Book Review: The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory

Against the Internet

Why have evangelicals gone insane?

In 2005, you occasionally had to hand it to evangelicals. True, they were against abortion, gay marriage, and comprehensive sex education, and wanted to teach intelligent design in the schools. But you couldn’t argue with the charitable work they did, both in the United States and overseas. An evangelical president, George W. Bush, created one of the most cost-effective foreign aid programs the United States has ever had. PEPFAR was an uncontroversial, bipartisan program to a substantial degree because of evangelicals’ support. And that’s not even mentioning our other evangelical president, Jimmy Carter, who after his presidency almost completely eradicated the guinea worm.

And—you might not like evangelicals’ principles. You might think that someone can be an effective president and a terrible person. But you couldn’t argue that they had them. Evangelicals wouldn’t vote for a man who cheated on his wife with an intern—much less a sexual predator, a fraudster, a corrupt man who used his position as president to enrich himself and his cronies, or someone convicted of multiple felonies because he used campaign donations to pay hush money because he’d had an adulterous affair with a porn star.

Yeah. Well. About that.

In search of an answer to this question, I read The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Because the author, Tim Alberta, is a Christian, I hoped that The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory would offer an empathetic explanation of evangelical behavior, instead of just saying “lol they suck because they’re misogynist homophobies who believe in sky daddy, lmao, here’s a list of the Bible’s worst 362 contradictions (#159 will SHOCK you).” And my expectations were fulfilled.

Unfortunately, because Tim Alberta is a Christian, his diagnosis of the problem is insufficient Jesus, and his solution is that everyone should repent and submit to the Lord. Still, I persisted.

Alberta catalogues, in painstaking and rather unnecessary detail, all the insane shit run-of-the-mill evangelicals believe. QAnon, of course. But also “Francis Collins is not an evangelical but rather a Satanist who deliberately made vaccines out of aborted babies to poison everyone.” “The government is about to ban owning Bibles.” “Starbucks puts baby parts in its coffee.” “Endometriosis is caused by having dream sex with demons.”

To be clear, the insane evangelicals aren’t the majority of evangelicals. David French and Russell Moore estimate that this sort of conspiracy theorist represents about 15-20% of church attendees. Many more listen to Fox News as their primary news source, but don't go all the way to Biden Has Been Replaced By A Body Double, The Pedophile Elites Are Sex-Trafficking Children. As ever, a large number of evangelicals don’t think much about politics; a similarly large number vote reluctantly for Donald Trump because they believe the Democratic candidate supports murdering the unborn.

But if a fifth of evangelicals—and a higher percentage of the most politically involved evangelicals—are batshit conspiracy theorists, that changes the entire movement. PEPFAR and other global health programs become less important, replaced with Covid denialism and #StopTheSteal. Evangelicals are no longer reliable votes in favor of cost-effective foreign aid; instead, they're reliable votes against vaccines.

The problem goes back to Jerry Falwell’s Faustian bargain.

Before the 1970s, evangelical Christians typically believed they were separate from the world and didn’t care about politics, only about God. In the 1970s, preachers began to attract an older, conservative audience by preaching about how America was going to fall—mostly because of the schools, which had replaced prayer with sex ed and evolution. But even in the 1970s, many evangelicals weren't registered to vote and those that were often stayed home.

Falwell was a megachurch pastor and one of the first televangelists. He, ironically, seemed to have little religious sentiment; he was drawn to preaching because he was an extrovert and a born salesman. Soon, pastoring a church wasn’t enough for him. He hungered for power. Influenced by philosopher Francis Schaeffer, Falwell decided to ally with people with different religious beliefs but similar political goals. Indeed, Falwell’s first step into politics was trying to destroy Jimmy Carter, a fellow born-again Christian.

