The crisis facing American evangelicalism
Tim Alberta on “The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory”
Good morning and happy Friday! Welcome to the second edition of the Wake Up To Politics Book Club. The first installment, featuring “Grand Delusion” by Steven Simon, was available to all subscribers. As I said then, the feature will be a special perk for paid subscribers going forward.
I’m very excited to share the next edition, featuring my interview with Tim Alberta about his book, “The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.” It was a fascinating book and Tim is an exceptionally thoughtful writer, so I hope you all get as much out of the interview as I did.
If you upgrade to a paid subscription, you’ll receive access to all Book Club features: author interviews, book reviews, and hopefully live Zoom calls as well!
Since Donald Trump’s two attempted assassinations, an interesting suggestion has been percolating in Christian circles, and not for the first time: that Trump’s survival, and his broader political rise, were the result of divine intervention.
“It is obvious that God’s hand of protection was on him,” the evangelical leader Franklin Graham said on Fox News; others wrote that Trump’s quick turn of the head in Pennsylvania was evidence that the former president had been “chosen” by God to retake the White House.
It’s just the latest example of how many evangelical Christians have meshed together their religious and political beliefs in recent years, as they have gone from ardent Trump critics in 2016 to some of his most fervent supporters today. That alliance has been one of the most consequential in modern American politics — and also one of the least well-understand.
There are few better translators to fill in the gap than Tim Alberta, the author of “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.”
Alberta is unique as a journalist for a few reasons. For starters, he is an evangelical Christian himself; precise data is hard to find, but available evidence suggests that he is among a small minority in American media. (I struggle to remember the last book I read by a political journalist that thanks Jesus Christ in the acknowledgments, as Alberta does.) He is also the rare writer trusted on both sides of the aisle: in the last half-decade, soulful and searching investigations (and critiques) of Trumpism have made up a solid percentage of his output — and yet he continues to receive access to prominent Republicans, as seen in his recent profiles of Sen. Mike Lee and Trump’s campaign managers. (In his Politico days, his pieces on Nikki Haley and John Boehner are also ones that have stuck with me. Not to mention, a piece of his last year was widely credited with ending then-CNN CEO Chris Licht’s career.)
I was also a fan of Alberta’s 2019 book, “American Carnage,” one of the best explanations of how the GOP traveled from the party of Romney to the party of Trump. With his second book focusing on the evolution of American evangelicalism, I told him when we spoke earlier this year, it felt to me like he had told the same narrative twice, just in different contexts.