The peculiar potency of American evangelicalism came home to me about nine years ago, in a one-two-punch combination. In 2014 my wife died young, of cancer; during her illness and afterward, the people of our church in Alabama rescued us daily. They fed our girls, propped me up, and carried us on a tide of love. They saved us. This, I thought, is true Christ-likeness.
Soon afterward I threw myself into work, covering the rise in American politics of a new figure: Donald J. Trump. On the campaign trail I watched him whip crowds into snarling, chanting anger. And back home the people I knew best transformed into something unrecognizable. The principles they had taught me in a thousand Sunday-school lessons—compassion, sacrifice, humility, honesty, kindness—all fell away in favor of one Christian-nationalist aim: winning.
In the years since, I’ve searched for the answer to a single overriding question: What happened to the people I love? But that answer only came in pieces: The fracturing influence of social media. The tipping of Christianity from majority toward minority; the tipping of whiteness toward the same. Power-thirsty pastors, who struck fear into their own flocks and handed them over for sorting. Politicians who lied about the literal and figurative machinery of democracy. In that darkness, I could only ever glimpse these truths with a narrow beam of light.
Now comes a broad, far-reaching floodlight in the form of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, by Tim Alberta. His story, like mine, begins with the death of a loved one. His father, a Midwestern Presbyterian minister, appreciated the skill and insight Alberta brought to his first book, American Carnage, which detailed internecine warfare in the Republican Party. But days before he died, he challenged his son to set his eyes on something higher than “sordid, nasty” American politics. Something eternal.
The son has succeeded. The irony of Christian nationalism is that it destroys both theology and patriotism, but, in a span of about 500 pages, Alberta pulls those elements apart and, in doing so, restores each to its own separate majesty.
This twofold approach—unsparing in its analysis, uncompromising in its faith—may at first seem unsettling to readers who know Alberta through his previous book, or his writing for The Atlantic and elsewhere. In those stories he deftly skewers secular subjects like CNN head Chris Licht, whom the network fired after Alberta’s profile in June.
In the new book, he begins each chapter with a piece of Scripture and then uses it as a lens through which to view the current American condition. Chapter Three, for instance, begins with Jesus’s famous, shrugging command in Luke 20: “Then give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.” Then with righteous ruthlessness, Alberta dissects the influence and corruption of Liberty University, one of the largest Christian colleges in the world. He begins with a history of the school, springing in the 1970s from the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s imagination along with the Moral Majority, largely as a tool to propel Republican politicians into power. Alberta documents its descent into darker realms of Christian nationalism, rotten in loyalty to both Christ and Constitution, culminating in the scandals of Jerry Falwell Jr. and an ideological takeover by Trumpist forces.
Again and again, Alberta builds his case with the eye of a journalistic outsider and the fluency of an evangelistic insider. He gains access to the highest echelons of both faith and politics, and rewards readers with direct confrontations with the likes of Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress, a Dallas mega-church pastor who maintains a shrine to Trump in his office.
Again and again, Tim Alberta builds his case with the eye of a journalistic outsider and the fluency of an evangelistic insider.
Alberta’s dual citizenship, fully journalist and fully believer, gives him a unique perspective that may reach Christian American readers in a new way. He criticizes their ideology for being internally inconsistent. Not for being too Christian, in other words, but for not being Christian enough.
He recounts, for instance, a stop on the American Restoration Tour, in which a collection of pastors and politicians traveled the United States in 2022 to turn out voters for the G.O.P. and sell merch. In Ohio the road show set up in the atrium of the state capitol building, and a state representative, Gary Click, hustled over to confer with Republican operative Chad Connelly about pseudo-historian David Barton, a tour headliner:
He looked frazzled. “Why aren’t there any books to sell?” he asked Connelly. “All these people want to buy David’s books.”
Connelly winced. “I wasn’t sure of the rules. I thought it might be inappropriate,” he replied, motioning toward our stately surroundings. Then Connelly perked up. “We’ll be selling them at the church later today,” he told Click. “Tell ’em to follow us there.”
This scene is subtle, and may even be lost on Alberta’s secular readers. But for evangelicals it will evoke a grave and unmistakable biblical resonance. These men consider the seat of political power sacred but feel no qualms about setting up money tables in a church. It’s the very scenario that led Jesus in Matthew 21 to storm the temple, driving out “those who sold” for making a house of worship into “a den of robbers.”
Why does it matter, this Christian-coded illustration?
In one sense, it’s because white evangelicals are, arguably, the single most important bloc of voters in the nation. In 1976 they largely supported Jimmy Carter, a Sunday-school teacher, for president. Falwell organized his Moral Majority to oust Carter in 1980, and just a few decades later, 81 percent of white evangelicals voted together to lift Trump to the presidency.
Trump’s behavior, leading to the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, dampened enthusiasm among some Christians for a time. But since then the former president has, despite numerous moral, ethical, and legal revelations, strengthened his grip on the Republican Party. Now the 2024 primaries are gathering momentum, as Trump and other candidates court influential pastors in key states.
But in a higher sense—the sense that lifts Alberta’s book, that transcends politics and fulfills his father’s wishes—it will matter to people who consider earthly power a small aim, and even an obstacle, to the eternal significance of real faith, hope, and love.
Near the end of the book, Alberta wrestles with the amorphous word that defines his subject: “evangelical.” “The people to whom we are witnessing—our friends, neighbors, coworkers—are completely and categorically repelled by that word,” he writes. “They sense that it has nothing to do with the teachings of Christ and everything to do with social and political power. That perception must inform our reality.”
Matthew Teague is a co-author with Mark Bowden of The Steal, a contributor to National Geographic, and executive producer of Our Friend, a feature film that premiered in 2021