Much of their disdain for Carter and his Democratic Party owed to essential partisan disagreements: taxation, spending, regulation, foreign policy, labor disputes, and the like. Yet these matters were of no obvious moral urgency. And Falwell’s crew couldn’t build a viable public-facing effort—in the twilight of the 1970s—around some of their pet causes, such as fighting the Equal Rights Amendment and supporting religious schools that discriminated against Blacks. They needed an issue set that would satisfy the lowest common denominator of their socially conservative constituency. And so Falwell would launch the Moral Majority with a focus on pornography, homosexuality, drug use, rising divorce rates, secularism in public schools, and, above all, abortion.

Falwell's grassroots organizing convinced one in four evangelical Carter voters to vote for Reagan. Republican party politics shifted towards catering to religious conservatives.

This didn’t end well for Falwell, who lost many of his viewers and parishioners in the transition—they wanted more Jesus and less politics. He disbanded the Moral Majority in 1989 to focus on preaching, but it was too late. The last twenty years of his life were spent neither as a successful preacher nor as a powerful political operative. He spent his time ranting that Tinky Winky from Teletubbies was gay, blaming 9/11 on God's punishment for gays and the ACLU, and calling Ellen Degeneres Ellen Degenerate.

But he had unleashed a monster:

“I would go to these fundraising meetings. They would start in prayer and end in manipulation,” Thomas [a former fundraiser] recalled. “We had this one fundraiser who was working both sides of the street, like a cheap hooker. His wife was a member of NOW”—the National Organization for Women, a feminist pro-choice group—“and he was raising money for her while also raising money for Falwell. He’d hit his goals, we’d go off to the bar and have a drink, and he would celebrate the stupidity of these people giving to him.”

Almost forty years later, Thomas still felt ashamed. This practice of preying on unwitting believers was central to the business model of the Moral Majority and its successor groups.

“You get these letters: ‘Dear Patriot, We’re near collapse. We’re about to be taken over by the secular humanists, the evil pro-abortionists, the transgender advocates, blah, blah, blah,’” Thomas said. “They’re always the same. ‘If you donate, we’ll do a double-matched gift!’”

Little has changed. There were emails in my inbox at that very moment—from Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, from Chad Connelly’s Faith Wins—that deployed similar language.

“There’s always a threat. Look at Tucker Carlson every single night: ‘They’re out to get you.’ And it works,” Thomas said. “One time, I actually asked one of our fundraisers, ‘Why don’t you ever send out a positive letter about what you’re doing with people’s donations?’ And he looked at me with this cynical look. He said, ‘You can’t raise money on a positive. If the goal is bringing in money, you have to scare them.’”

Little by little, Thomas told me, the limits were pushed. The successes of the Moral Majority became self-justifying: The money raised by dubious methods was evidence of God’s blessing on the project, thereby sanctioning ever-more-dubious methods to raise ever more money…

"When you ask the average person, what do you think it means to be a Christian? They’ll say, pro-Trump, Republican, right-wing, anti-abortion, don’t like gays. They’ll go down the list,” Thomas told me. “Well, why would they say that? Because that’s what we’re modeling before the world. Those are our public priorities—not these other things, which get so little attention from man but all the attention from God.”

You can fundraise off the transgender Satanist abortionists grooming your children with drag queens and porn in schools. You can’t fundraise off guinea worm eradication or PEPFAR. So, over time, evangelicalism becomes less and less about helping the poor, protecting the least of these, or even converting people to follow Jesus. It becomes an arm of the Republican party.

But evangelical leadership had called up that which they could not put down.

Alberta interviewed Chad Connelly, who runs an organization called Faith Wins that registers evangelicals to vote. Alberta tried, again and again, to make Connelly believe that his followers are conspiracy theorists. Again and again, Connelly demurred. They were outliers. Alberta was selecting a handful of nutjobs and missing all the faithful Christians who were fully connected to reality. You can find someone who believes anything.

Connelly simply refused to believe what was obvious to anyone taking a walk around his events and eavesdropping on conversations—these people weren’t extremists. They were his base.

As Upton Sinclair said, it’s hard to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it.

