When his father died suddenly in 2019, Tim Alberta didn’t expect to be talking about Rush Limbaugh in his eulogy, but then he didn’t expect to be talking about politics at his father’s wake either.
As he poignantly recounts in the prologue of his new book, “The Kingdom, the Power and The Glory,” Alberta was devastated by the loss of his father, an evangelical pastor in the suburbs of Detroit, and shocked when some mourners reproached him for his criticism of then-President Donald Trump at the visitation.
They hadn’t read Alberta’s just-released book “American Carnage” but had heard Limbaugh bashing “a guy named Tim Alberta” on his radio show.
“Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn my father,” Alberta would write later, saying that while some of the remarks were light-hearted, others were “cold and confrontational.”
Shaken by the encounters, Alberta responded the next day in his eulogy, saying people would be better off listening to his father’s old sermons than to Limbaugh. Within a few months he had moved his family from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., back to Michigan with an idea for his next book. “Dad had implored me to apply my talents to subjects of more eternal significance, and I could think of nothing more eternally significant than the crack-up of the American evangelical Church,” he writes in the “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” released this month.
Subtitled “American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” the book is Alberta’s attempt to grapple with a question that has troubled him for years — why some of the seemingly most religious Americans would support a man that Alberta has described as a “lecherous impenitent scoundrel.”
He also wants to open a window into what he considers “the most polarizing and least understood” faith tradition, one that is “more politically relevant and domestically disruptive than all the others combined.”
Alberta, a staff writer for The Atlantic and the father of three sons, does not write from outside the tradition. While his father converted to Christianity after a period of atheism in college, Alberta, who is 37, was raised in the church (quite literally, he points out), and he told me he has grown even more grounded in his faith while researching the book. When I ask him what he’d like our readers to know, he earnestly responds, “Jesus.”
Why do evangelicals support Donald Trump?
According to a poll conducted by HarrisX for Deseret, “more than half of Republicans see Donald Trump as a man of faith,” ranking him above Mike Pence, Mitt Romney and Tim Scott, all of whom are known for their religious faith.
While Trump has described himself as a nondenominational Christian, it’s been said that he is “unique among American presidents for his seeming lack of deep religious orientation.”
Alberta has his own theories about the disconnect between the values of evangelicals and the man that a large number of them support.
“I think it’s probably evidence of the degree to which political and cultural identity have come to shape perceptions of faith identity,” he told me. “In other words, if you perceive someone to be playing for the right team when it comes to partisan politics, or fighting for the right side when it comes to the culture wars, then you are probably more inclined to assign that person a spiritual or religious kinship than you would be with someone who has different tribal identification from you otherwise.”
The reverse is also true, he noted. “Mike Pence for years was the avatar of evangelicalism in the Republican context. And on several occasions after Jan. 6, when he chose to certify the election results, I saw him treated as an apostate, like he was the enemy and was no longer in good standing with his Christian brethren — not because of any religious betrayal or heresy on his part, but simply because he had chosen the Constitution over Donald Trump. And maybe that is actually a religious betrayal.”
Alberta says that love for America has become a religion for some evangelicals, with Trump seen as a religious leader. “What we see with Donald Trump’s continued dominance among these voters, and in certain quarters, this cult-like attachment to him, it transcends anything political, it transcends anything sociological; this is a religious fervor that many of these people have, a religious devotion that they are demonstrating to him. “It’s something we’ve never seen in our politics before,” he said.
Response to Alberta’s book
While “The Kingdom, the Power and The Glory” has attracted a lot of favorable media attention, there’s been little criticism of it in the public square so far, although Steve Bannon did take a dig at Alberta at Turning Point USA’s “AmericaFest” held earlier this month.
The former Trump strategist mocked the idea that people could be too patriotic, saying, that Alberta, “sitting up there on MSNBC,” says “the single biggest problem we have in the country and the church is that certain Christians love their country too much. There are certain Christians out there who are super, uber patriotic, and that’s a problem.”
Dave Brat, vice provost for engagement at Liberty University, also criticized Alberta in a discussion on Bannon’s podcast, saying, “Tim, is your God sovereign over politics? It’s a yes or no question.”
Liberty University and its founder, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, are addressed at length in “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” and not in a positive light. At one point, Alberta writes that while the students are kind and decent, there is kind of “sleaziness” surrounding the university and he says the students are being brainwashed.
Brat said that Alberta’s identity is rooted in media, and that he gaslights his “evangelical brothers and sisters.”
