Ep. 3 / Following Jesus at the Ballot Box ► Tim Alberta

Tim Alberta, author of "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism," joins us to explore the complex relationship between American evangelicalism and right-wing politics. Raised in an Evangelical Presbyterian Church where his father served as a pastor, Alberta offers a deeply personal perspective on how these religious communities have evolved, particularly under the influence of Donald Trump. His poignant recollections, including those from his father's funeral, illuminate the troubling shifts within the evangelical community and raise critical questions about how faith and politics have become increasingly intertwined.

Together, we examine the rise of Christian nationalism and its profound impact on faith and civic responsibility. We challenge the binary choices often presented by the American electoral system, encouraging Christians to vote in a way that truly glorifies God rather than succumbing to political panic. Our conversation extends beyond U.S. borders, offering guidance to young Christians worldwide to remain steadfast in their faith amid political or cultural oppression. This episode emphasizes the importance of serving God's kingdom, distinct from any earthly nation, and aims to inspire and challenge Christians navigating these turbulent times.

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Transcript

Brian Stiller

Hello and welcome to evangelical 360. My name is Brian Stiller, Global Ambassador for the World Evangelical Alliance and host of this new podcast series. On evangelical 360, I interview leaders, writers and influencers about contemporary issues which are impacting Christian life around the world. And my hope, is that it will not only be a global meeting place where faith is explored from different perspectives, but that each person listening will come away informed, encouraged, challenged and inspired. 

If you've wondered why, in the world, a majority of white evangelicals in the United States have climbed on the bandwagon of the political right, and especially Donald Trump, you'll want to listen to our guest today, author and journalist Tim Alberta. Tim, a writer for the Atlantic and son of an evangelical US pastor, has written this stunning book called the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. His remarkable analysis is what we will examine today. I invite you to be a part of this conversation.

Thank you so much, Tim, for joining us today on evangelical 360.  Tim, your book Kingdom, Power and Glory opened a window for many of us outside of the US on why is it that white evangelicals have become so enamored by conservative, right-wing, Trumpian kind of ideas, and I want to explore that. But before we do, I'd like to know something about who you are and your background and the kind of family life, experience and training that brought you to a place where you could do your analysis and come up with what this book is proposing. Tell me a bit about yourself?

Tim Alberta

Well, thank you for having me, brian. First of all, it's a real treat to be talking about this with you. I was raised in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church and my father was the senior pastor of our church, a church that was pretty small when I was a kid in the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan, and the church grew quite large over time. And growing up as a pastor's kid, as a PK, you're always going to have sort of a special window into the goings on of the church that most people don't see. You just you know the good, the bad and the ugly right, and I think for me as kind of a precocious child and then as a kind of precocious young man, I was always a little bit struck, I think, by the disconnect between who Jesus is and, you know, who we are called to be as mini-Christs, as Christians, as followers of Jesus, on the one hand, and then, on the other hand, what the institution of the church at times appeared to be. In other words, there seems to be a glaring contradiction in certain moments of my upbringing between the attitudes, the behaviors, the standards prescribed by Scripture, versus the attitudes and the behaviors and the standards that I would see sometimes in the church community around me and then even sort of more broadly in the evangelical movement that I was very much a part of.

You know, in the United States, and particularly in American media, which was my chosen career path, evangelicalism is treated as kind of a cartoon character, really a punching bag sometimes, if you will, and early in my career that really bothered me and I really felt as though I had a responsibility to push back on that, because these are my people, this is my tribe, and I felt sort of protective of them. I felt defensive when I would hear those sorts of attacks on the evangelical church, because on the one hand I knew how much good the church could do, and in some cases certainly was doing, and so I felt defensive of the church. But on the other hand I also knew that some of these criticisms were in fact very valid and that the church was in so many cases getting in its own way and sabotaging its own great commission with the way that it engaged with the outside world, and so that was sort of the inner conflict that in many ways led me to write this book.

