The Good Evangelical
Notes on "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals In an Age of Extremism," by Tim Alberta
As far as I can tell, what Tim Alberta means by extremism is people of faith not having the political views he wishes them to have, which is why he has written such a soggy washcloth of a book. People are always commenting what a precocious little stylist he is. I think what they mean is he’s the best in Jeff Goldberg’s prison yard, which is like being the tallest pygmy in Mindanao.
This appears to be news to Alberta, but we call them protestants because theirs is a movement born of protest. For protestant sects to play the role they have in the peopling of the United States, they needed to generate sufficient emotional force to get someone to up stakes and move, even in the face of an uncertain outcome at the end. In the history of religions, this is unusual; it’s more common for them to be a force for social stability.
It would have been interesting for Alberta to consider whether this makes our own American variety of low-church evangelicalism unsuited to a time in which we’ve run out of frontier, there are more people, and therefore one can fairly assume stability is something that will come to be more valued by the public.
A good definition of a conservative is someone for whom stability rates highly in their personal ranking of values, and by this standard, it’s Alberta who has gotten more so, while his subjects in the book have stayed the same. It’s normal for someone to move from Michigan to the East Coast and begin to think and act like an Episcopalian, the very American conceit is the way Alberta continues to identify with the tradition in which he was raised. He just pretends it’s actually something else. He’s not the only one: in the account of Russell Moore here, as he goes through his time in the wilderness, one of the reasons Moore comes up with for remaining a Southern Baptist is that he likes sweet tea. Get thee to evensong, Russell.
At the end of the day, this is a personal book. Alberta has grown up among these people, yet he’s writing about his misgivings when he notices them acting the way all history and prior experience would lead us to expect they would. To avoid this conclusion, he reaches for the phrase right there in the title, the “age of extremism,” as if it’s something that rubbed off on them recently, or maybe it’s in the water, but really they’re just like this. From the middle-class busybodies of Trollope’s Barchester in the 19th century, to pentecostals in the slums of Rio today, maybe or maybe not stamping the mogen david on bricks of cocaine, it’s actually normal to see low-church evangelicalism as a force for social chaos. To think the government is against them, that the whole world is fallen, is a historically normal feature of the way these churches think about their role in the world.
In the past, however, the people who were actually in charge of things had the good sense to be right about more things than they were, which kept it under control. It’s not like some two-bit Bible college graduate preaching in a warehouse in front of televisions and smoke machines is any more fatuous than Pod Save America. It’s true that something has gone wrong, but he’s observing downstream effects and considering them causes.
There’s a moment in here that’s outrageously funny. Alberta visits some Michigan church where the pastor is extolling ivermectin as a COVID treatment. The election was stolen, the governor put us on lockdown, and worst of all, they don’t want you to take the horse dewormer! Alberta’s own tiresome perspective on this is like Missus Dalloway on safari, wondering what they’re gonna think in the Watergate. Roll with it, homie! It’s a fault of mine not to be able to recognize religious authority in any of these people, but my God are they colorful characters.
But understand, Alberta wants you to know he’s a Christian too, but also a serious journalist, which is why this book is a ponderous, interminable death march that should be 200 pages shorter. It’s sodden with jargon both left-wing and religious—he talks about “deconstructing” as if it’s a theological fad with some biblical basis, in apparently blissful ignorance of the history of that term in leftist philosophy, and there’s the usual church ad-copy jargon for Facebook advertising; “seeker sensitive,” “kingdom-first.” If you want to think, first learn how to talk and write.
The basic charge of the purportedly extreme religious leaders Alberta encounters, like Steve Strang who runs some sort of charismatic madrasa in Florida, is impossible to dispute. The evangelical social circle with which Alberta clearly sympathizes is constantly infected with left-wing ideas. They have failed to guard the interests of their community. Quite apart from the Soros cash, they have discredited themselves. Most of them, however, have the good taste not to allow themselves to be tokenized as the good evangelical in the way Alberta has. Another horror Aaron Sorkin hath wrought on his country is that journalists all want to be that quintessential Never Trump prick Jeff Daniels played in The Newsroom, and that’s the motive impulse of the author here.
Alberta ends up accusing his subjects of all these things, but none of his charges make the slightest bit of sense. He’s just sputtering as the world he’s known turns out to be a little weirder and a little wilder than he knew. He is very down on the concept of Christians believing the civil order can be sanctified, but in the process has made himself into a sort of doofus inquisitor.
I think what Alberta was betting on, as far as the arc of his career and reporting is concerned, is that we would have turned the page on Trump in November, the mad carnival would have ended, and we could be treated to David French, Pete Wehner and all the various public Christians who made their careers propagandizing for mass murder would tut-tut at their low-class coreligionists for their unseriousness. One of Alberta’s widely-shared pieces just prior to the election, and widely denied by the Trump campaign, was that staffers were about ready to call it quits. Ain’t it funny how life springs from death?
As a good evangelical, Alberta’s role is to complain that the bad ones’ political alliance with Trump compromised their Christian witness. We heard this all the time in his first term, and the arguments were always contradictory and in bad faith. If you ask me, the way protestant conservatives engaged with Trump seems much more healthy than during the Moral Majority era, with all its sanctimonious falsity. For that matter, when I think of the phrase “Christian nationalism” separate from the baggage that’s been assigned to it in the last year or two, the speech that comes to mind is Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. Does Alberta have concerns about the Liberator’s bloody-minded transactional metaphor surrounding lashes and swords?
