[MUSIC FADES IN]
Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from "Apple News."
I'm Shumita Basu.
Today, how the evangelical church became so political,
according to a pastor's son.
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[PENSIVE MUSIC]
Tim Alberta was raised in the church, and I mean that literally.
His father was an evangelical minister for nearly three decades
at Cornerstone Church outside of Detroit.
His mother led the women's ministry.
As a kid, Tim played games in the church's back rooms,
did his homework in the office wing,
brought high school dates to Bible study, and even worked as a church janitor
while in college.
When Tim's father died in 2019, Tim returned to the church
that he'd always called home to remember his dad and to mourn.
Tim Alberta: I had people at the visitation, the day before the funeral, confronting me.
In some cases, really confronting me in a hostile way,
questioning my faith, questioning if I was on the right team,
on the right side of things.
You know, while my dad was in a box about 100 feet away.
Basu, Narrating: Tim is a journalist and at the time he had come out with a book
that was getting a lot of attention.
It was about the impact of Donald Trump on the Republican Party.
That's where this criticism from the church community was coming from.
Tim was really unsettled by the comments he was getting
and it made him pretty angry.
Alberta: The next day, in fact, at his funeral,
I sort of let it rip a little bit in my eulogy.
I brought up these confrontations from the day before
and said, like, "What are we doing here?" You know, like, "Is this right?"
"Is this who we are as believers?" And then it got even worse.
Basu, Narrating: After he delivered that eulogy, he got a written note
from a longtime member of his father's congregation.
Alberta: That basically said I was a part of the deep state
and that I was undermining God's ordained leader of this nation,
Donald Trump, and that I should be ashamed of myself.
And it was just… long story short, really a clarifying moment.
Basu, Narrating: This experience at his father's funeral tipped the scales for Tim
to report out a book, out now,
called, "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory:
American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism."
The book lays out the state of the American evangelical church today,
how intertwined the church has become with politics, and the forces pushing it
to embrace what were once considered the political and cultural fringes.
I sat down with Tim several weeks ago, before I started my maternity leave.
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Alberta: There's a two-word phrase that you will hear when you hang around
evangelicals long enough, particularly political evangelicals,
and that two-word phrase is, "under siege."
Basu: Hmm.
Alberta: A belief that the barbarians are at the gates,
a belief that the culture,
the hostile, godless, wicked, secular culture
and the hostile, wicked, secular government is coming
for Christians,
that we are being persecuted and that that persecution will intensify.
Once you get to that place in believing that this thing that is so sacred,
and I don't mean your faith necessarily, I mean your faith
in the context of your national identity.
You are not just a Christian, you're an American Christian.
You are sort of almost in covenant with God in a special way
because he has so blessed this country.
That is the mindset of a lot of these folks.
And once you're there…
well, then you can pretty quickly get to a place where you're willing
to compromise some of your core values, your core beliefs,
in the interest of keeping those enemies at bay, warding off those threats,
and allowing the ends to justify the means.
You have this huge scramble of people winding up in these churches
that are now preaching this sort of blood and soil, Christian nationalism.
And you have pastors like Greg Locke in Tennessee, who a few years ago,
nobody knew who he was, and now he's got millions and millions
of followers and enormous influence in the evangelical world.
Those sorts of figures would have been considered fringe 10 years ago,
and now, in some sense, they're actually quite mainstream.
Basu: Hmm.
Alberta: And so, it's difficult, I think, for unbelievers,
for people outside of the church, to take any of that seriously,
to say, "Well, hold on a second here, you're telling me that white Christians
think they're persecuted?"
"You're telling me that people who have sort of controlled the commanding heights
of society since this country was founded,
that they feel like they're being marginalized
and almost martyred, and that is what justifies their
affiliation with Donald Trump and some of their political behaviors?"
And the answer is yes.
And understanding that fully, really, really appreciating what goes into that,
I think, is a big first step toward addressing the issue here.
[INTRIGUING MUSIC]
Basu, Narrating: Tim says this mixing of religion and politics was exacerbated
by the election of Donald Trump in 2020.
You can hear it in the way many evangelical voters talk
about the former president.
[START TWITTER ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Unidentified Reporter 1: So what is it about Trump that you love so much?
