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

Tim Alberta is a Christian. If you read his acknowledgments in the back of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, he makes that plain. He also mentions his pastor in the acknowledgments, so I looked up his church. Its statement of faith is pretty similar to most evangelical churches you will find.

I begin this review of his book with this fact because I am quite confident that many people saw this book come out and wondered if the author was even a Christian. Perhaps this is a bias of mine, but when I see a book that claims to make sweeping statements about American evangelicalism and appears to be critical, I assume that it is a hit job from someone on the outside who doesn’t understand anything about evangelicalism. Alberta, however, is a Christian, so it is important to note that he is not someone who is writing with a complete lack of understanding (although there were many questionable characterizations made throughout the book about evangelicals that I will delve into later). His father was a conservative evangelical pastor, so, again, I want to highlight that Alberta knows the language and culture as someone who was raised in it. In an interview that he gave to The Holy Post, he explains how he self-identified as an evangelical while he worked at Politico, calling it “his tribe.” As you read the book, you might find him not to be as theologically conservative as you might like, but it is important to know that Alberta is not a complete foreigner to the culture he is trying to study.

Nevertheless, I do have some strong critiques of this book and specifically its presentation of evangelicalism. My critiques of this book do not have to do with the fact that he is criticizing evangelicalism. Thematically, the book suffers from a consistent problem with many books in this genre. It fails to define the term evangelical adequately (a concern I also shared in my review of Jesus and John Wayne). Outside of a few brief paragraphs in the beginning, the definitional question of evangelicalism is left largely unaddressed. This lack of definition leads to a further identity crisis later in the book. Numerous times, to his credit, Alberta says that there are tons of good evangelicals out there. In the interview I referenced above from The Holy Post, he even suggests, in response to a question from interviewer Skye Jethani, that perhaps 95% of evangelicals are not the kind of outliers he is criticizing in his book. As I was reading this book, though, evangelicals are continually criticized as a group, but they are continually being defined by the 5% minority. It is hard to differentiate when he is talking about what would be “good evangelicals” and “bad evangelicals” from his perspective because he seems to want to have it both ways. It is almost like he is anticipating that people like me will claim that his characterization of evangelicals does not represent the majority, so he throws in a few qualifiers throughout while remaining focused on his thesis that these “bad evangelicals” are the true representatives of evangelicalism. However, it does not make sense to define everyone by a vast minority, and that problem runs throughout this book. Because the definition of evangelicalism is confounded, it causes unintended interpretive consequences.

Starting with his definition of evangelicalism, he does acknowledge its imperfections before he even provides it to the reader. He writes, “Yet a look at the broader Christian Church would not yield a satisfying explanation of the turmoil within its commanding faction of conservative white protestants. However imperfect the designation, for brevity’s sake, these are the evangelicals whom I set out to chronicle following my father’s death” (10). Shortly after, he rightfully points out the classic definition of evangelicalism from David Bebbington and his famous quadrilateral.

“In 1989, a British scholar named David Bebbington posited that evangelicals were distinct because of four principal characteristics: Biblicism (treating scripture as the essential word of God); Crucicentrism (stressing that Jesus’s death makes atonement for mankind possible); Conversionism (believing that sinners must be born again and continually transformed into Christlikeness); and Activism (sharing the gospel as an outward sign of that inward transformation). This framework—now commonly called the “Bebbington quadrilateral”—was widely embraced, including by the National Association of Evangelicals. But it also drew its share of criticisms. Efforts to formulate a more effective definition have failed time and again. To the present day there remains no real consensus around what it means to be an ‘evangelical’” (10-11).

From this point of lacking a true definition of what evangelicals are, in one very short paragraph, we are brought to the Moral Majority and to the ultimate conclusion of what Alberta claims evangelical means for the balance of his book. “’Evangelical’ soon became synonymous with ‘conservative Christian,’ and eventually with ‘white conservative Republican.’ This is the ecosystem in which I was raised: the son of a white conservative Republican pastor in a white conservative Republican church in a white conservative Republican town” (11). There is no further justification as to why we have gone from a place of no definition to a very definite definition in one paragraph.

Utilizing a politically driven, not to mention racial, central definition for evangelical sets this book up for a few problematic framings.

First, it automatically portrays evangelicals as people without central theological convictions. It implies that one could be an evangelical without believing in God if a white conservative Republican is synonymous with an evangelical. One evangelical could like low taxes, and another evangelical could believe that Jesus died on the cross for his sins. Utilizing this imprecise framework, they are both legitimately evangelicals, but I think it is obvious that they are different. By this definition, you could even have atheist evangelicals, and that is a contradiction in terms. Therefore, this imprecision is the first problem with this definition.

