What's wrong with these people? -- part the nth

Tim Alberta's The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism is yet another stab at a question I can't seem to let go of -- what's wrong with the subset of U.S. Christians who make up the base of Donald Trump's ugly cult following?

I wrote about Diana Butler Bass' theological insights on the matter in a previous post and that holds up.

But Alberta's exploration of the conundrum is more intimate: Bass left evangelical Christianity a long time ago; Alberta comes from deep within the evangelical culture. His admired, recently deceased father was a successful megachurch builder and pastor. Yet the son can't square the sort of Christianity that has taken over American evangelicalism with his own faith, let along his observations as a journalist. So he uses his professional journalistic acumen and personal connections to draw a detailed, nuanced picture of a white American evangelical Christianity which has gone off the rails and rushed headlong into a Trumpist swamp.

As Alberta explained in The Atlantic (his employer) during his book launch:

I am a follower of Jesus Christ. I believe that God took on flesh in order to model servanthood and self-sacrifice; I believe he commanded us to love our neighbor, to turn the other cheek toward those who wish us harm, to show grace toward outsiders and let our light shine so they might glorify our heavenly Father.  

Not all professing Christians bother adhering to these biblical precepts, but many millions of American believers still do. It is incumbent upon them to stand up to this extremism in the Church.

Yet the responsibility is not theirs alone. No matter your personal belief system, the reality is, we have no viable path forward as a pluralistic society—none—without confronting the deterioration of the evangelical movement and repairing the relationship between Christians and the broader culture. This Christmas, I pray it might be so.

Alberta begins his book with interviews with Chris Winans, the religious leader who succeeded his father at what had been his childhood congregation. Winans tells of elders that young Tim had known all his life drifting away to aggressively MAGA churches. He sadly concludes that he knows what has become of his former members:

"Too many of them worship America. ...  At its root, we're talking about idolatry. America has become an idol to some of these people. ... If you believe that God is in covenant with with America, then you believe -- and I've heard lots of people say this explicitly -- that we're a new Israel. ... you view America as a covenant that has to be protected. You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance. At that point, you understand yourself as an American first and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of who we are called to be."

Alberta used his professional journalistic access to observe and describe evangelical churches across the country and also MAGA movement para-religious formations like Turning Point USA and Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition. Mostly he is appalled; repeatedly he is able to get evangelical pastors who know better to confess that they must stifle their convictions for fear of losing their people. 

In wide ranging interviews with ordinary churchgoers, he finds a dangerous underlying crevasse:

To be sure, plenty of those evangelicals had always cared more about power than principle ... But there was something deeper at work. What I'd personally encountered during those five years wasn't just an increased appetite for power. It was a sudden onset of dread. ...

There's a reason scripture warns us so often and so forcefully against fear. It's just as powerful as faith. But whereas faith keeps our eyes steadily fixed on the eternal, fear disrupts us, disorients us, drives us to prioritize the here and now. Faith is about preserving our place in the body of Christ; fear is about protecting our own flesh and blood ... No one should be surprised to see politicians and political hacks utilizing something so powerful in the name of winning an election. ...

Simply put, American evangelicals cannot let go. They cannot detach themselves from national identity or abandon the notion that fighting for America is fighting for God. Hence the creeping allure of "Christian nationalism."... Something was happening on the religious right, something more menacing and extreme than anything that preceded it. This was no longer about winning elections and preserving the culture. This was about destroying enemies and dominating the country by any means necessary.

Of course individuals are ultimately responsible for their own choices, but Alberta blames Donald Trump for exploiting the weaknesses of evangelical faith formation and practice to turn many churches into outposts of his political cult.

... his legacy in the sweep of western Christendom was already secure. More than any figure in American history, the forty-fifth president transformed evangelical from spiritual signifier into political punch line, exposing the selective morality and ethical inconsistency and rank hypocrisy that had for so long lurked in the subconscious of the movement. ... Speaking only for myself, Evangelical has become an impediment to evangelizing.

[Trump's] imprint on evangelicalism would endure. The forty-fifth president had foundationally altered the expectations and incentive structures within American Christendom. He had persuaded the churchgoing class that it was better to win with vice than to lose with virtue. He had blinded believers to the means and fixed their eyes on the ends. Most significantly, he had shown evangelicals that their movement need not be led by an evangelical.

... The forces of political identity and nationalist idolatry -- long latent, now fully unleashed in the form of Trumpism -- were destroying the evangelical church. I had seen it for myself, over the past six years, in every corner of the country. Pastors had walked away from the ministry. Congregations had been shuttered by infighting. Collective faith communities and individual relationships had been wrecked. ... [Trumpist political operatives like Charlie Kirk] did not concern themselves with the credibility of the Christian witness. Churches were not a bride to be loved, but a battlefield to be conquered.

This was nothing less than a war for the soul of American Christianity. And church by church, believer by believer, it appeared that Kirk and his allies were winning. This wasn't just because their side had more resources to deploy and fewer ethical guidelines to observe. It was because they were encountering no resistance. ...

This committed evangelical author tries to find hope for a more Biblical sort of Christian belief and practice. He finds push back on the margins; see also Russell Moore at Christianity Today and some sad pastors. He can see a small remnant:

Having spent Trump's presidency traveling the country, I knew how many sane, serious evangelicals were still out there. ...They are reasonable and realistic, making prudential political judgements that often reveal something quite limited about their core values, their commitments to others, their complex set of religious convictions. ... Their character deserves respect and the crackup of the evangelical Church is not their doing.

But this is not a hopeful book.

• • •

A couple of brief observations: what a world! -- there don't seem to be hardly any women in it, and that's not going to fly. 

And though Alberta is well aware his subject matter is white evangelicalism, he doesn't draw any implications from that. Yet despite limitations, this is a convincing, grimly fascinating picture of a subculture that deserves to dwindle.