Unidentified Voter 1: Well, I like Trump as a person.
Unidentified Voter 2: He's a godly man.
Unidentified Voter 3: President Trump works for God.
Unidentified Voter 1: His Christian values that he stands for.
Unidentified Voter 4: He's working for God, for darn sure.
3: And God is all about America.
Unidentified Voter 5: Gotta support the king.
3: He's using President Trump as one of his tools.
5: King Jesus first and then King Trump.
[END TWITTER ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Basu, Narrating: Trump has said he identifies as a non-denominational Christian.
He's also said that no president has ever fought
for Christians as hard as he has.
And you'll often see church leaders at events for Trump,
like this pastor who spoke at a rally in Iowa last month.
[START TWITTER ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Unidentified Pastor 1: This election is part of a spiritual battle.
are demonic forces at play.
And when Donald Trump becomes the 47th president
of the United States, there will be retribution
against all those who have promoted evil in this country.
[CROWD CHEERING]
[END TWITTER ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Basu, Narrating: From Tim's perspective, so much of Trump's behavior
defies Christian texts and teachings.
Everything from misquoting the Bible, to bragging about assaulting women,
to mocking a reporter who has a disability.
In reporting his book, something that Tim wanted to
understand better was how millions of evangelicals
continue to support Trump despite his conduct.
And he found the reasons for supporting Trump fell along the spectrum.
On one end of that spectrum, you have…
Alberta: …self-identified evangelical Christians who are just nakedly hypocritical.
They almost own the charge, embrace the charge of being hypocrites.
They're jumping at the chance to go slumming with Donald Trump,
who behaves in ways that are completely antithetical
to the lifestyle that they themselves claim.
Basu, Narrating: At the other end of the spectrum are evangelicals
who feel much more conflicted,
but because of certain issues like abortion,
they couldn't bring themselves to vote for the Democratic nominee.
These were evangelicals who…
Alberta: …voted for Donald Trump in 2016
and prayed for forgiveness immediately thereafter
and felt completely nauseous in the voting booth
while they punched the ticket for him.
Basu, Narrating: Tim told me about a moment when he was talking to Ralph Reed,
a very prominent, long time Christian organizer.
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Alberta: He was talking about Trump's sort of reprehensible conduct and rhetoric,
he said, "Yeah, but in politics, that's just kind of the way it goes."
And I sort of stopped to unpack that in the book.
And I said, for a lot of Christians,
they've come to view politics the way that a suburban dad
comes to view a weekend in Las Vegas.
Like it's this self-contained escape from their life where they can go
and behave in ways that they would never behave anywhere else,
and that when it's done, it's done, and then they can go back
to being a Christian in their everyday life.
But the problem, of course, is that what happens in Vegas doesn't stay in Vegas.
And in this case, for the Christians
who decide that politics is this sort of special carve-out in their lives
where all of the teachings from the Sermon on the Mount
and all of the Christian ethics and virtues
that they hold dear in every other facet of their life,
that they're suddenly dispensable when it comes to electoral politics.
And when they behave that way,
it so badly diminishes the credibility of the gospel of Jesus.
And it opens these schisms, and that's what really the book is about,
is exploring this great schism between so many people who are,
in one sense, very much the same, but when it comes to this question
of politics and political engagement,
have just gone in entirely different directions.
Basu: Mmm.
Well, I think one pairing that we can look at
that really exemplifies that is Donald Trump
and former Vice President Mike Pence, right?
And just their relationships to the evangelical community today.
I mean, Mike Pence came in as V.P.
He is evangelical. He is a born-again Christian.
He had a very strong relationship with evangelical voters from the start.
And I think today you could say he has pretty much the inverse relationship
as compared to Donald Trump with this group of voters.
What does that flip tell you
about how the evangelical community has changed
over the past, you know, six, eight years?
Alberta: I'm so glad you asked that because there's probably no better relationship
that can be used to understand
these broader dynamics that I'm describing.
So I'll give you two examples.
First, when I was with Ralph Reed in that story
I was just describing a minute ago,
Donald Trump had been speaking at this Faith
and Freedom Coalition gathering.
This was in the summer of 2022,
and it was really the first time that Trump had ever publicly gone after
Mike Pence for his actions on January 6th.
