12/9/23: COVID, TRUMP, Q-ANON: Evangelical Extremism with Tim Alberta

really have a strong relationship with Jesus. And in my just professional journey working in politics over the last almost twenty years covering politics, I began to just since this just to feel a disillusionment with the ways in which the church was becoming ever more not just ever more political, but ever more sort of radicalized politically, and by the way, like we have seen that not just in the evangelical right wing church, we have seen that in the progressive

left wing church. This is my tradition, the white evangelical tradition is is you know what I was born out of in the church. My dad was an evangelical minister. My mom worked on the staff, So like I grew up physically literally in the church. It was my home, it was my community, and I think for many of us. It's always a little uncomfortable to talk about your tribe, to air the dirty laundry, to sort of, you know, feel like you are giving ammunition to those on the outside.

And so for a long time I didn't do that, and I just sort of kept quiet. And I think over the last six seven, eight years, and it's not just Trump. Trump looms large in all of this, of course, but there's a lot of things happening culturally and politically that just we're feeling. It just it seemed to me that the church was beginning to lose sight of its true purpose, it's true mission, it's true calling in the culture,

which is to evangelize. It is to take the gospel of Jesus Christ to all the nations, and it is to share that good news, and to do it without erecting barriers to entering along the way, in other words, sort of replacing the biblical standard for why do we come to church with sort of a different standard of well, hold on, who did you vote for? Did you get vaccinated? These other litmus tests that were suddenly keeping people from

coming into church and learning about Jesus. And so that's ultimately why I wrote the book.

an evangeline, right. And we've seen some social science on this over the decades, how this has sort of evolved starting back fifty years ago with the moral majority. We don't need to do the whole history of this, but basically that term in a cultural context has taken on the meaning of effectively conservative, white Republican rather than being a spiritual signifier, rather than speaking to any sort of

theological doctrine, it's really speaking to partisan political identification. And my argument in the book is that is profoundly damaging to the witness of Jesus Christ, who last I checked, was not a registered Republican or a registered Democrat for that matter. What we saw also during the Trump years, which was really interesting, and there's been some things written about this, some good social science research, we saw simultaneously a pretty good uptick in the number of Trump voters

who self identified to polsters as evangelical. But also at the same time we saw a pretty rapid downturn in the number of those same people who attended church everything. So in other words, you had people identifying as evangelicals while they were going to church less and less. So there's a cultural phenomenon here. I'm not necessarily arguing that we jettison the term evangelical. I have many friends and family who I love who are deeply attached to the term.

I understand why, but I also think we have to think critically those of us inside the church who care about that mission of the church as far as what that term means to the outside world.

it to me. They're like, look, the Southern Baptist Convention itself exists because of a political act tracing all the way back to the Civil War and splits over segregation and Jim Oh and American emangelism itself is separate from the way that it may be interpreted in Europe and really evolved, you know, through a split on abolitionism, and has always been tied directly to the American state, at the very least not in power, but trying to pressure it from the outside. So is it really all that

different in history? Like, what do you make of kind of what I'm saying.

There's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. I think what I'm trying to detail in the book is the point at which it crosses over from sort of a healthy engagement to an unhealthy engagement. And really not just in terms of sort of ones, you know, selling one's soul to Donald Trump or any of that sort of hyperbolic stuff.

I think there are examples of that, obviously, but I think we're also dealing with you know, when you begin to sort of pair conspiracy theories inside the church with the evangel with the evangelizing, I should say, of the

witness of Jesus Christ, that becomes very dangerous. So when you look at a lot of the polling over the last two years and you see that the folks who are most likely to believe that the election was stolen, the people who are most likely to believe in QAnon, the people who are most likely to buy into a couple of these different you know, you call them conspiracy theories, call them fringe beliefs, whatever you want to say. They are white evangelicals. Time and time and time again. We

see that. I've seen it in my own community. The problem with that, aside from just the epistemological crisis that we're living through here as far as information, the problem with that is that, in my view, and I just have to say this as clearly as I can, the death and resurrection of Jesus is not a conspiracy theory. And if you, as a Christian are and I know Christians like this, if you are simultaneously proselytizing for Jesus Christ and proselytizing for QAnon, you are sapping the Gospel

of its credibility fundamentally. So I do think that that is one of the big differences. You're absolutely right that in many ways, the modern American evangelical movement, dating back at least fifty or sixty years, has been in many ways political. I also think, interestingly, if you look at sort of the paragon of evangelicalism, Billy Graham, who of course prayed over every American president, had these deep relationships

