William B. Evans
Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (HarperCollins, 2023), 493 pp.
I finally got around to reading Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory this week, thanks to the generosity of a former academic colleague who graciously loaned me his copy. The title, as many will realize, is taken from the last portion of the Paternoster or “Lord’s Prayer,” as Christians recite “for Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,” the ascription being to God rather than to Christians themselves. Alberta’s sustained argument is that many evangelical Christians have arrogated that kingdom, power, and authority to themselves, with tragic implications for the evangelical churches and subculture.
Alberta begins with a vignette of the church in suburban Detroit where he grew up, a congregation of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church denomination pastored by his father. This personal background is important; Alberta, an accomplished political journalist who has written for The Atlantic, Politico, The Wall Street Journal and other prominent publications, self-identifies as an evangelical Christian. This is both a positive and a negative—Alberta knows the nuances and details of the evangelical terrain rather well, but he also seems to lack critical distance at some crucial points.
Occasionally, however, Alberta does get the details wrong. For example, he mentions the “Presbyterian Church of America (PCA),” and he speaks of his own denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church as “further to the right, theologically and otherwise, than the PCA” (p. 439). While there was a “Presbyterian Church of America” briefly in the 1930s, the denomination of which Alberta speaks is the Presbyterian Church in America, and most observers would regard the PCA (which does not ordain women to any church offices) as to the right of the EPC (which does ordain women to all offices).
Some evangelical Christians will dismiss this volume as yet another progressive evangelical anti-Trump screed (along the lines of, say, Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation). This is unfortunate; while both books evince a similar underlying declension narrative, Alberta’s less ideologically driven book provides a wealth of anecdotal detail that needs to be read and digested.
Much of the book has the air of a travelogue, as Alberta travels around to various churches, schools, and events. The sustained impression we get is that evangelical churches and institutions are in crisis, as pastors seek to navigate, often unsuccessfully, the political and cultural divisions that afflict the broader nation, and as some churches and evangelical institutions have sought to capitalize on these divisions by aligning themselves with the populist religious Right. A persistent theme in the book is the fearmongering message promoted by such church leaders and institutions that evangelical Christians are “under siege” in America by progressive, secular interests, and that the traditional American way of life hangs in the balance. Thus an “apocalyptic” sensibility pervades in many of these circles, and this explains to a considerable extent the embracing of Donald Trump.
There is, to be sure, a lot of low-hanging fruit that can be picked to support Alberta’s argument. The populist religious Right indeed is, to a discouraging degree, a freakshow of grifters and ambitious intellectual lightweights (e.g., Charlie Kirk, Erik Metaxas, David Barton, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jr., etc.) often flogging really strange and self-serving stuff and capitalizing on the fears of unsophisticated evangelicals. Particular attention is given to the dumpster fire that is Falwell’s Liberty University, which appears to be Exhibit A of the pattern of sacrificing Christian piety and academic substance for money and political access. We are also given, through the eyes of investigative protagonists such as Julie Roys and Rachel Denhollander, an insightful window into the abuse scandals that touched the Southern Baptist Church, Southern Seminary, Moody Bible Institute, and prominent pastors such as James MacDonald and Ravi Zacharias, all further evidence of the temptation to sacrifice Christian principles on the altar of institutional interest.
All this is worthwhile, indeed important reading. Nevertheless, there are some problems and blind spots in the book. Alberta clearly writes as a participant in the struggle, with his heroes and villains. Persistently emerging as heroes are Alberta’s friends and prominent evangelical never-Trumpers Russell Moore and David French, while the villains are, predictably, all to their right. We are told many details, for example, of Russell Moore’s journey from Southern Baptist insider to Editor of Christianity Today magazine, but nothing is said of the circumstances that preceded Moore’s rise to the helm of CT—the sexual harassment scandal involving Moore’s predecessor and prominent never-Trumper evangelical Mark Galli. History is generally messier than we prefer it to be, but evenhandedness is important.
Perhaps the most intriguing chapter in the book details the efforts of David French, Russell Moore, and Curtis Chang to mount an effort in churches (a politically oriented Bible study program called “The After Party”) to counter the Religious Right/pro-Trump agenda. When donors did not emerge from traditional evangelical funding sources, they found an activist progressive secular foundation quite happy to support their efforts. Alberta is reticent about the details of the funding source but investigative work by journalist Megan Basham found that the effort was funded by Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors as part of their “New Pluralists” project, with the effort being rolled out in the electoral “battleground” state of Ohio. In short, French, Moore, and Chang, while gaining access to evangelical churches on the basis of their religious credentials, were party to a well-funded effort to elect Democrats. All this seems at best only slightly less tawdry than the shenanigans Alberta details on the right throughout much of the book.
Alberta is a good storyteller, and the book juxtaposes competing narratives, both of which have their limitations. On one hand, there is the apocalyptic narrative on the religious Right of a nation beset by the forces of darkness in which Christians are threatened with marginalization and persecution, the implication being that desperate times call for desperate measures. On the other hand, there is Alberta’s declension narrative of an evangelical subculture that has projected a threat to its existence and has sold its soul for power and wealth. It is clear, I think, that American populist evangelicals have overestimated the existential threat to themselves and to America, and their apocalyptic rhetoric is often disconnected from reality. But that is not to say that American populist evangelicals are completely wrong in their sense of marginalization and exclusion, and a weak point of the book is how Alberta persistently goes out of his way to pooh pooh that sense of marginalization (see, e.g., pp. 122-23). In short, Alberta writes as an “elite adjacent” evangelical who is apparently pretty satisfied with the current cultural situation.
If Alberta were more familiar with the literature treating recent American cultural warfare (e.g., sociologist James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars: The Struggle To Control The Family, Art, Education, Law, And Politics In America) he might have produced a more nuanced book that could begin to bridge the divide and facilitate dialogue between the polarized groups. As it is, the book is well worth reading as long as the author’s Tendenz and commitments are recognized.
TheEcclesialCalvinist 