And so this is about 18 months after they'd left office
and the violence at the Capitol.
And Donald Trump comes to Ralph Reed's conference
full of, you know, thousands of evangelical political activists.
These are people who had been Mike Pence's sort of comrades in arms
for decades.
I mean, he was really like the torch carrier for that movement.
And Trump gets up in front of these folks
and he starts ripping Mike Pence and basically calling him a coward,
calling him weak, mocking him, really a pretty cruel demonstration.
[START C-SPAN ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Former President Donald Trump: Mike was afraid of whatever he was afraid of.
But as you heard a year and a half ago, Mike Pence had absolutely no choice
but to be a human conveyor belt.
He was a human conveyor belt, even if the votes were fraudulent.
They said he had to send the votes, couldn't do anything.
[END C-SPAN ARCHIVAL CLIP]
Alberta: And the crowd went wild. They loved it.
I mean, they were eating it up. And it was so jarring to see that.
And I think the other example I would give,
which was not long after that, Mike Pence was getting ready
to launch his presidential campaign.
And he came out to Michigan and spoke at Hillsdale College,
which is a largely conservative Christian school in Michigan,
and I went there to see him speak.
And Pence was kind of laying the rhetorical groundwork for his campaign
and then he joked at one point and said, you know,
"I had a career in talk radio. They called me Rush Limbaugh on decaf."
[BASU CHUCKLES]
And I was talking with voters after that speech,
and one of them said to me, he said, you know, "The problem with Pence
is we don't need decaf."
"We need the real thing. Trump showed us that we need the real thing."
And there's something almost Shakespearean to this reality
that one of Trump's enduring legacies will have been
that he conditioned evangelical Christians to demand something
decidedly un-Christ-like from their political leaders.
In other words, here is Mike Pence who believes all of what they believe.
He sits in the pews with them.
He teaches their Sunday school classes.
He is a serious, devout believer,
and yet he can no longer pass muster because he's not willing
to be sort of antagonistic and provocative
and angry and loathsome in the way that Trump is.
And in some sense,
I know that, personally, I know just from my own reporting,
that Trump takes great satisfaction in that.
Trump believes that he has effectively transformed
the evangelical base of the Republican Party
and made it into almost his own image, which is, I think,
not an overstatement in many ways
and understanding just that core reality of the attitudinal
and behavioral makeover of this voting block is pretty essential
to trying to figure out where we go from here as a country.
Basu: Hmm, hmm.
Well, one thing I really appreciate about this book
and the way you approached it is that you clearly spent so much time traveling
to different places and sitting in church and talking to people over long periods
of time, talking to people and talking to congregants, talking to pastors.
And what seems to emerge in your reporting on this is people being drawn
to the caffeinated message.
Can you talk a little bit more about what you were hearing from people
who switched churches in the past few years,
went out in search of a pastor who was more politicized,
more politically charged in their messaging?
Alberta: I think specifically when historians look back at this period
to try and understand this great sorting, this great realignment happening
within American Christianity, I think they're probably going to zero in
on COVID-19.
And the reason I say that is because for, again, tens of millions
of evangelical Christians who had spent decades
marinating in this sort of, almost end times prophecy,
this apocalyptic rhetoric around the government is coming for Christians.
If you had spent decades marinating in that message,
the arrival of COVID-19, and more specifically, the orders
from a lot of blue state governors to close down houses of worship,
even if it was just for some very short period of time,
two, three, four weeks.
That was almost like a prophecy being fulfilled.
It was a sense of, okay, we've been warned about this day.
We knew this day was coming.
Basu: The threat has arrived.
Alberta: The threat has arrived. That's exactly right.
It's here. And now what do we do about it?
Right?
And so you had a really incredible schism,
in real time, sort of emerging between, again, a lot of people
in the same congregations who had worshipped together,
and loved one another, and been neighbors, and friends for decades,
who were suddenly at odds, almost overnight, over this question of,
"Am I being faithful to God by agreeing not to go to church
for a couple of weeks, by allowing my pastor
to shut the doors of our church for some period of time
and comply with the government's orders?"
The reason I hone in so much on COVID-19 and that specific division
is because it's hard to understand otherwise
how so many folks could pack up almost overnight
and walk away from congregations that they'd been a part of
for, in many cases, I mean, without exaggeration,
I met people who'd been in congregations for 40 years.
