock to many self-respecting Christians who still want to believe that their pastors are nothing like Locke; that their churches are nothing like Global Vision; that they themselves are nothing like the people in that tent. These self-respecting Christians are in denial. It’s easy for evangelicals to dismiss Global Vision as an outlier, the same way they did Westboro Baptist. It’s much harder to scrutinize the extremism that has infiltrated their own churches and ponder its logical endpoint. In this environment, if a pastor begins to dabble in conspiracies and political deception, what guardrails exist to keep him from going off the grid altogether? And what if he does go off the grid—does it even register? Just as with our politics, there is no longer a clear line of demarcation between the fringe and the mainstream. Ten years ago, Global Vision would have been considered a cult. ...Locke preaches to 2.2 million Facebook followers and poses alongside Franklin Graham at the White House. Walking out of Global Vision, I wondered: How many pastors at smaller conservative churches—pastors like Bill Bolin at FloodGate in my hometown of Brighton—Michigan, would have felt uncomfortable sitting inside this tent listening to Locke? The answer, I suspected, was very few. Global Vision and FloodGate may be different in degree, but they are not different in kind. What binds them together—Locke and Bolin and the scores of other right-wing pastors I’d encountered over the past few years—is that they are now expected to be something more than mere church leaders. They are political handicappers, social commentators, media critics, information gatekeepers. And they have only themselves to blame: It turns out, when a pastor decides that churches should do more than just worship God, congregants decide that their pastor should do more than just preach. This might be precisely what some pastors had always hoped for, the opportunity to guide and shape every aspect of their congregants’ lives. But spiritually speaking, this is a doomed proposition. Pastors already struggle to provide all the answers written down inside their book. 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. Down this path, disaster waits. The pastor who finds himself offering religious justification today might find himself inventing it tomorrow. In the darkest chapters of Church history—the Crusades and Inquisition, the slave trade and sexual abuse scandals—the common denominator has been a willingness on the part of Christian authority figures to distort scripture for what they perceive to be some greater good. This explains why, long after leaving Global Vision, I could not rid myself of its violent imagery—all the guns and the paramilitary gear and the swaggering talk of the Second Amendment. Locke swore this rhetoric was defensive in nature. That’s always the case, until it isn’t.

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This, then, is what I have learned from this writer. It is exactly as bad as I had thought it was...and...is! This is not whether or not I would recommend this book... This is about whether or not you, as the reader really want to know Jesus as Your Savior... Because, now I know why He said it would be hard to follow Him. Now I know that millions have chosen the easier way and created their own religion, while corrupting the scriptures that have been presented to new Christians for hundreds of years. The manipulation of news, lies, and, now we know more firmly, the scripture, for the power received through political fame...

Where is God's Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory in this choice?

GABixlerReviews

This Then Is The Answer? - Where is Jesus? An Excerpt: The Kingdom, The Power, And The Glory

 

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This then is the Answer... Why we are fighting for the Soul of our Nation? If you agree, Speak for Jesus and Spread the Word... It is not just my saying what I've been saying all along... These are His Words: Thou Shalt Love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our mind, and with all our soul... And Love Your Neighbor as Yourself... This, then, is all that we need to know... We must find Jesus once again. Find our Love Through Him... Knowing, that,yes, we are fighting for the Soul of America--of This World... For The Kingdom, The Power, And the Glory... Amen...

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Volf would certainly know. A renowned theologian who heads Yale University’s Center for Faith and Culture, Volf had traveled to France to share the dais with his fellow scholar Hovorun. Raised in the former nation of Yugoslavia, Volf was the only Protestant in his high school. He was the son of a Pentecostal minister who, like most Protestants, was monitored closely by the governing authorities. Volf grew up buffered by ethno-religious boundaries: The republic of Croatia was predominantly Catholic, the republic of Serbia was predominantly Orthodox, the republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina was predominantly Muslim, and the churches in these and other states preached a dogmatic nationalism as Yugoslavia careened toward civil war in the late 1980s. “The world was uniting but Yugoslavia was falling apart,” recalled Volf, a lanky, bald-pated professor, his accent still distinctly Eastern European. 

“What we experienced was a religiously motivated reassertion of ethnic identities.” The result was a decade of genocide and ethnic cleansing. The carnage is difficult to quantify, but scholars generally believe that some 150,000 people were killed and as many as 4 million others were displaced by the violence in the Balkans. The chief instigator was Serbian president Slobodan Milošević, who rose to power by vilifying the Muslim Kosovans within his state. 

