[Tim Alberta is a fine guide to the world of conservative US
Christians, their dispiriting march to the right, and its ugly cost. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

TRUMP AND HIS EVANGELICAL BELIEVERS  
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Lloyd Green
December 2, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Tim Alberta is a fine guide to the world of conservative US
Christians, their dispiriting march to the right, and its ugly cost. _


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_The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an
Age of Extremism_
Tim Alberta
Harper
ISBN: 9780063226883

With The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in
an Age of Extremism, Tim Alberta of the Atlantic, author of a previous
blockbuster on Republican politics and, this year, the profile that
helped bring down Chris Licht at CNN, delivers another essential read.
It is substantive, news-filled and personal.

“I have endeavored to honor God with this book,” he writes. The
son of an evangelical Presbyterian minister who came to religion from
finance, Alberta lays bare his hurt over how the cross has grown ever
more synonymous with those who most fervently wave the Stars and
Stripes, on the right of the political spectrum.

“All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him
less than nothing, and vanity.” Isaiah’s teaching stands nearly
forgotten.

In his prologue, Alberta takes us back to summer 2019, and his
father’s funeral. The Rev Richard Alberta died suddenly, of a heart
attack
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Regardless, a church elder delivered to Alberta a one-page screed
expressing his disapproval of the author for not embracing Donald
Trump as God’s anointed. Yes, the same guy who made “Two
Corinthians
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a punchline. Time, place and decorum were discarded. Alberta’s sins
demanded rebuke.

“I was part of an evil plot, the man wrote, to undermine God’s
ordained leader of the United States. My criticisms of President Trump
were tantamount to treason – against both God and country – and I
should be ashamed of myself.”

Alberta passed the letter to his wife.

“What the hell is wrong with these people?” she cried.

As many congregants would see it, probably nothing. The unidentified
elder simply repeated sentiments that had taken root in evangelical
America since Trump’s election in 2016. The letter embodied a shift
that was decades in the making. Demographics were in flux. Barack
Obama had occupied the White House. The spirit of Protestant dissent
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which once fueled rebellion against the crown, had given way to
declaring Trump a divine emissary, a modern-day Cyrus. Or Caesar.

Funny how Obama never held such a place of honor. Then again, he was
Black and liberal and his personal beliefs could be discounted.
American evangelism had evolved into caffeinated American nationalism,
white identity close to the surface.

Franklin Graham, the late Billy Graham’s son, threatened Americans
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with God’s wrath if they had the temerity to criticize Trump. “The
Bible says it is appointed unto man once to die and then the
judgment,” he said, on Facebook.

Another famous scion, the now disgraced Jerry Falwell Jr, admonished
his flock to stop electing “nice guys”. Instead, he tweeted
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“the US needs street fighters like Donald Trump at every level of
government”. Resentment and grievance supplanted the message of
scripture and “What would Jesus do?”

Alberta remembers a preacher in Colorado who conflated a Republican
midterms victory with the triumph of Christ. “May this state be
turned red with the blood of Jesus, and politically,” Steve Holt
prayed, at a revival in spring last year.

“Lauren Boebert looked right at home,” Alberta recalls, of the
far-right controversialist and congresswoman from the same great
state. “Boebert wasn’t bothered by this pastor praying for
Jesus’s blood – His precious, sacrificial blood, shed for the
salvation of sinners – to win an election, because, well, she
wasn’t bothered by much after all.”

Months later, Boebert won re-election in a squeaker. Her recent
behaviour at a performance of the musical Beetlejuice in Denver –
singing, dancing, vaping, groping
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– simply confirmed what everyone had thought since she arrived on
the national scene. She is profoundly unsuitable for power.

Alberta grapples with the decline in evangelical affiliation and the
growth of evangelical unpopularity. He is mindful of religion’s lack
of purchase among younger Americans. Scandal, and the embrace of
conservatism and Trump, has extracted a heavy price. “Religious
nones” grow stronger at the polls. In 2020, more than one in five
voters identified that way. White evangelicals made up 28%.

Alberta also delivers a deep dive
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into events at Liberty University, the Virginia machine built by Jerry
Falwell Sr and Jr.

“Jerry Jr told me … the school was building a new $35m
facility,” Alberta writes. “There would even be a hologram of
Falwell Sr preaching.”

So much for the biblical injunction against worship of idols and
images.

“I actually own my father’s name and it happens to be my name
too,” Falwell Jr is quoted as saying. By that logic, the sordid
circumstances surrounding Falwell Jr’s marriage would be stains on
his father’s legacy. “I like to watch
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It doesn’t scream piety or faith.

Donald Trump talks with Jerry Falwell Jr in Davenport, Iowa, in 2016.
Photograph: Paul Sancya/AP

These days, Falwell Jr litigates against the school his father built.
Fallen from grace, he wants back in. Among his gripes is that present
management is “choosing piety over competence”, Alberta quotes him
as saying. “It’s exactly what my dad didn’t want to see
happen.”

Alberta also captures Trump’s true feelings for the evangelical
community, or at least those who sided with Ted Cruz in the 2016
primary. “So-called Christians.” “Real pieces of shit.” Seven
years on, it does not seem much has changed.

According to recent reports
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Trump has privately derided anti-abortion leaders as lacking
“leverage” to force his hand while tweaking them for having
nowhere else to go after the supreme court struck down Roe v Wade. He
has reportedly mocked as “disloyal” and “out of touch” those
evangelicals who cast their lot with Ron DeSantis. In Iowa, Trump
holds a 30-point lead. DeSantis falls, Nikki Haley nipping at his
(lifted
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heels. As November 2024 draws closer, a Trump sell-out of his
evangelical supporters looms large.

Alberta closes his book with a verse from II Corinthians, the Epistle
of Paul Trump couldn’t get right: “So we fix our eyes not on what
is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but
what is unseen is eternal.”

Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department
of Justice from 1990 to 1992

* White evangelical Christians
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* Donald Trump
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* Christian right
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