And they got up and walked away because their pastor decided to comply
with the government, decided to close down the church for a few Sundays,
and they felt that that was a betrayal, like a betrayal of scripture,
a betrayal of their duty as Christians, and almost like a white flag
of surrender to the secular left that was coming for them.
And where did those people go?
They went to churches that were almost, like, belligerent, militant,
in saying, no, we're going to stay open,
we're going to defy the government, and we're going to do so not simply
because we believe that we have a responsibility as Christians
to meet on Sunday morning,
but because we believe that this is the proxy war
for sort of good versus evil, that those satanic, secular leftists
are coming for us, and if we let them have our churches, then it's game over.
So we're defending our churches because we're defending our way of life,
and we're defending America,
and we're defending everything we believe in.
And again, they struggle at a certain point to draw a distinction
between, okay, what is my theology, and what is my sort of
cultural, political worldview, and am I compartmentalizing the two?
Basu: Mmm.
Another example of this that you give in the book
is actually what you observed happen in your own hometown in Michigan.
There was the church that you grew up in, that your father was a pastor at,
Cornerstone, and Floodgate, which is a church
that stayed open during COVID, unlike Cornerstone,
and saw just a rush of people during the pandemic years.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that story
and Floodgate specifically?
You spent quite a lot of time
talking with the pastor there and, I would say, also challenging him
on inaccurate statements that he was making.
Alberta: Yeah, so the floodgate story is really interesting because this church
had, prior to COVID, typically around 100 people worshiping on a Sunday,
they were a pretty small, little roadside church.
And fast forward to a few months into COVID, and suddenly they had
about 1,500 every Sunday.
So they'd grown, you know, more than tenfold in their attendance
and in their giving, I might add.
The pastor told me at one point that their giving,
their financial offerings in the pews on Sundays had increased,
I think he told me, six-fold.
And so, of course, this church and this pastor, who not only kept
the church open, but basically turned his Sunday morning worship services
into, like, elaborate Fox News segments, just conspiratorial,
hateful, venomous rhetoric from the pulpit.
In fact, at one point, he delivered a Nazi salute
to Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan,
and then bragged about it and laughed about it.
And the scary thing about what was happening there
at Floodgate, in my hometown,
was that I saw people defecting from my home church,
people who'd been there for many, many, many years,
people who I thought to be pretty serious Christians,
and they were leaving Cornerstone because the church had closed during COVID
and they were coming to Floodgate.
And the story of Floodgate, I will just say,
it is the story of churches all over the country.
This is not an isolated incident. It has happened everywhere.
As David French jokes with me in the book, David French,
who is a conservative evangelical Christian himself,
and he is an opinion writer for "The New York Times" editorial page,
David said to me at one point, he said, "Look, crazy is now
a church growth strategy."
And he was exactly right.
Basu: Mm. Well, given what you're identifying here about demand, what people want
to be hearing in their church environment, what does this mean
for the political future of the evangelical church?
Are we just going to keep marching toward a more politics-based identity
for religious groups like evangelicals?
Alberta: My fear is that in the short term, yes, we will,
because the political environment we are in now is so hot
and so toxic, and all of the incentive systems sort of built in
around us with social media and with cable news
with the algorithms sort of set up the way they are,
even those Christians I've met who have been making
a really concerted effort to sort of extract themselves
from the political hothouse have told me that, like, inevitably,
they just keep getting sucked back in.
Like, it's really, really hard to stay out of it.
So it's just hard to imagine that this moment we're in
is going to fade anytime soon.
On the other hand, I would be remiss if I didn't say this.
The great source of optimism I have, besides, you know, as a Christian,
I have to be optimistic because I believe that God is sovereign over all of this,
and as my dad used to joke, he used to always say,
"God doesn't bite his fingernails," and I think that's true.
And, you know, Christians shouldn't either.
The other thing that gives me great optimism, though,
is that there is a real generational clash here, a real generational break.
As I've traveled and as I've met people in my generation
and in the generation behind us on college campuses,
what I've been really encouraged by is that the younger Christians,
including those who are personally very conservative,
that you could go up and down the list on a whole bunch of
sort of policy questions and political debates,
and they're very conservative.
