Aaron Renn has written a helpful review of a book I recently read. The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory by Tim Alberta is a supposedly conservative, evangelical Christian journalist’s assessment of the current unhealthy state of the “tribe,” so to speak, out of which his faith was formed as the son of a conservative Presbyterian minister. I won’t argue that, particularly over the last decade, evangelical Christians have forged some rather questionable alliances with some less than virtuous politicians and celebrities; and that some of their own most visible spokesmen have failed to exhibit the character and decency becoming of Christian leaders.
In his review (which he summarizes in a shorter article here), Renn acknowledges the validity of a portion of Alberta’s argument. While it would be easy to dismiss the whole project as the rantings of a disgruntled “exvangelical” courting favor with the secular world, evangelicals would do well to take a good portion of his critique seriously.
The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory relates numerous stories of pro-Trump evangelicals behaving badly. Alberta investigates Liberty University and its former president Jerry Falwell, Jr., who operated the school like a dictatorship while engaging in dubious personal behavior. He attends an event put on by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, where speakers include Trump spiritual advisor and prosperity gospel preacher Paula White—viewed by many evangelicals as a heretic—and another person who promotes the QAnon conspiracy theory. Alberta visits the American Restoration Tour, a hybrid revival and GOP pep rally designed to convince people that “We’re losing the country.” He covers pastor Bill Bolin at FloodGate Church in Brighton, Michigan, who regularly devotes 15-minute segments of the church service to political rants about COVID-19 and other topics. And he attends the church of pastor Greg Locke, who has called Joe Biden a “sex-trafficking, demon-possessed mongrel” among other colorful phrases.
An imperfect messenger, Renn notes, does not diminish the importance of several uncomfortable truths about their movement that many evangelicals are reluctant to acknowledge.
But whatever the defects in the messenger or the message, evangelicals would do well to heed some of Alberta’s criticisms. There are serious and widespread flaws in American evangelicalism. It is dominated by charismatic figures who rule over their organizations like feudal lords. Many are hucksters who exploit their flock or have acquired unseemly levels of wealth for people in their positions. Some promote conspiracy theories. There are more people involved in the prosperity gospel movement and other dodgy corners of Pentecostalism than many evangelicals would like to admit.
Conversely, Renn takes Alberta to task, and rightly so, for his one-sided praise for some of the most insufferable internal critics of evangelicalism who have exploited a disdain for Donald Trump as a convenient excuse to trash and smear the entire movement.
In contrast, his portraits of anti-Trump evangelicals like David French and Russell Moore, and others he deems “good guys,” are one-dimensional hagiography. He writes of [now former] SBC president Bart Barber, for example, that “[i]t was hard to imagine a more winsome human being.” Of Barber’s predecessor as SBC president, Ed Litton, Alberta tells us that Litton did not run for the customary second term because of “the pressures he felt navigating this denominational civil war.” He fails to mention that Litton was also embroiled in a major plagiarism scandal involving over 100 sermons allegedly copied from others without attribution.
Summarizing his review, Renn concludes:
The net result is that while Alberta identifies some real problems, his book is not written in a way to actually promote a resolution of them, but rather in one that flatters the sensibilities of hostile secular readers.
Beyond the valid points raised in Renn’s review, my biggest problem with Tim Alberta is that he would probably look at the people of my particular tradition, confessional Anglicanism, and say we are part of the problem he is critiquing. After all, we hold traditional, biblical views on life, sex, marriage, and family. We must share, Alberta might conclude, the same ethos as these “evangelicals” whom he claims to love but loves to criticize.
I know a lot of people who fit the description of Alberta’s bogeymen; many of whom I count as friends and some of whom I have gladly worked alongside in promoting various causes and doing various forms of outreach. We share a lot of beliefs in common. But there are also areas of disagreement—none more pronounced, I daresay, than what we believe about the church.
In my mind, “evangelical” is a term deeply rooted in our Reformation heritage. It describes and sets apart a traditional Protestant Christian over against the excesses of Roman Catholicism and, in more recent years, the apostasy of modernism that has infected, and pretty much destroyed, the mainline church.
In American political lingo, “evangelical” means something vastly different. It refers to a hodgepodge of right-leaning Christian and Christian-adjacent persons with whom we, as confessional Anglicans, may share some common beliefs but who have a markedly different understanding of the church. In fact, the term is lately being applied even to people who no longer attend church.
An inadequate doctrine of the church (so inadequate for some, apparently, that they no longer even consider it necessary) inevitably leads to an inadequate faith; and if Alberta does have a valid point, it is that those whom he calls “evangelicals” are often motivated more by fear than by faith.
The idea that the church could “lose” was certainly not anywhere in the minds of first century Christians who endured arrest, torture, and even martyrdom. Theirs was a faith and an assurance born of the certainty that they were on the side of the ultimate Winner.
“Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah!” Jesus says to the Apostle who first confessed him to be the Christ. “For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
Contra John MacArthur, the Church of Jesus Christ is not a losing proposition. We so often misread the above cited passage, as though it has the church constantly on the defensive but somehow managing heroically to fend off the onslaught of “the gates of hell.” But Jesus is not talking here about the church defending herself against attack. He’s talking about the church being constantly on the offensive—trampling the gates of hell, breaking down all the barriers that sin has erected, always marching, always advancing, always conquering.
Persecution, slander, marginalization, threats of arrest and death—these are the acts of the people on defense. These are the death throes of a defeated enemy. These are the last gasp of the gates of hell—and they will not prevail.
We have our Lord’s word on it.
When we look at it that way, our motivation to spread the Gospel, to stand for what is right and good and virtuous in the face of all that is wrong and wicked and decadent, to shine the light in a world of darkness, to defend the weak, to feed the hungry, to exalt the Lordship of Jesus Christ over every inch of community, culture, and creation will always be motivated not out of fear, but out of a confident, abiding, and unshakable faith.
“. . . and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”