Historians point out that Milošević, in delivering a national address that sparked the civil war, cited the recorded persecution of his people by rival religious factions. He delivered the message flanked by Orthodox priests. This is the world from which Volf emerged. Having returned to his native Croatia to teach after completing his theological studies in the West, Volf left in 1991, the year Croatia declared independence, and watched from the United States as his homeland was ravaged by internecine violence. The professor has since dedicated much of his career to preventing a historical encore. 

His advocacy of nonviolence—“I take seriously the commandment of Jesus that one should love one’s enemy,” Volf said, citing it as a cornerstone of the Christian faith—can only accomplish so much. To head off what he fears is a resurgence of religious totalitarianism, Volf was attempting to reclaim his own faith tradition from the extremist fringe. The narrative arc of the Bible tells of an aspirational evolution in mankind’s thinking, Volf said. What began in Exodus—the story of God’s chosen people escaping bondage and eventually coming into the covenant state of Israel—was finished by the arrival of Jesus, who taught His disciples to take His message to all the nations. 

The transformational effect of this cannot be overstated. Immediately, all but overnight, a people who had refused to associate with anyone outside their ethnic tribe began calling them brothers and sisters. “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians. 

The Bible’s final book, Revelation, paints a utopic vision of Christ living among His followers in a New Jerusalem. This is the believer’s pluralistic destiny, a heavenly melting pot where descendants of every nation, ethnicity, and race are unified, forevermore, in the body of Christ. That vision can be difficult to see, Volf said, when professing Christians are engaged in a “twisting of the religious landscape” that rationalizes social antagonism, clannish nihilism, and even physical violence. 

None of this is unprecedented. 

Religion and politics are natural enemies; both provide a sense of belonging and self-actualization to the masses. Tension between the two is healthy and necessary. When one appropriates the other, history shows that oppression—leading to death and human suffering at a woeful scale—is the inevitable result. 

What Volf watched take root in Yugoslavia has been seen throughout the centuries and continues to repeat itself. In his view, there are three features of creeping totalitarianism in the name of religious conviction. The first can be seen when leaders assert the primacy of an ethnic or cultural identity over shared humanity. The second is when they stress the purification of those identities (inevitably leading to forms of ethnic cleansing). The third is when violence becomes legitimized for the protection of group identities. People of the modern world are “living in a gap,” Volf said, stuck between a pre-technology age that is fading away and a futuristic world that has yet to fully arrive. The resulting anxiety—around the crumbling of institutions, the instability of cultures, the insufficiency of economies—creates a crisis at the intersection of religion and politics. 

Volf fears that Christians are claiming to navigate this rupture via religious identity but are actually navigating it via political identity. When believers invoke eternal symbols to advance an earthly goal, those symbols become cheapened to the point of ultimately meaning nothing. This is what happened in the Yugoslavia of Volf’s youth. This is what is happening in Ukraine today at the hands of Vladimir Putin and Patriarch Kirill. And this, he warned us, is what could happen elsewhere if current trends go unchecked. Volf threw up a hand symbol—like a peace sign, but with the thumb jutting out—that was commonplace among Christian soldiers in Eastern Europe. Its aim was religious. Instead of two fingers calling for peace on earth, three fingers, representing the Trinity, meant to summon God’s blessing. “But if you see a fighter riding on a tank flashing this sign, none of that theological content is on their minds,” Volf said. “That is a religion that has been completely hollowed out of its internal content. It is functioning simply as a marker of identity.” I could think of a few markers like that. 

ALTHOUGH THIS WAS A CONVERSATION BETWEEN TWO EASTERN EUROPEAN scholars, taking place in France, about a war between Russia and Ukraine, the subtext very much centered on the American evangelical Church. Hovorun fought a smirk while describing how Putin manipulated his countrymen into buying a revisionist “founding myth” of their nation, his ultimate goal being to “Make Russia Great Again.” Volf, noting the hard conversations he’s having with his American students, detailed the ways in which religion and nationalism were motivating “today’s totalitarian movements” (the plural was not lost on anyone in the room). Neither one of these erudite, dignified gentlemen seemed eager to discuss the sordid details of what was transpiring across the pond. But the rest of us were. America was not engulfed in a land war; it was not waging holy war against a sovereign nation. There was, however, a war for the essence and the character of American Christianity, and it was reverberating the world over. 