Secondly, his definition of evangelical is a bigger problem because Alberta even recognizes that it is a problem and still decides to base his work around this contention. He mentions many times that many of the figures he portrays in this book are not representative of all evangelicals. Here is a list of several examples throughout the book. I am not going to delve into the full context of each quote for the sake of brevity. Still, I hope the number of examples will help prove my point that Alberta recognizes that the evangelicals criticized throughout the book do not represent the majority of evangelicals. I have also tried to share larger quotes so it is not as if I am just pulling phrases out of sentences that appear problematic:

“This extremism represented nowhere near a majority of the church; the cabal numbered no more than twenty, a fraction of the hundreds of people who attended services every week” (42).

“’Here’s the thing. I always figured it was five percent that was crazy—no more than that,’ Torres said. ‘We have a lot of strong Christians here. Some of them like Trump; some of them might be worked up about CRT or whatever else. But they would never do that crazy stuff’” (43).

“Being alarmed about the state of the country—feeling ‘under siege’ by a secular government and a hostile culture, as Jeffress repeatedly phrased it—does not make someone an extremist. Broadly speaking, of course, this is true. But a few zealots can define an entire movement—and given the sudden scale of this persecution sentiment inside the evangelical Church, it was only a matter of time” (120).

“This was the type of anecdote that, if relayed to Connelly, would be met with eye-rolling. He would dismiss Wright as a crackpot who might be found on the periphery of any group. There would be some truth to this; people like Wright did not constitute a majority of American evangelicalism. Yet they were everywhere I went. Whether it was a big urban church or a small rural church, a mainstream event with respected headliners or a sideshow circus featuring professional grifters, I kept running into people like Jim Wright” (174).

“’The great fault in the evangelical movement today, is that we’re disobedient to the commands of the one we claim to follow. What were those commands? Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Care for widows and orphans. Visit those in prison. Seek first the kingdom of God.’ There are millions of Christians in America who follow these commands with rigor. But there are millions more who do not—or who, at best, follow them selectively and inconsistently” (215).

“Whereas I was suggesting that the silent majority needed to speak up, Volf wasn’t sure they were a majority anymore at all” (240).

“None of this justified the sweeping censure of tens of millions of people. Having spent Trump’s presidency traveling the country, meeting religious voters in small towns and big cities alike, I knew how many serious, sane evangelicals were still out there. These people have no place in the left-wing fever dreams that inform cable news punditry and op-ed pages. They are reasonable and realistic, making prudential political judgments that often reflect something quite limited about their core values, their commitment to others, their complex set of religious convictions. They are dismayed by the hysteria and hyperbole that has captured their movement and want nothing more than to reclaim it. Their character deserves respect and the crackup of the evangelical Church is not their doing” (302-303).

“We all agreed that these ideological die-hards whom French was describing were not a majority of the evangelical movement. There is a difference between the people who prefer the 6 p.m. hour of programming at Fox News to those of its cable rivals, and the people who marinate in right-wing misinformation all day long. That latter group, everyone estimated, was still no more than 15 or 20 percent of most church congregations they knew of. The problem is, as Moore pointed out, ‘That vocal minority will always push around a timid majority. The people who care the most usually get what they want’” (336-337).

“To be clear, there are still thousands of healthy, vibrant churches across this country, places that have their gospel priorities straight and lean into the tradition of discipling with hard truths. And yet, from everything I have seen, most Christians in America have no interest in being provoked this way from the pulpit” (444, a statement that is almost contradictory to the quote I shared immediately above this one).

I appreciate the fact that Alberta repeatedly recognizes that not every American evangelical is one of the vendors selling “miracle pills” at one of the conventions he visits (266). Very few of these more ordinary evangelicals are profiled in this book, however. Even more telling, the less extreme Christians that are profiled are ones that have been in conflict with this more conservative wing present in evangelicalism. For example, Russell Moore, clearly a hero of Alberta’s who he describes as “trying to prop up the whole of the American clergy like Atlas” (339), is an evangelical who has run into more conservative factions and lost his job because of it. Julie Roys has been largely criticized by some voices in evangelicalism because of her exposes on other evangelical institutions. Chris Winans, the pastor of the church that Alberta’s father pastored at, describes his struggles with more extreme minorities in his church. The entire story of evangelicalism at large is filtered through the lens of what Alberta claims is a minority, perhaps even a vast minority, in evangelicalism. That is not fair.

Alberta interviewed a wide variety of polarizing figures throughout this book, from Greg Locke to Robert Jeffress to Jerry Falwell Jr. He interviewed people who become frequent targets of conservative evangelicals like Russell Moore, David French, and Julie Roys. He interviewed ordinary church members and small church pastors who never would have been heard from outside of this text. He shared his own story as it related to his father’s ministry specifically. As you read the list of people I mentioned above, I’m sure you reacted differently depending on your perspective. You may love Jeffress and think that French is a hack. You might love Moore and think that Locke is a disaster. I understand that different people will respond to these people differently and that different people are reading my review right now. Alberta also provides extensive commentary around each of his interviews, and he makes it exceptionally obvious who he favors and does not rather than allowing the interviews to speak for themselves.

