Want to ask a question about a terrific book? Tomorrow evening I’m scheduled to interview before a California audience Tim Alberta, author last year of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (you can read the two reviews Current ran of this book: by Ron Miller and Elizabeth Stice). It’s a lament about politicized Christianity, and if you have an inquiry you’re dying to make before more churches die, leave a comment or email me (zenger1735@gmail.com) and I’ll try to slip it in.
Alberta asks whether the American church suffers from the “bully syndrome” that often accompanies insecurity. He says Tennessee pastor Greg Locke “came to appreciate that wrath is a business model, that crazy is a church growth strategy.” (Many publications have a similar strategy.) Alberta aptly quotes George Orwell’s contention that patriotism is defensive, nationalism is offensive.
The ground-level reporting in The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory is especially important. Alberta shows how Michigan pastor Bill Bolin “could no longer rule out a second civil war” and describes Locke pointing a finger at the camera and saying, “You ain’t seen an insurrection yet!” Alberta interviews many churchgoers and points out that the ones ready to play mortal combat are not in the majority, “yet they were everywhere I went.”
Alberta raises theological questions as well. Are some belligerent preachers relying on mistaken assumptions about the Old Testament and sidelining the New? (I’ve written since the beginning of this century about problems inherent in seeing America as a new Israel that should live by the laws of the old, as if the experience of Daniel and Esther in Babylon and Persia, or Paul in Athens, is irrelevant.)
My nightmare scenario is another close election where Trumpists lose after expecting victory for months and take revenge. Alberta quotes agitator John Zmirak telling a large suburban Seattle audience, “The next January 6 should be open carry.” We’ll need a remnant of pastors like Brian Zahnd, who reminds his Missouri congregation of the truth we should carry with us: “You can take up the sword of Caesar or you can take up the cross of Christ. You have to choose.”
I’d like to hear more about the concept that the church should be an “unreliable ally” to the various governments and social movements of this world. It no longer seems acceptable for the church to say nothing about what happens outside its doors. But how can a vocal church also be an unaligned church?