One thing that sticks out in Alberta’s account is how many of these preachers or believers who ended up getting into Qanon have roots on the left, they have almost a Jesus People sensibility, which hardens. This is a very rich vein which Alberta mostly does not see fit to mine. It fits in rather well with some of the woo-woo parts of the MAGA coalition, almost as if someone has taken the great American Etch-a-Sketch and shaken it—people who were once over here, are now over there. This is a merger of very anti-authoritarian points of view, but that cuts against the argument Alberta is trying to make in the book, and this stuff is taking place mostly out of view of the elite evangelical circles with whom he is best sourced up.
The most interesting characters in here are the ones Alberta presents sympathetically, like Cal Thomas and Pastor Brian Zahnd. Thomas is the sort of man God would observe if he were to choose to refrain from destroying Washington, DC by meteor strike, and he appears in the narrative as a sort of kindly guide, aware of all the errors because he made them at one time. Zahnd is a Kansas City pastor from a Baptist family who was drawn to the Jesus Movement as a young person, and he’s the one who provides the condemnation of political engagement Alberta’s narrative requires. He, and Zahnd, fall into the error of all quietists. The corruptions of money and power are real, which is why sanctifying the civil order requires thinking through the proper uses for these things, not throwing up one’s hands and fleeing from the discussion.
Churches too use money and exercise power. They sue in the courts, and sometimes are right to. They have debts to service, salaries to pay, and buildings to build. The sovereign power of God does not depend on any of these things, but Christians have generally understood them to be fairly important.
There are ways in which Alberta is condemning the wrong things, and then there are ways he fails to be forceful in places he ought to. I share with him the frustration about the idiocies of David Barton. I don’t mean to be offensive, but protestants used to be known for being the people who were well educated, something they linked to Martin Luther and the printing press. God loveth the simple, but lying and willful stupidity is another thing.
On that note, what I was really hoping for was some amusing portraits of the real scoundrels. We don’t get them, though he seems to know who the bad guys are. Guys like Ralph Reed, the shiny-faced snake oil salesman who, for the last dozen years, has betrayed the noble protestant cause of opposition to gambling with his alliance with the Adelson crime family.
There is rich material when it comes to the poor taste of some of these people. Surely Robert Jeffress was teaching his flock an uncharacteristically subtle message from the book of Ecclesiastes when he spent $250 million on his Dallas church building only for it to look like complete shit. In the past it was understood that church buildings were to draw the eye upward, toward the choir invisible, whereas the blue concave facade of the Pastor Jeffress Godplex evokes nothing so much as the copious bosom of a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, no doubt heavenly in its own way.
The closest Alberta gets to a funny portrait is with Paula White, the Babbling Bimbo of Babylon, Elmira Gantry herself. He darkly hints about her path to stardom despite allegations of affairs and the general stupidity of everything she says, but this is of course missing the point. We do not need pages about the way in which Paula White’s views are at variance with more traditional presentations of the gospel. We know she did a prosperity gospel, the prosperity she’s talking about is hers, and there’s a sucker born every minute. You can lead a horse to the horse dewormer, but you can’t make him think.
In Sinclair Lewis’s story, Gantry was a fraud, at least at first, but he was a capable speaker and exegete. Paula White has accomplished the incredible trick of not even having to preach. In the great evangelical race to the bottom, we have next to look forward to a preacher who gets up on stage and flaps his finger in front of his lips in a sort of Raspberry in the Spirit.
But conversions are funny things, which is why Lewis’s novel has that wonderful ambiguity. Lewis was an atheist who appreciated that the religious impulse pops up in unlikely places, even in the context of a willful fraud. The Catholic view is that you assent to the truths of the gospel with your individual reason, and then the Holy Spirit begins to work. But it works on its own time, and in its own way. Faith is a thing one has, religion is a thing one does. The Catholic read on Elmer Gantry is that the acts he participated in, even just because he had the hots for Sharon Falconer, had an effect on him.
There are things one can do which conduce to an increase of faith, and there are things which do not. Is there much about Paula White’s ministry, in terms of what her members do, that conduces to an increase of faith? I’m not passing judgment here, just asking.
I am left with terrible confusion about who Alberta is writing for. Is this a work of journalism, conducted to help secular Americans understand the landscape of evangelical politics? That would be a noble endeavor, religious history is not well taught in public schools because it is not allowed to be. Is it his jeremiad written on his way out of this world? That would in some sense be noble too, if his criticisms made more sense.
If that were the goal, he would need to write it from within the tradition, something which, perhaps because of the conventions of journalism, he is studiously shy to do. The argument he needs is that Trump, and the chaos and shame attendant to his presidency for people like him, is just punishment for the sins of a wicked people. This is a book about a guy who has grown up in the last generation in which liberal protestantism was normal. He is observing all the signs of its passing, but does not seem to see that’s what this all adds up to. It’s the sort of book you’d write once you’ve stepped on the fumi-e and taken your place as a curiosity in the court of the shogun.
The old liberal protestant mindset would be to look at these people, for whom Alberta seems to have nothing but contempt, and notice that, for all their faults, their hearts are in the trim. They need to be taught, formed, and put to work.
The other just condemnation which Alberta is unable to make because he would be fired from The Atlantic is that the legacy of modern evangelicalism, whether the rarefied kind with which he is familiar, or the tumbleweed circus variant, is 141 square miles of rubble and tens of thousands of dead Arab children. That is where their moral witness is dying. Most every politically connected evangelical minister has supported endless armaments illegally sent to an Israeli government rapidly sliding into dictatorship. They have gilded barbarism with holy writ, and betrayed both their country and their faith. This is a core tenet of belief for many of them. It has already created a hell on earth, and will send them there too if they’re not careful. Alberta ought to think on that.