Outsiders often assume that evangelical leadership is brainwashing their followers into believing crazy shit. But, in reality, the crazy is coming from the bottom up. Today, when evangelical leaders spout conspiracies or call Trump the next King David, they’re responding to organic demand from their own followers. Often, they’re making compromises between appeasing the evangelical masses and what they know to be true:

When it comes to political extremism infiltrating churches, Moore acknowledged that sometimes the pastor is responsible. (“Crazy as a church growth strategy,” he mused.) But he insists this isn’t typical. In most cases, Moore said, the tension is coming from the bottom up. Members complain about a sermon or a social media post from the church account; angry emails to the leadership prompt an emergency meeting among elders and the pastor; the complaint goes ignored, which enrages the aggrieved members, or it earns an apology, emboldening those members while irritating a different clique. A church can only endure one or two such cycles before the scent of insurgency becomes overpowering.

What struck me, reading The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, was how many of the evangelical leaders Alberta interviewed saw themselves as helpless victims of circumstance. Many of them, to be sure, believe in certain conspiracies or apologize for some of Trump’s behavior. But they don’t think Trump is the God-Emperor and they don’t think the Biden administration wanted to ban Bibles. It’s just… if they say that, they’ll lose their jobs; better to stay quiet. If they angrily preach about politics, they’ll build an audience and bring people to Christ; surely that’s what really matters? It’s not great that Trump voters are conspiracy theorists, but at least they’ll vote for a Republican and overturn Roe.

Even the conspiracy theorists seemed kind of freaked out. Alberta interviewed Greg Locke, a pastor who thinks that Oprah Winfrey is a pedophile and that Hunter Biden should be executed by a firing squad. And he’s worried. Locke is opposed to QAnon and Christian nationalism, but he knows that if he preaches against them he’ll lose followers. It bothers him that his parishioners carry guns to church. And he hates how he’s rewarded for anger and hatred, instead of love and faith.

[Locke] discovered that there was a market for being irrational. He came to appreciate that wrath is a business model, that crazy is a church growth strategy, that hating enemies is far more powerful—at least in the immediate sense—than loving them.

But Falwell got his start in the 1970s. Fundraisers have been sending out scary letters for forty years. George W. Bush’s presidency was well after evangelicals became politicized. Why now?

In part, Alberta blames Covid. Many evangelicals, even quite politicized ones, went to apolitical churches that stuck to God and helping the poor. But during the Covid pandemic, no church could be apolitical: either they closed or they stayed open, and either was a political statement. Evangelicals who wanted to attend church in person went to whatever church stayed open—and these churches were disproportionately likely to preach that the essence of Christianity is hating gays and loving Trump. But Covid only accelerated trends that were already happening.

A bigger factor is that the evangelicals have lost.

The past fifty years of evangelical political involvement have been a list of nothing but failures.¹ Though ten to forty percent of Americans are young-earth Creationists, neither Creationism nor intelligent design are taught in schools and there is no serious effort to cause them to be. Pornography, once relatively tame and limited to red-light districts and the top shelf of bookstores, is available, in all its polymorphous perversity, to anyone, at the press of a button. Gay people can get married, and homosexuality is widely considered a value-neutral sexual preference.

If you’ve lost this thoroughly, you look for an explanation. People don’t want to believe “I lost because my viewpoints are unpopular and lost in the free marketplace of ideas”; it’s the Moral Majority, not the Moral Embattled And Shrinking Minority. So you reach for conspiracy theories. It’s the secularists, the Satanists, the liberal elites. They’re raping children. They’re stealing elections. And, sure, they’ve put the baby parts in Starbucks drinks.

From my perspective, it’s obviously absurd that Starbucks would use baby corpses as flavoring. From the perspective of an evangelical, watching the world get draped in rainbows every June, it seems natural. The world has utterly rejected morality. Why would you assume cannibalism is where they’d draw the line?

If you lose this hard, you start wondering how much you’re going to keep losing. Once it was unthinkable that gay people would, for the first time in human history, be able to get married. Once it was unthinkable that, if gay people married, they could force evangelical Christians to bake cakes for their gay weddings. Now it’s unthinkable that the government would ban Bibles, that Christians would be rounded up and put into camps, that the government would engineer a “plandemic” to close the churches and separate people from God. Is this where the liberals would stop? Are you sure?

