REVIEW: Whose Kingdom, Power, and Glory?

A former GOP insider finds himself nodding along with Tim Alberta’s damning portrait of the Christian Right

The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta. Harper, 2023. 512 pp., $35.00

In 2016, as Donald J. Trump was on his way to securing the Republican Party’s nomination as its candidate for President of the United States, I wrote a reflection on what his ascendance portended for the GOP, American conservatism, and the American evangelical church. Regarding the last one, I declared Trump’s impact on evangelicalism “the most significant sea change of them all.” This was not an abstract observation.

I had witnessed firsthand how Trump’s candidacy divided the campus of Liberty University, the evangelical mega-university where I worked at the time. The university’s then president, Jerry Falwell, Jr., had given Trump his full-throated endorsement, shocking many who expected him to back Senator Ted Cruz, an evangelical favorite who had announced his run for president on campus about ten months earlier. By some accounts, President Falwell’s endorsement gave many evangelical voters the cover to support a man of questionable character. Faith leaders who declared character essential to public service less than a decade earlier, at the height of President Clinton’s scandals, eventually rallied behind Trump.

Tim Alberta recounts this episode in his new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. A political journalist, author, and staff writer for The Atlantic, he tackles the question that has fascinated and troubled pundits, academics, cultural observers, and people of faith since the 2016 election, in which exit polls infamously indicated Donald Trump secured the votes of 81 percent of self-identified white evangelicals. How did this come to be, what does it mean, and where do evangelicals go from here? 

Alberta is uniquely positioned to chronicle the impact of extremist politics on American evangelicals. His previous New York Times best-seller, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, was a deep dive into how the GOP morphed during the Obama presidency into the populist party that made Trump’s presidency possible. Furthermore, he is not only an accomplished political journalist but the son of an evangelical pastor. He is also himself a professed evangelical Christian whose formative years revolved around the church. It was the death of his father, the Reverend Richard J. Alberta, and his experience at his father’s funeral that motivated him to write his second book. 

During the funeral, Alberta found himself castigated for his portrayals of President Trump by many of the mourners at the church where his father served as senior pastor for twenty-six years. After Alberta rebuked them during his eulogy, a church elder handed him a letter declaring his criticisms of Trump “treason,” saying he should be ashamed of himself. The elder offered the hope of forgiveness and restoration if he applied his journalism skills to investigating “the deep state” that opposed Trump, and said he’d be praying for him. Alberta handed the letter to his wife, who tossed it away in disgust and uttered the line that formed the book’s thesis statement:

“What the hell is wrong with these people?”

Before his father passed away, he had advised Alberta to use his talents to tackle “subjects of more eternal significance” than politics, so he decided to take a long and incisive look at evangelicalism in America today. 

Each chapter of the book takes place in a specific location, beginning with his hometown of Brighton, Michigan. Alberta interviews a variety of leaders, influencers, and followers in today’s evangelical movement, all on the record. While he asks probing and challenging questions of his interview subjects, he allows them to speak at length, and in the instances where they are invested in promoting the prevailing political narrative, their own words betray the contradictions between the teachings of Jesus Christ and their pursuit of power, influence, and cultural relevance in America. 

Some of the pastors he interviews are torn between pandering to their congregation’s demands for political engagement to preserve their numbers or standing firm on religious instruction, thereby losing people to more aggressive, publicity-seeking clergy. However, others are intoxicated by the benefits of appealing to the fear, mistrust, and anger prevalent in the population today. Of one such pastor, Alberta writes, “He discovered that there was a market for being irrational. He came to appreciate that wrath is a business model, that “crazy” is a church-growth strategy, that hating enemies is far more powerful—at least in the immediate sense—than loving them.” Pastors who loudly defied the government during the pandemic and kept their churches open saw dramatic increases in church attendance and donations. They see no incentives to put that genie back in the bottle. 

Alberta spends a lot of time at conventions, church gatherings, and rallies. There a toxic combination of swindlers, ideologues, and the masses seek validation of their fears, anger, and mistrust in an America they don’t recognize. They rely on religious themes, worship, and imagery to push a dangerous and decidedly unbiblical narrative about America, its people, and the world we live in. While Alberta acknowledges that extremism, fringe elements, and conspiratorial thinking are not new to the church, the difference today is that such thinking is rapidly becoming mainstream. The church must face this crisis today.