“And so I want to warn the evangelicals out there ... be aware. ... He says we view our faith through politics, as if the politics is God. Of course that’s false. And that’s a terrible thing for him to say about his brothers and sisters in the faith. Our faith is in a God who acts in history and through politics all through the scriptures, and brother Tim, we’re all in, sorry, no matter what you say.”
Alberta responded to that exchange on the social media platform X.
Who is Tim Alberta?
Linking Alberta to MSNBC, a cable news network that skews left, might lead someone not familiar with the writer to assume he is part of the so-called “godless media,” although the “godless” part is demonstrably untrue.
Alberta, who was a political correspondent for Politico before becoming a staff writer for The Atlantic, liberally quotes from the Bible like the pastor’s son that he is. (He told NPR a favorite verse is Mark 8:36, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?”) In conversation, he easily segues from talking about politics to the teachings of Jesus.
“(Trump) instinctively understands the fears and the anxieties and the insecurities and the grievances and the resentments of the people whose vote he is seeking. And he knows how to exploit those things, and that’s what makes him such an effective demagogue. He doesn’t have to look at polling data or focus groups. He has a talent, if you want to call it that, a twisted talent, for identifying the fear that lives deep in the heart of some of his countrymen and preying on it in ways that bring out the very worst in all of us,” he said.
“In particular, I must add, he brings out the worst in American Christians, who are taught to follow the commands of the one who said ‘Fear not.’ The one who said to love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you. The one who said ‘Turn the other cheek.’
“Those are the teachings that Christians are commanded to follow: to love your neighbor as yourself. All of the law rests on the command to love your neighbor as yourself and to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind and all your soul and all your strength. Those are the commands, and they are not ambiguous. They are not open to interpretation. And yet Donald Trump has convinced millions and millions of Christians in this country that their status, their safety, their identity is so threatened that they need to jettison those teachings of Jesus if they are to take their country back and survive this secular onslaught.”
That’s a false choice, Alberta says.
But the historical power and influence of white Christians is shrinking as the nation’s demographics rapidly change, I pointed out.
“I think the question becomes, which identity is more important to you,” Alberta said. “In the American context, their identity, in some sense, is threatened, and that’s a real thing, and I empathize with it to some degree.”
But Christians have a choice, he said: “You can turn to the sword, or you can turn to the cross. Throughout the ages, when people feel afraid, when people feel threatened, they turn to the sword — they turn to political leaders, military leaders, the power of the state to keep their enemies at bay and to feel more secure. And ultimately that security is fleeting and the damage done to the witness of Jesus is profound.
“But, if and when these followers of Jesus turn to the cross, and they pray for their enemies and they accept that in this life, they will be marginalized, they will be ostracized, they might even be persecuted, but they can not only come to terms with that, but they can embrace it because that is what they are called to do as followers of Jesus.”
“They may lose their status, but they will retain their identity as Christians. I can’t emphasize this enough. That is the Gospel in a nutshell. This is not some sub-cult teaching that I’m going off on here. This is Jesus 101.”
What is ‘The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory’ about?
In June of 2019, a month before his father died, Alberta took sides in an online riff between Russell Moore and Jerry Falwell Jr., saying that Christians should “choose wisely” between the two men’s ideologies.
In some ways, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” is a deep dive into those “two kinds of Christians” Alberta referenced in that tweet. He interviews Moore, a Southern Baptist luminary who left the denomination, as well as Ralph Reed, David French and other notable names in conservative Christian circles, as he traverses the country. “From a purely organizational standpoint, Christianity is in disarray,” he writes. His own denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, is considering dropping “evangelical” from its name, and Pew Research Center has found that evangelicals are the “most disliked” religious group. In the current environment, Alberta writes, “Evangelical has become an impediment to evangelizing.”
But the solution is not a certain political leader or even a religious leader in the mold of the 20th century evangelist Billy Graham, he told me.
“I don’t think that what’s going to save us from hating our neighbors, and obsessing over our politics, and treating every election as if it’s Armageddon, is going to Billy Graham or another Great Awakening. I think it’s going to be American Christians turning off cable news, logging off social media and opening up their Bible again.”
What does he want people to take away from the book?
“Jesus,” Alberta said. “And I’m not being a wise guy. I wrote the book to not just expose what is wrong and false, but to illuminate what is true and what is right. There’s a lot wrong in the church, but there’s nothing wrong with Jesus.”