Over the course of time it soon became clear that our views on worship were not the majority’s and toward the end of my time serving there conservative politics began creeping in more and more. It was a time when the Tea Party was reaching the peak of its influence and President Barack Obama was seen as an existential threat to not only America but Evangelicalism. At the time, I was very conservative but I loathed the marrying of politics and worship and despised even more the way some elders in the church willfully spread lies about Obama or Democrats in general. This lust for power at the price of witness worried me and when serial fibber Louis Gohmert was invited to speak at the church on a weekday evening for a Tea Party event I knew we were in trouble.
That lust for power at the expense of witness is the subject of Tim Alberta’s recent volume The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (HarperCollins, 2023). Alberta, a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump (HarperCollins, 2020), had experienced first hand the vitriol of hard-core conservative Christians when at his father’s funeral he was confronted by members of the church his father had pastored over critiques he had made of both Donald Trump and the ways in which evangelicals had not only cozied up to the billionaire philanderer but gave him their enthusiastic support. “One man questioned whether I was truly a Christian,” writes Alberta. “Another asked if I was still on ‘the right side.’ All while Dad was in a box a hundred feet away” (p. 7).
The insensitivity on full display at Alberta’s father’s funeral is given a fuller context in the rest of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory. Whether it is talking with MAGA minister Robert Jeffress in Dallas, TX or attending conservative political conferences and interviewing attendees and organizers, the portrait Alberta paints is of an American Christianity so diseased by megalomania that the whole body has become sick. It has been a slow-growing illness that, in recent times, has seemingly reached a tipping point.
It is hard to walk away from reading The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory and not think that at the root of it all lay Liberty University and, in particular, its founder Jerry Falwell, Sr.1 The late Virginian preacher turned founder of Liberty is today best known for his attacks on the Teletubbies, a children’s television program that Falwell claimed was promoting homosexuality. Decades prior, Falwell had become “one of the most consequential figures of the late twentieth century” (p. 54), especially with the creation of the Moral Majority in 1979. As Alberta deftly explains, Falwell and his sycophants claimed that the impetus for the organization’s creation was the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade in 1973. But such a portrait is, to quote our author, “evidence of careful storytelling and masterful salesmanship. But it does not stand up to factual scrutiny” (p. 66). Alberta notes that Ed Dobson, a friend of Falwell’s and a dean at Lynchburg Baptist College (the precursor to Liberty University) disputed the notion that abortion was one of the reasons for the Moral Majority’s formation. In her masterful history of the United States, Jill Lepore points out that some pro-life Catholics, upon learning of Falwell’s seemingly newfound position on abortion, expressed skepticism. “In 1982,” she writes, “the founder of the American Life League sneered, ‘Falwell couldn’t spell abortion five years ago.’”2
Regardless of how it came to be, the Moral Majority helped to influence the results of the 1980 election battle between incumbent Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and Ronald Reagan, a Republican. Falwell not only stumped for Reagan during the Republican primaries but he poured millions of dollars into advertisements making Carter seem, as Alberta quotes him, “a traitor to the South and no longer a Christian” (p. 69). His interjection into America’s political landscape was a boon for Falwell. Both his church and his college saw attendance numbers go up and Falwell himself raked in millions of dollars, purchasing a private plane and appearing on primetime news programs. Falwell had placed his distinctive stamp on evangelicalism and, consequently, amassed a significant amount of power.
The surge of conservatism fostered by Falwell has grown and it can be felt acutely in today’s political climate. Alberta demonstrates this both in his interviews with MAGA-leaning ministers and defectors. In ch. 11, our author goes over his conversation with right-wing pastor Greg Locke. Despite the unhinged nature of so much of what Locke says, the picture Alberta paints of him is complicated. Somehow Locke comes across as much more mild than his sensational bombast from the pulpit would have you think. But while Alberta believes Locke to be “a genuinely gifted preacher” (p. 228), he nevertheless expresses concern about how Global Vision, Locke’s church, manufactures an environment conducive to extremism.
Other interviews reveal that evangelicalism is hardly monolithic and that while Locke “embodies a distinct Trump-era phenomenon” of predictability (p. 299), others demonstrate a more independent spirit. David French, discussed in ch. 18, stood up against Trump early on and faced repercussions for it. He and his family received death threats and other personal attacks. Trolls “photoshopped images of his youngest daughter, who’d been adopted from Ethiopia, inside a gas chamber (Trump, depicted in a Nazi SS uniform, was shown with his finger on the ignition button)” (p. 333). But French did not relent, continuing his opposition to the MAGA movement as well as appealing to Christians to stand up to such movements, especially within their congregations.
What Alberta does well in The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory is to report on the MAGA movement within evangelicalism with the gravity it deserves. While the stupidity of many a Trump sycophant may seem amusing, it is also alarming. As I write this review, seated in Congress are members who believe the last election was stolen, endorsed so-called 9/11 “truthers,” claimed some school shootings were “false flag” operations, and more.3 These officials vote on bills in ways that reflect their depravity and ignorance. Combating them is the only way to preserve American democracy in an age of demagoguery.
American evangelicalism is at a turning point and it remains to be seen whether it will succumb to the lust for power so many of its leaders have led them to or if it will emerge a movement prophetic in its denunciation of those who have cozied up to the mighty. It was Jesus himself in the Gospel of Mark who, when overhearing his disciples debate who the greatest among them was, taught them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9:35, NRSVue). Perhaps there should be a new slogan – Make Evangelicals Christian Again.”
- The volume is framed in such a way that lends credence to that assumption. Chapter three is entitled “Lynchburg, Virginia” and is an overview of the work and influence of Jerry Falwell and the university he would found. The final chapter, ch. 21, is also entitled “Lynchburg, Virginia” and looks at the struggles of faculty and students at the university in light of the school’s politically prolific leadership. ↩︎
- Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), 664. ↩︎
- One of the worst offenders at the moment is Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. See Em Steck and Andrew Kaczynski, “Majorie Taylor Greene’s history of dangerous conspiracy theories and comments” (2.4.21), cnn.com. Accessed 22 April 2024. ↩︎
The Amateur Exegete 