And—if you lose, you’re willing to throw the dice and take a chance. George W. Bush was, except for the torture, a deeply ethical man: devout, hardworking, faithful to his wife, concerned for the poor and vulnerable in America and abroad. He also lost.

Trump is corrupt, crude, a divorcee, an adulterer, a sexual predator, a felon, wildly ignorant of the Bible, and completely uninterested in faith—and he won. Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which said there was no right to an abortion, is the one unambiguous culture-war victory that evangelicals have had in the past twenty years. Maybe a good Christian man isn’t what they needed. Maybe they needed a warrior.

“I’m tired of nice guys letting us down. The Bushes were nice. Mitt Romney was nice. Where did that get us?” said Jerry Byrd, a churchgoing attorney who’d driven from the Detroit suburbs to hear Pence speak. “Trump is the only one who stood up for us. The Democrats are ruining this country, and being a good Christian isn’t going to stop them. Honestly, I don’t want someone ‘on decaf.’ We need the real thing.”

“I don’t want some meek and mild leader or somebody who’s going to turn the other cheek,” [Trump-supporting pastor] Jeffress told the host. “I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.”

“Where’s Russell Moore and all the other breastfeeding Christians as that happens—as the U.S. government cracks down on Christianity?” Carlson asked on his Fox News show in March 2023, showcasing that familiar snarl while slinging an adjective nobody quite understood.

An explanation that Alberta overlooks, but which I think is very important, is the Internet. In the 1990s, evangelicals mostly got their information from evangelical leadership: authors, televangelists, political advocacy groups, and most of all their own pastors. These sources could be completely unhinged, but most of the time were limited by their own sense of good taste and decorum. Political advocacy groups might be cynical bastards whipping up hysteria for short-term political and financial gain, but they wouldn’t say something as obviously false as “Starbucks is putting baby parts in its coffee.” They have shame.

Alberta interviews David French, who says that present-day evangelical media consumption isn't actually very different from past evangelical media consumption. A lot of people were, historically, spending five hours a day listening to televangelists or conspiracy theorist preachers who talked a lot about the Rapture. The only difference, French says, is that these days the preachers talk about politics—which is far more destructive to the church and the body politic.

I’d add that when we talk about evangelical conspiracy theorists we need to remember the Satanic Panic. This isn’t new!

But I think this line of reasoning underestimates how different the Internet is. The Satanic Panic had an extraordinary level of mainstream acceptance in a way that QAnon doesn’t. There are only so many televangelists and Rapture preachers, only so many ways they can try out different messages and see which ones garner the most attention.

But the Internet has no gatekeepers. Anyone can type any series of words, no matter how contradicted by facts and basic logic, and hit “post.” The dumbest and most fearful evangelicals can talk directly to each other and make each other dumber and more fearful. You can’t fundraise off PEPFAR; you definitely can’t go viral off it. Evangelicals can choose not just from a handful of televangelists but from every pastor who livestreams their preaching—and what sells is anger, hatred, fear, and lies.

I’m not sure where we go from here. Unlike Tim Alberta, I don’t have faith in the salvific force of the Holy Spirit, working itself out in believers’ lives. I wish Russell Moore and David French the best of luck in taking evangelicalism back, but forgive me if I say I’m not optimistic. Part of me hopes that Trump is a singularly bad person; once he dies of a heart attack or something, the Republicans will return to normal. But I fear that Trump is only the most obvious sign of a rot eating the Republican Party from within.

I’m an atheist, but I grew up among Christians and attended a Catholic high school. Many of my friends and teachers were socially conservative and pro-life and supported Republican presidential candidates. But they were also admirable people, who opposed racism and gave to the poor and supported global health programs. It is good for our politics if there is a place for them in Christianity and in the Republican Party. I worry that, increasingly, there is not.

1. While PEPFAR is successful, as I said, it didn’t make it into the fundraising letters.