with Nixon and others. Billy Graham laid in his life, gave this sort of contrition laden confessional where he talked about how in retrospect it was a great regret and how he really felt like he had undermined in some way the witness of Jesus Christ because of his political attachments. So I just think that the book, if nothing else, it's a call to Christians to be very careful and very discerning. It's not to not be engaged politically. It's

not to try to make your voice heard. That those things are fine, but an over realized sense of where your citizenship is. We are called as Christians to be citizens of a kingdom that is not of this world, as Jesus said. And if you become so attached and find all of your hope and your purpose and tie all of you your self determination to political activity in this world, you begin to lose sight of the next.

be unjustifiable. And I see this, you know, again, coming from a non believer perspective, as effectively a feature rather than a bug, of fervent religiosity. And I'll give you a non American you know example of this. You have these settlers right now, Jewish settlers in the West Bank who really believe they are like doing God's work when they are murdering Palestinians and kicking them off of their land.

So you know what's your reaction to that? That when you have this sort of you know, fundamentalist, fervent religiosity, this is the direction that it frequently tends to go in in terms of tribalism us versus them, and you know, quote unquote good people justifying things that should not really be justified.

throughout the centuries. This is nothing new, I mean, and we've seen it with Christianity, we've seen it with Islam,

We've seen it with other faith traditions. I think your question is absolutely appropriate, and part of the reason again that I'm writing the book is to try to warn about this that when religious identity properly realized and rooted in the specific to the Christian tradition, rooted in Jesus's teachings that you love your enemy and you pray for those who persecute you, and you turn the other cheek, there's something fundamentally so distinct and countercultural about the teachings

of Jesus. There is zero justification for violence found anywhere in the New Testament. I mean, the apostle Paul is locked up and being beaten, and he's singing hymns and talking about how he's praying to convert the guards who are abusing him. Peter, who is Jesus's right hand disciple.

He's writing his epistles from Rome, locked up under brutal Roman occupation in the first century, as Christians were treated terribly there, and he's telling them that your suffering brings you closer to Jesus, and you will be judged by how you treat those who are abusing you. So you can find a twisted religious justification for violence and for

identitarian conflict if you are looking for it. But what I'm trying to emphasize in the book is that if those of us who are truly followers of Jesus, we are called to something greater. And I share your concerns with any religion that is twisted and used to justify that sort of conflict. I really do.

at a Marriott. I was there, and it was a hard cell. And he had Huckabee, and he had Franklin Graham and others vouching for him, Jerry Folwell Junior. They really had to do the hard cell. So that was this transactional relationship. I think how it's evolved, and this

is really the psychological component of this is fascinating. I think many of these people, they are under no illusion about Trump's morality, that they don't think that he's become born again, that there's some supernatural transformation of the man.

I think for many of them, and this is kind of a thematic backbone of the book, they believe that America is on its last legs, that Judeo Christian America is on its last legs, that the secular culture is coming for them, and that if they don't do something about it, if they don't fight back, then they're going

to lose this country. And they look at Donald Trump, and in some sense, even though on paper he's the exact wrong match for them because of his personal lifestyle and all these things, he's also actually the perfect match for them because he's not a Christian, he's not bound by their norms, he doesn't have to play by their rules. Mike Huckabee and others have given voice to this where they've basically said, look, the barbarians are at the gates, and we need a barbarian to keep them at bay.

And I think that that is sort of the justification that a lot of these folks have reached, where they've said, listen, I'm horrified by the guy's behavior. I WinCE every time I hear him talk. But I'm so afraid of this country being overrun by people who are going to you know, persecure. Look at COVID nineteen. They shut down our churches. You know, the secularism is on the march. They're coming for us. And I think, let me be clear, I think that's

a very unhealthy approach for the Christian to take. We're told time and again throughout Scripture fear not. It's the most frequently cited command Old Testament news fear not. Like again, if you find your identity so wrapped up in America and in these sort of tribal identitarian movements, you do start to lose sight of where your calling ultimately is. And so that fear, while I understand it, I also just want to warn against it.

those barbarians? So if you think about some of these ascendant Christian nationalist movements that I document in the book, you don't have to have a polycy PhD to figure out when they say that we're going to reclaim America. We're going to restore America. Like who are they reclaiming it from? Right? Look, fifty or sixty years ago, this was a country that was ninety percent white, it was

ninety five percent Christian. Everybody went to church, you know, demographically, sociologically, it was a different place, right, And so I think a lot of folks are invested, deeply invested in this idea that they need to take back this sort of idealized Christian America. There are any number of problems with that, but I think just at its core demographically statistically, that America isn't coming back. We are secularizing, we are diversifying.