In recent years, I had spoken with missionaries and evangelists spanning multiple continents, and they all shared the same fundamental concern. Was all this nationalistic talk from the American evangelical Church just that—talk? Or was it indicative of a serious effort to restructure the relationship between the state and the country’s dominant religion? And if it was the latter, why weren’t sane Christians doing more to stop it? This last question haunted me most. 

{As is has haunted me...}

In the years following September 11, 2001, as the Taliban and al-Qaeda and ISIS slaughtered innocents in the name of Allah, Western intellectuals fixated on the idea of finding and elevating “moderate Muslims” who could help reclaim the religion from its violent extremist fringe. The wisdom and efficacy of this strategy was dubious, yet it struck me that Christianity was probably overdue for a similar conversation—globally, in Russia, and in the United States. This was not to equate suicide bombers with January 6 rioters, or to compare body counts between Putin and Osama bin Laden, but rather to observe that there are consequences when religious doctrine becomes infected with political ideology. While the scope of the American crisis at present seemed trivial relative to, say, the Crusades, things had gotten very bad very quickly and would only get worse unless something was done about it. But what? 

Having spent a lifetime immersed inside this world, it was unclear to me what—or, more realistically, who—might help to bring American evangelicalism back from the brink. There was no longer reason to believe that some calamitous intervening event could unify the Church; we had just endured a once-in-a-century pandemic, and it made existing divides that much deeper. The situation seemed almost hopeless. It was an unfair fight for the soul of American Christianity. On one side were decorated veterans of the culture wars, archconservatives Christians who live for conflict. 

Meanwhile, their more “moderate” counterparts—in temperament, not theology are inherently reluctant to enter the fray. (Those who believe that their struggle is not against flesh and blood, I had learned, were the least likely to struggle against flesh and blood.) Unpacking all this for Volf and Hovorun—with an apology for viewing their universal discussion through a narrower prism—I asked what hope they had for the American evangelical Church. 

“I’m wondering how many American Christians, even conservative evangelicals, think in those purely spiritual terms,” Volf replied. He didn’t think it was a fair fight, either, though for somewhat different reasons. Whereas I was suggesting that the silent majority needed to speak up, Volf wasn’t sure they were a majority anymore at all. 

He told us that something had changed during his decades spent teaching and engaging with Christians in America. A generation earlier, this militant approach to theology was discernable only below the surface. But the Church had since been “captured by nationalist ideals” that saturated the evangelical ecosystem. Volf said he believed that Christian nationalism was now “the predominant form of evangelical Christianity” in the United States—and he “frankly had no idea” what to do about it. “There’s something really powerfully insular about this vision that it’s almost like I have experienced it as impenetrable,” he told us. “Just as it’s very difficult to talk to your neighbors who disagree on political grounds, so also it’s difficult to have theological discussions at all.” 

I asked Volf whom he held responsible for this tapering of our theology in the American Church. “There is a loss of educated, thoughtful leadership,” he said. “Leaders of evangelicals have become media personalities. Paula White is a very good example of somebody who is highly, highly influential, but has the thinnest of all possible understandings of the complexities of faith.” The gates to Mar-a-Lago were flung open now. Emboldened by the mention of Trump’s pastor, the British journalist Emma Tucker—who, soon after this convening, was named editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal—followed my question with an even better one. She asked Hovorun whether, given the nature of Putinism as a “secular religion” in Russia, he saw the same forces at play with Trumpism in the United States. 

“Certainly, we are dealing with a similar sort of secular religion,” Hovorun replied. Under this canopy of secular religion, however, he stressed a key distinction: “political religion” versus “civil religion.” The former is imposed by the state, while the latter is practiced voluntarily. As Hovorun explained the history behind these definitions, it became obvious why he was so invested in our understanding of them. “Political religion is [not] optional,” he said. “That was exactly Hitlerism, Nazism, communism. They were political religions. They were much more violent, and that is exactly the transformation that happened to Putinism. It started as a civil religion with a set of rituals, quasi-religious rituals, ideas that were optional for the Russian people. Now it’s not optional anymore. It’s a political religion with [the] power of imposition upon the Russians.” 