They would lean Republican as a default on all of this stuff.
But they have no appetite for Trumpism.
They have no appetite for nationalism.
They have no appetite for any of this craziness
that has permeated the church in recent years.
And they are, like, they are really pushing back hard
against all of this.
They are organizing, and they are mobilizing,
and they are trying to reclaim their faith tradition
from their parents' generation. And that's a painful thing.
It's a hard thing. It's going to take time.
But that really has given me an incredible amount of optimism
about the long-term prognosis here.
Basu: Have you, I'm sure you have been, you probably can't help but think
what your dad would think about this book.
Alberta: Yeah, I do think about that a lot.
You know, it's funny,
I'm pretty sure I couldn't-- no, I'm not pretty sure, I'm totally sure
that I could not have written this book while he was still alive
because it just, it would have been too raw.
It would have probably been too contentious.
And I've heard his voice in my head at certain times when writing,
saying, "Hey, you know, be humble, show a little grace here,
show some humility," you know, "You don't have all the answers either."
And, you know, he's right, I don't.
I think there are things that I've written,
arguments that I've made, that he would take issue with, for sure.
The same as I did with him when he was alive,
and it was always loving and always respectful,
even when we really disagreed on things.
But I am also quite confident, knowing my dad as well as I did,
that he, above everything else, more than his country,
more than even his family, his sons, his wife, he loved Jesus.
And this book is meant to not just shine a light
in the darkness to expose what's wrong in Christianity,
but to illuminate what's right in Christianity, and that's Jesus.
And ultimately, I think all of the other disagreements should fall
by the wayside.
Basu: Mmm. How is your faith after writing this book?
Alberta: I really worried that my faith would suffer from writing this book,
and I prayed a lot and really worried a lot
early in this process that my faith would be hurt.
And, I mean, words just really can't articulate the comfort
and the reassurance I felt throughout this whole process,
and I have, in many ways, a far closer, far more intimate relationship
with Jesus today than I did a few years ago
when I set out on this project.
And I'm really… to say that I'm grateful for it would be an understatement,
but the short answer is my faith has never been better.
And I hope, if nothing else, that maybe that offers a word
of encouragement to people to say, listen,
stepping out and kind of blowing the whistle on your own tribe
can be tough, it can be painful,
but you have a shepherd looking after you, and you will ultimately be just fine
if you do so.
Basu: Mmm. In your epilogue, you end with a rather big question
which is, what is the purpose of the church?
And I'm wondering how you're thinking about that question at the end,
reflecting on all your reporting. What kind of answer have you arrived at?
Alberta: Well, I think it's almost easier to answer the question
of what is not the purpose of the church.
Not to be cute about it, but, you know, okay, the purpose of the church
is not to stage political rallies.
The purpose of the church is not to fight the culture wars.
The purpose of the church is not to serve as a staging ground
for some identitarian conflict with our perceived enemies.
The purpose of the church, ultimately, as I understand it,
is to take the most beautiful gift the world has ever received,
which is the gospel of Jesus Christ, a poor, vagrant preacher from the ghettos
of a Roman-occupied province who was executed by the state
for claiming that he had a kingdom that was not of this world,
and that if you followed him, you would have citizenship
in that kingdom as well.
And this man who took on flesh, who was fully God and fully man,
who came to be the mediator between humanity and God,
that if we take that message to the ends of the earth
as he instructed us to, then we might just be persecuted for it.
We might just be ostracized, marginalized. Who knows? We could even be hurt.
We could be killed. We could be rounded up and imprisoned.
That's happened throughout world history.
But if we are carrying out that mission of what the church is called to be
then we will be fulfilling our purpose as believers.
And so, that must be both our individual purpose,
and our collective purpose as the church.
We are called not to go and change the world.
We are called to be the world changed by Jesus already
and to go and shine that light so that others may see it
and that others might pursue him as well.
Basu: Mm. Tim, thank you so much for your time and thanks for your reporting on this.
Alberta: It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Basu, Narrating: You can find Tim Alberta's book, "The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory:
American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism" on Apple Books.
We'll include a link to it on our show notes page.
And if you're listening in the Apple News app,
we've teed up an excerpt from Tim's book to play for you next.
Keep listening.
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