Brian Stiller

Tim, it was an interesting way in which this book was triggered, ironically at the funeral of your father. Describe that moment and how that became a catalyst for you in pushing forward and doing this analysis that you've done in this book.

Tim Alberta

Well, the short version of the story is that when my dad died quite unexpectedly five years ago, this summer book which was a pretty detailed and sometimes quite devastating examination of Donald Trump and his takeover of the Republican Party and that book really put me in the crosshairs of the right wing there were a lot of Trump allies in the media, particularly Fox News, rush Limbaugh talk radio, who were really coming after me and really criticizing me for that book.

Well, right in the middle of that, my dad died and so when I went home to the church where I'd grown up, where he'd been the pastor for more than 25 years, for the funeral, there were any number of people there who, because I was in the news and because I was sort of a target at that point, they decided to pile on, to pile on.

They decided that they wanted to pick a fight with me about politics, about Donald Trump, about, you know, the culture wars. Right then, and there, as I was in the sanctuary mourning my father, and I think that that was just, it was a moment that helped to really crystallize the depths of the problem that we're facing in the American church. What are partisan political differences, no matter our disagreements on any sort of social issue. I could never have imagined Earlier in my life I never could have imagined before Donald Trump came along frankly, that sort of situation where people would feel that it was appropriate at a funeral, in that setting, to attack the son of the deceased pastor that they were there honoring, or supposedly honoring. And so it just became very clear to me that something had changed, something very dramatic had changed, and it really confirmed a lot of my worst fears about the trajectory that the church might indeed be on.

Brian Stiller

It must have triggered in your mind a concern on a larger issue than simply being offended at your father's funeral, than simply being offended at your father's funeral.

Tim Alberta

I think that the best way I could describe it, brian, was what I had sensed over the years was this creeping existential paranoia that had begun to really penetrate much of the American evangelical movement, this idea that we've lost the culture, we've lost the country, that our enemies, the secular, humanist, pagan, left, that they're going to come after us, that they're going to come after the church, that they're going to try to eradicate the Almighty from civic public life in America, and that this is our last stand, that time is running out and we had better do something about it. And I think really, and I think really, this very acute ends justify the means mentality where Trump and with others who, I think, very clearly do not share the values of the church but who are perceived to be these bare-knuckle brawlers who are willing and able to do for the good, humble, peaceful, pious Christian what he cannot do for himself.

Brian Stiller

Okay, but Tim, what's the rationale behind this fear? It isn't simply the reaction to a political ideal. There must be something underlying that's giving rationale or logic as to why they were acting and voting and behaving the way they have been doing?

Tim Alberta

If one were to study the last 100 years of history, that the country today bears very little resemblance to what the nation once looked like in terms of its sort of Judeo-Christian value set. You know, sexuality in public life and drug usage and pornography and divorce rates and all sorts of other things. I mean, there's no question that, even if you consider where we've been in the last just 10 to 15 years in the United States, you know Barack Obama campaigned for president in 2008 opposed to same-sex marriage, insisting that marriage, in the biblical view that he held, was between one man and one woman. That was in 2008. By the time he left office in 2016, same-sex marriage was the law of the land, right, and anyone who disagreed, anyone who dissented, anyone who said that they weren't comfortable with that, anyone who held that same view that Obama had just eight years earlier, they were summarily dismissed as bigots and people with retrograde views who were on the wrong side of history and weren't welcome in this new and enlightened age of American life.

So you could certainly excuse some of these people for looking around and saying how did this happen so quickly? And what is you know what's next? Right? And they panic over what they perceive to be this sort of coordinated assault on their way of life. And the problem is, brian, that even if some of this is true, even if one were to accept the premise that these Christians in America are in fact under assault America are in fact under assault that does not in any way, shape or form, justify the sort of belligerent, militant response that we have seen from much of the evangelical movement in recent years, because this idea that we are so unique in this country and that we need to preserve this country this is really the root of the problem, because any Christian can read the New Testament and understand the conditions that the first century Christians were living under in a brutal Roman occupation.