Reading this book was like studying my life for the past thirty years. While I was raised in a Christian home and gave my life to Christ at the age of nine, I stopped going to church in my college years and didn’t return until 1992, after my grandfather’s untimely death led to soul searching, conviction, and a rededication to my faith. While my church upbringing was eclectic because of our military family’s nomadic lifestyle, I returned to faith in an evangelical church affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination whose checkered history and current challenges play a prominent role in Alberta’s book. From that point forward, I was discipled in evangelical churches and consider myself an evangelical Christian—although Alberta notes there is considerable debate about the utility of that term because of the baggage it carries these days in public discourse. 

In 2001, I was appointed to the Bush Administration and became more politically active in subsequent years, running for office in 2006 and working on various GOP campaigns and for conservative causes. My political activism eventually landed me at Liberty University, to which Alberta devotes two chapters of his book and where I worked for eleven years. By this time, like so many of the people Alberta encountered in his travels, I had lost sight of the boundary between my faith and political beliefs. I attended many of the faith and policy conferences Alberta writes about, and I know most of the public figures he features in the book. It wasn’t until what he describes as the fringe elements of the party began to scale the walls that I was shaken out of my trance and began critically examining and deconstructing my faith to determine what was of Jesus Christ and what wasn’t. I would characterize myself today as politically homeless and happily so, fully invested in following Jesus Christ alone and striving to be more like Him for myself and others.

Of my former employer, Alberta describes the tension between the school’s stated mission of “training champions for Christ,” integrating faith with a liberal arts education and placing believers in every vocation, and its long and controversial history of political activism and cultural antagonism, beginning with founder and president Jerry Falwell, Sr. and his establishment of the Moral Majority in 1980 as a kingmaker in Republican politics. He concludes that the university’s true purpose is political and cultural influence, not the education and spiritual formation of its students. Ironically, Jerry Falwell, Jr., who resigned as university president in 2020 after a well-publicized scandal involving an affair between his wife and a young pool attendant-turned-business associate, agrees with Alberta, saying his father was always more concerned with changing the culture and restoring evangelical preeminence than running a university. 

I mentioned previously that Alberta is uniquely qualified to write about what he calls “the crack-up of the American evangelical church.” In each chapter, Alberta offers verses of Scripture and insightful theological observations to illustrate the dichotomy between the ministry of Jesus Christ and the church he is chronicling in the book’s pages. He quotes the Bible when posing hard questions to many of his subjects about their words and actions. In some respects, this makes him a more fearsome adversary in the eyes of many of his subjects because, like one of his interviewees, Russell Moore, former Southern Baptist Convention pastor, former president of the denomination’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, and current editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, his critique comes from inside the tent.  

Alberta’s book captures the American evangelical church’s fear of losing its position and privilege and its rage toward others who oppose or don’t take up the cause of “taking back America for Christ,” ranging from the secular left to pastors who refuse to bring politics to the pulpit. One self-declared “patriot” called these pastors “squishes” because of their unwillingness to engage in cultural warfare against the enemies of Americanized Christianity.

 In another article, I wondered aloud about the whole idea of returning America to Christ, as if He had lost it somehow: “A question for another time is why we think we need to ‘take it back’ when it’s already His, and always has been, and always will be.”

Jesus declared before his ascension to heaven that “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me” (Matthew 28:18, NIV).  After declaring His authority over all things, he then charged us to “go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20). And what did he command his apostles to do? “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments’” (Matthew 22:37-40).

The American evangelical church cannot take back and present to Jesus Christ that which He already possesses; the truth is that those who are striving to “take back America” want it for themselves, not for Christ. They want it not to make disciples, but to add to their political and cultural tribe at the expense of others. 

Alberta interviews a theologian from Australia who, because the evangelical church in America has strayed so far from its divine purpose, moved to America to teach at Wheaton College, the flagship evangelical institution founded in 1860 by American abolitionists, and considers America his mission field. Alberta also interviewed faith leaders from totalitarian regimes who see in American evangelicalism what they experienced in their homelands and warn that the church “must be ‘an unreliable ally’ to every social, political, and government order of this world.” It is sobering to think that a nation that has for generations lauded itself as an indispensable exporter of Christian values to the world is now looked upon by other nations as a threat to the Gospel and in need of missionaries to bring them back to the Word.

If you are intellectually curious about how evangelical Christianity in America arrived at this current precipice, Alberta’s book is an indispensable resource—exhaustively researched, well-written, and compellingly narrated. If you consider yourself an evangelical Christian, you will see yourself in this book, regardless of what side of the cultural fault line you find yourself.

Ron Miller is a Christian higher education executive, educator, church elder, and writer of Ron’s Reflections, addressing the current state of American Christianity and its fidelity to Christ. Ron previously served as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, an information technology executive, and a political appointee in President George W. Bush’s administration.