The person you mentioned is John Dixon. Yes, he's a professor at Wheaton College. He's Australian, and which gives him this fabulous perspective because Australia just in the last couple of years officially became statistically a post Christian nation. Christians are now a minority in Australia and we in the United States are tracking about ten to fifteen years behind Australia.

So he gives this wonderful talk at Wheaton, and I would invite people to try and find it online, where he says to his American Christian brethren, he says, you know,

greetings from the future, my friends. Let me tell you about when you lose this status in society, this majority status, when you lose the commanding heights of society, that it is a good thing for Christians, because if you look at Christianity dating back to Constantine, there's always been this kind of funny inverse relationship between the amount of social, cultural political power that Christians have in a society and

the health of Christianity in that society. In other words, when Christianity is at the margins, it tends to flourish because of the countercultural message. But when Christianity tries to dominate a culture through through government and through culture wars, then its witness really sort of dies on the vine.

And so when he talks about losing well, the idea here is your witness to the world is so much more effective when they see you filled with grace and forgiveness and love for your neighbor, rather than this fear that I was describing earlier, in this desire to dominate your neighbor because you feel like you're losing something.

any data yet about diminishing evangelical support. So there's been a theorized I've seen from some folks who are in the pro life community. We're like, we're going to withhold our vote against Trump. Do you think that will actually happen at scale? And what do they make of him politically disting himself from pro life movement.

Court justices hanging in the balance. Was a federal issue. It has now been defederalized. Effectively, it has thrown back

to the states. So the question for me, when I'm looking at evangelical support for Donald Trump isn't necessarily the raw percentages we've seen him, you know, according to which exit polling that you're looking at, he's typically winning between seventy five and eighty percent of white evangelicals, which, by the way, is consistent with Republican nominees dating back decades. Spectation is that he will do that again. But in terms of raw numbers, could you see some significant chunk?

And by significant chunk, I mean even like two or three percent, four or five percent, I mean that would be enough. Yeah, could you see some significant chunk of those single issue pro life voters decide? You know what, I can't make peace with voting for this man again. I also can't make peace with voting for Joe Biden because he's pro choice and because of other issues that they might disagree with the Democrats on. Could you see them stay home? Could you see them leave the top

of the ticket empty? Could you see them vote for a third party candidate? I think that that is a very real possibility, and I think that if you're in the Trump campaign right now, you should be deeply concerned about that. Yeah, Because I mean just if you just look at the raw numbers here, there's no way he wins without the same turnout, the same showing from those voters in sixteen and twenty. If there's any meaningful drop off, I don't see how the math works for him to win again.

poor and you know, the immigrant et cetera. Why isn't that the bleeding edge focus of this movement and instead instead it's all on like whatever the right wing cultural issue of the day is.

God's many people miss the application of that. He's talking to a man in the crowd, and he says, hold up that Denari, that the Roman coin. He says, whose image is on it? He says, Caesar's onto Caesar, give back because that coin has Caesar's image, but you have God's image on you. So give that coin back to Caesar, but give yourself to God, because you belong to God.

So I think those in the pro life community who are truly deeply invested in this as an ethical spiritual issue, I understand why they are so deeply invested in fighting there. I think your point about where is the concern for the orphan, for the widow, for the poor, and the destitude, I mean it is. I think the simplest answer to it, Krista, and the honest answer to it is that those issues

don't mobilize voters around election time. And I have spent years pressing people and I do, as you'll see in certain parts of the book, putting that question in really uncomfortable ways to some of these leaders, saying, listen, if in fact we're truly trying to be holistic Christians here, then why are we selectively choosing some of these biblical precepts instead of embracing the whole thing and letting the

chips fall where they may. Because again, my concern is that we diminish the credibility of the witness of Jesus Christ if we are just cherry picking certain things when there are other teachings clearly coming through scripture, Old Testament and New Testament where we are taught to care for the stranger and the sojournal and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Like if there is one command that Jesus is emphasizing again and again and again, love your neighbor

as yourself. And I don't see a lot of that in the political system. I don't see it on the right, I don't see it on the left. And for those of us who profess to follow Jesus, I think it's really important to step back and reevaluate the totality of the message rather than, as you're saying, just pick the parts of it that can help us win an election.