And yet those first century Christians, they instruct us very clearly on how we are to engage with our enemies and how we are to treat those who oppress us. So why do we feel that we have permission to disregard those that we are somehow uniquely exempted from the teachings of Scripture? Because this is a blessed nation, we can't defeat our enemy by loving them. That doesn't work anymore, maybe for some other people, but not for us, and that is, I think, the uniquely American psyche that we are dealing with.

Brian Stiller

The title Christian nationalism has become ubiquitous as a definer of what you've just described. Circle around and do 101 on Christian nationalism, at least as it's finding its roots in the US.

Tim Alberta

I'm not entirely sure that we'll ever get to a place of real agreement on what it means to be a Christian nationalist. Some people view it as an insult, others wear it as a badge of honor. I think Christian nationalism in many ways is the marriage of bad history and bad theology. And the bad history is necessary in America to literally rewrite the history books. There are people, there are groups that will travel the country, going into churches and basically present the argument in a very compelling way, basically arguing that we were founded as a Christian nation, that we were intended to be governed by Christians, by Christian men, by white Christian men. Right, and they will try to convince you that everything you know about the Establishment C clause of the Constitution, about the separation of church and state, about the warnings that were written down by our founding fathers, that actually all of that is nonsense, that really that's just a bunch of junk fed to you by the secular left to keep God out of public life, god out of public life.

That bad history then creates the sort of lays the foundation for a separate but codependent movement of people who would attempt to then dramatically change the ways in which centuries of Christians have interpreted scripture.

They would change it to then sort of view all of the teachings of Christ, all of the epistles from Paul and others, as actually a sort of coded permission structure for us to reclaim control of the institutions of power in America by any means necessary, because, again, the ends justify the means. If this was meant to be a Christian nation, if this was a nation conceived in covenant with the Almighty and it's been taken from us, well then we aren't just fighting for America, we are fighting for God himself, right, and then you feel that you are sort of ordained almost to set aside the Sermon on the Mount, set aside the Beatitudes, set aside the great command to not only love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and all your strength, but also to love your neighbor as yourself, because your neighbor is made in the image of that God. We can set that aside, temporarily at least, because we have this call to retake our country for God himself.

Brian Stiller

Tim, as a journalist and as a person of faith yourself in all of this, what is your message as a Christian in the midst of this political turmoil?

Tim Alberta

One of the things that my dad used to say that has always stuck with me is that, as Christians, we are called to be in sales, not in management, and what he meant by that was that we are ultimately broken and limited and finite creatures who can only do so much with the meager talents we are given. But what we should try to do with those talents is to sell Jesus to those who are in our midst, our neighbors, our family members, especially the people with whom we disagree, the people who hold a completely opposite viewpoint from ours, people who live a completely different lifestyle from ours. Instead of considering them as enemies to be conquered, what if we considered them as brothers and sisters to be gained? And so to be in sales means that you are primarily concerned with presenting the gospel to those who are most in need of it, and then you stand back and let God do the rest. He is the one who's in management, right?

But instead I think so many American Christians truly believe that they are in management, that they have to be in control, that they have to be somehow sort of at the switches, pushing the buttons, pulling the levers, trying their best to dictate circumstances that are completely beyond their control. Ultimately, and if they believe in a sovereign God, they should recognize that in his grace and in his time he will make all things new. But their task in the meantime is to present the gospel in a way that opens eyes and opens hearts and creates the possibility to live in right relation with those around us. And if we do that, then so many of these other problems, I think Brian, are going to take care of themselves.

Brian Stiller

Tim, we're having this conversation before the fall election, but, as you project the church out through the coming years, regardless of where the election will take you, what's your sense of the evangelical church, its witness, its place in American life? Where are we going to be five years from now?