He added: “In Trumpism, we are still dealing with civil religion—a form of civil religion. It’s not yet political religion.” Hovorun stabbed a finger into the air as if to suspend his thoughts. After Trump won the presidency in 2016, he told us, he submitted an article to the conservative ecumenical magazine "First Things" arguing that Trumpism could become America’s first political religion. The article was rejected. 

Surely the editors found his premise a bit exotic. The brilliance of our kingdom is in its curbs on autocracy: term limits, checks and balances, a peaceful transition of power. And yet, long before the mayhem of January 6, Hovorun argued that all of this was beside the point: Just as the political theology of Putinism was now bigger than Putin himself, Trumpism as a religious ideology was taking root in ways that would endure after Trump left office. The magazine editors spoke for most American Christians in refusing to entertain the notion that what had transpired in Russia—an abrupt, ensanguined transition from civil religion to political religion—could happen here. “I still believe it is possible, unfortunately,” Hovorun said. 

TO THE EXTENT HOVORUN REMAINED OPTIMISTIC, IT WAS BECAUSE OF A basic difference between American evangelicalism and Russian Orthodoxy. “Political evangelicalism, at least rhetorically, is Christ-centric,” he said. “Political Orthodoxy is not. It avoids speaking about Christ. If you take Putin or others, they don’t speak about Christ. They speak about other things in the faith.” But Volf wasn’t sure that the rhetoric mattered anymore. “I’ve come to believe . . . that the Christ of the gospel has become a moral stranger to us,” he said. 

“If you read the gospels, the things that profoundly mattered to Christ, they marginally matter to most evangelical Christians. And the things that really profoundly matter to them, marginally mattered to Christ.” He added: “In the sense in which Christ is the key to Christianity—you cannot have Christianity without Christ—we are, in a certain sense, in this crisis of Christianity precisely because of a certain alienation from Christ.” One of the journalists asked Volf to be more specific. 

Could he offer some examples of the things that mattered profoundly to Christ? The professor’s eyes danced at this open-ended invitation to proselytize. Christ concerned himself greatly with the poor, Volf said, but the poor are “hardly mentioned” in today’s evangelical discourse. Christ actively avoided fame, Volf said—asking the people on whom He performed miracles not to tell anyone—but today’s evangelical leaders are “drunk on fame.” Christ demanded that we love our enemies, Volf said, but “not even lip service is being paid to this” in today’s evangelical churches. “I can go down the line of the fundamental values of modernity—the fundamental values of most of us—and contrast them to what one finds in the gospel. You find incredible discrepancy,” the professor concluded. “I find it deeply, deeply disturbing.” 

Thomas Chatterton Williams, a Paris-based journalist who was born in the United States, offered a final thought on “the American situation” Volf was describing. “My maternal family are evangelical Christians, and my aunt is someone that I think of as keeping Christ very personally in her life,” Chatterton Williams said. “She voted for Trump twice and said that he’s a very flawed human being, but the only way she could get herself motivated to block a truly evil woman”—i.e., Hillary Clinton—“was to think that God works with flawed human beings all the time to do a greater good.” That same aunt, he said, had just moved from California to Georgia. During a recent phone conversation, she told him that she was planning to vote for Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. It didn’t matter that a proliferating number of news reports, beginning with a blockbuster story in the Daily Beast, offered credible and compelling evidence that Walker had paid for at least one abortion. It didn’t matter that Walker’s son—the one child he had publicly acknowledged, not the three others—had responded to the news by tweeting that his father, a self-professing “moral, Christian, upright man,” had in fact abandoned him and his mother to “bang a bunch of women” and then “threatened to kill us.” None of these flagrant character flaws were relevant to his aunt, Chatterton Williams said, because Walker, like Trump, was playing for the right team. “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. THAT HERSCHEL WALKER WOULD CLOSE THAT U.S. SENATE CAMPAIGN BY likening his Democratic rival to Satan incarnate was not surprising. After all, the success of Putinism and Trumpism owes to a literal demonizing of the other—casting adversaries as not just wrong or obnoxious but as wicked and diabolical. Because these political-religious movements depict opponents as evildoers, it is intrinsically difficult to defeat them on theological grounds. 