Tim Alberta

We've been moving in a direction that I think is very dangerous, not just for the church but for the country, because when you have this sort of Christian nationalist fever that is infecting more and more of the American right, certainly what it does is it degrades both your love of God and your love of country. It sort of perverts your ability to have a healthy, proportional love for both of those things. And this panic that results has, I think, in many ways sort of opened the door not just for Donald Trump to come in and exploit these people and to weaponize their fears, but for a whole host of copycats and other cynical, shameless political leaders and cultural leaders who now see that there are all of these people out there who are scared and insecure and desperate for salvation in the form of a political strongman. And I don't want to be alarmist here in saying this, but I do think that it's our responsibility as Christians to understand the very real danger we are in now of repeating some of history's worst mistakes.

Brian Stiller

Tim, you used a very interesting line. You said that false choices create a false dichotomy of choices. Are people caught between the bifurcation of two false choices?

Tim Alberta

The challenge of the American electoral system in so many ways is that it seems to impose a binary on all Americans that if you really care about the outcome, if you really care about doing your civic duty, then you really only have one of two options you can vote for the donkeys or you can vote for the Republicans.

But I believe, I truly believe, that an election is always an opportunity to examine not just the two parties, not just the two candidates, not just the policy platforms, but to examine our own hearts, in our own way of thinking and our own approach to how we must live in a broken world.

And at the end of the day, I don't believe the test for a Christian after they walk out of the ballot box is did you support the lesser of two evils? I think the question for the Christian when they walk out of the ballot box is have I glorified the Lord and have I, to the best of my ability, voted in a way that reflects the inner transformation that accompanies being a Christian? In other words, it's much less about did I help one side or the other side, and I think that it becomes terribly challenging, especially in these times when so many people have become convinced that the stakes are so high and that we're living through this moment of existential dread about the collapse of democracy and feeling as though if we don't get this one right, then we might not get another chance. I understand those feelings. I've written about those feelings at length. I get it, but at the end of the day, for the Christian, your security is found not in a kingdom of this world, but in the eternal promise of the kingdom that awaits you.

Brian Stiller

As you know, Tim, this is a global issue and while it's percolating in the US, those concerns of the combination of the social liberal elites are taking away our rights or we're losing our democracies, and that's finding its conversation and its political outworkings in Europe and Africa and Asia. What advice would you have to a young person in Zambia or in Hungary or in Brazil on what the call of Christ is out of his kingdom life into their world and into their own lives?

Tim Alberta

Well, Brian, it's interesting because I'm not sure that the American should be giving advice to anyone in those situations, because so often, from what I've seen in my own experiences, the people outside of America are handling this a whole lot better than we are.

I think the Christians in sub-Saharan Africa and in the underground church in China and elsewhere have a much more grounded and mature outlook on these things.

I would say, though, to your question for anyone who is fearful of the oppression of the state, anyone who believes that there are forces in politics or in culture that are coming for them and that will punish them and persecute them for their beliefs punish them and persecute them for their beliefs I would just encourage them to remember that this is exactly what Christ promised would happen to you, that there are very few ironclad promises that Jesus made to his followers, but one of them was that if you follow me, if you become my disciple, they will hate you because they hated me first.

In other words, I've marvelled at the argument that we hear from some in the American evangelical world, who have said well, we have to fight back, we are under siege, but as Christians, we signed up to be under siege. That was part of the deal from the very beginning right Sales, not management. We are not God. He is Ultimately. We are here to serve him, to enjoy him forever, and we must not get caught up in this notion that somehow we must fight for the kingdom of America or the kingdom of this country or that country, as though it is the kingdom of God, because it is not.

Brian Stiller

Tim, I want to thank you for your writing, your journalism. And my hope is that people who would disagree with you on your analysis would at least take time to think through the logic of your analysis and the implications the kingdom implications that you've described both in our conversation and in your book, and take that into account as they work out their own life and their own witness. And so thank you for being with us today. We look forward to having you again on evangelical 360, and the best to you in your work, thank you.

Tim Alberta

Thank you so much, Brian. I appreciate you having me.

Brian Stiller

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