And yet, both Volf and Hovorun argued, this is the only way of defeating them. Denouncing cruelty and malice and violence in a political context only achieves so much, because politics are naturally cruel and malicious and violent. To expose the shallowness of these secular religions, Hovorun told us, “they need to be deconstructed theologically.” That term, deconstruct, had come to represent a great rift within American evangelicalism. The concept was hardly new, yet it took on heightened significance during the Trump era: Christians who’d been raised in the evangelical tradition—reared in churches that effortlessly synthesized conservative theology with the zero-sum tribal politics that led to Trump—began to question their beliefs. If their parents and pastors had been so mistaken about the politics, the thinking went, what had they gotten wrong about the theology? I never considered myself a deconstructionist, though I empathized with the underlying sensibility. 

In my view, biblical Christianity requires a constant reassessing of one’s beliefs and biases; deconstruction is something that should be done every single day, not in response to some black swan event. (Very Important) 

Tellingly, much of the modern evangelical lobby had condemned deconstructionism writ large, claiming (wrongly) that it was some progressive political device and fearing (rightly) that it would stir uneasiness in their churches. 

Hovorun and Volf were prescribing deconstruction on an industrial scale. This went far beyond challenging individual interpretations of scripture. What they envisioned was a collective and decentralized effort on the part of serious, kingdom-first Christians of all partisan persuasions to strip these secular religions of any theological legitimacy. The best antidote to bad religion, as Volf noted, is good religion. 

Hovorun pointed to a hopeful precedent. It was Volf’s mentor, the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, who helped to lead an interconfessional effort that rectified so many deadly distortions of Christianity in post–World War II Europe. This was no easy feat. For decades, Hovorun said, “totalitarian theology” had seized much of Europe. Christo-fascists had a foothold inside the Roman Catholic Church. The Deutsche Christian faction in Germany was rabidly anti-Semitic. Orthodox leaders in Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe spewed anti-democratic propaganda. 

It took the extermination of six million Jews—at the hands of soldiers wearing a twisted cross—for Christians to deconstruct this fascism, anti-semitism, and authoritarianism.

“Putinism is a mosaic consisting of all those pieces,” Hovorun said. “We need to come together and figure out how to deal with this new monster, which is so similar to the totalitarian theologies of the thirties.”

What made the old monster so difficult to slay, Volf told me over lunch afterward, was that it feasted on the trembling heart of man. Jesus instructed His followers to “take heart!” because He had overcome the troubles of this world. But most of us don’t listen. Christians remain just as susceptible to panicky groupthink and identity-based paranoia as anyone else. Despite Jesus promising His followers that they would suffer—or perhaps because of this promise—Christians since the age of Constantine have run anxiously into the arms of the state, desperate to be protected by the rulers of their time and place. 

The irony, Volf said, is that Jesus Himself was killed by the state because He was daring enough to “offer an alternative to the powers that reigned in the domain where He was.” 

A willful blurring of lines—between those powers and the alternative—led to calamity in the last century. History might repeat itself, Volf warned, if we don’t heed the words of Karl Barth, the legendary Swiss theologian who prosecuted the theological case against Hitler and Nazism. If the Church is to practice the teachings of Christ, Barth wrote, it must be “an unreliable ally” to every social, political, and government order of this world. This is not always an easy message to preach. 

Volf’s mentor, Moltmann, possessed a singular credibility because of his proximity to the Nazi cause. Drafted into the German army at age sixteen, he surrendered to the first British soldier he encountered and spent three years as a prisoner of war. An American chaplain supplied the Bible that would alter the course of his life. Moltmann’s reflections on the atrocities of Auschwitz—and his teachings on the benevolence of a sovereign God, one who took the form of man in order to bleed and grieve alongside us—did as much to shatter the spell of Nazism as any B-17 bomber. 

Listening to Hovorun during our time in France, I could tell he was following a similar blueprint. The onetime Russian Orthodox insider turned dissident-in-exile was traveling the world at considerable personal risk to warn of the dangers of Putinism. He was proving highly effective. It made me wonder about 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.

Alberta, Tim. The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (pp. 236-246). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition. 

Highlights are my own

I'm about 40% through the book; however, when I read this section, it seemed that I should share immediately... I will be returning to visiting at Amherst, tomorrow, as I continue reading this important book--maybe the most important book you should read to understand just why America has become so divided. I found the answer here, because I had already guessed the answer. I've been reading books, confirming my hypothesis, doing the research...This book is a must-read to save America from...itself...

In Jesus' Name

Gabby