The chief problem with the selection and framing of the interviews is the emphasis and consequent inaccurate focus that permeates this entire work. As I demonstrated in the first portion of this review, readers cannot be quite sure what evangelicals are like based on the unstable and largely undefended definition Alberta chooses to utilize. Readers are told that evangelicals are white and conservative with no objective justification for that belief or the use of that definition, and they might even wonder why they should not use the more traditional definition utilized by Bebbington, which provides a much narrower set of criteria.

If readers are able to get past this definitional issue, they might be uncomfortable with some of the polarizing interviews in this book but are assured that this is not the majority of evangelicals. As you can see in the quotes I have mentioned above, Alberta repeats that there are even millions of less controversial evangelicals. However, these evangelicals garner very little attention in these pages except for when they interact with those who would be deemed as extreme. Consequently, a reader who picked up this book would be forgiven if he missed the caveats I mentioned above and instead focused on the remaining 400 pages that seem to portray evangelicals in a much more negative light. This is what I mean when I say that the selection and framing of the interviews cause an inaccurate focus and a problematic definition of the evangelical movement that does not reflect reality. Readers would be forgiven if they came away with the impression that the entire evangelical church, not just a minority, is going astray, but the multiple chapters dedicated to Russell Moore’s work are the only thing that has a prayer of saving the evangelical church, where Alberta admits most people are not even in the “extreme” category. For instance, he explicitly writes:

I knew the leaders of the opposition—figures like Moore and French—and I knew they were horrified by this hostile takeover of evangelicalism. These were people who had suffered, personally and professionally, by swimming against the currents of their own faith subcultures. It seemed most of them had given up, or least retreated, and I couldn’t blame them. They had every excuse to ignore the institutional struggle and look inward, toward their own families and their own faith journeys; to settle on loving the Lord and letting him sort out this mess in America. But they had not given up. They had not retreated. They had been underground, regrouping and organizing and plotting the path forward. Finally, after so many years on the defensive, they were poised to launch a counterattack (330).

It is a question of emphasis and a question of a misleading and inaccurate focus. I have a very hard time saying that even at his highest estimate of 20%, you can classify evangelicalism as being taken over. You would not say a country has been taken over militarily if it still retains 80% of its land. However, that fact does not fit the narrative he is trying to tell, where he wants the focus to be on the massive threat of certain evangelicals.

The reasoning for his characterization very well might be ironically highlighted in one of his interviews. Alberta interviews Dan Darling, a spokesman for the National Religious Broadcasters who was fired for supporting the coronavirus vaccine, and he points out something very interesting about stories on churches.

Some of this, Darling complained, was the product of incentive structures in the media industry. He had spent years living and worshipping in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, the town where Greg Locke pastored his tent-revival church. Darling explained that an alliance of evangelical leaders there had done heroic work in the community, including starting a public-private cooperative to help feed, clothe, and educate underserved youth. They got no coverage from the Nashville press—and they didn’t want any. “But when Greg Locke starts spouting all this crazy nonsense, guess who makes the cover of the Tennessean?” Darling said (352).

Telling stories about Greg Locke will sell many more books and garner a lot more interest than telling stories about your ordinary Baptist pastor in rural North Dakota who has a small family and a church of 50 members he loves and cares about. It will sell many more books than the stories of the missionaries who have dedicated their entire lives to some small town in a Third World country. There is a narrative around highlighting more extreme evangelical voices that will get you interviews with places like CNN, PBS, Time Magazine, and C-SPAN, as well as book reviews from the New York Times. (I will add a quick note that I found many of his statements in these interviews much more inflammatory and extreme than most of the tone of his book).

I do not mean to imply that Alberta is all about the fame and the publicity. I don’t want to be that cynical. However, I do want to suggest that that is part of the reason this book has taken off like wildfire and, according to the Amazon profile, was even one of Barack Obama’s “favorite books of the year.”

“This is the portrait of evangelicalism that a significant portion of our country already believes or wants to believe. ”

If I drive 30 minutes down the road to Montpelier, the capital of my home state, and tell people on the street I am an evangelical Christian, most of them are going to think of the people they have read about in certain publications who enjoy highlighting these kinds of stories, like CNN, PBS, Time Magazine, and C-SPAN.

There is a self-reinforcing bias that I wish Alberta would have spoken more against because of his unique position. Instead, he leans into that bias even further. Yes, there is no doubt that there are extreme factions of evangelicalism today. I do not deny that. It would be factually incorrect for me to say otherwise, and some of his chapters, especially about sexual abuse in the church, made me incredibly uncomfortable in a powerful way. It made me mad that the stuff exists in communities where we ought to be safe and where we ought to be loved. Alberta is an excellent writer, and I wish he had been more committed to presenting a fuller picture of evangelicalism. We are given a picture of the minority while we have forgotten the majority.

The story of the extreme factions of evangelicalism would need to be told in a history of contemporary evangelicalism, and Alberta has indeed told it. However, one of the most significant weaknesses of this book is its slant towards the dominant, media class narrative that reinforces a negative perception of evangelicalism, not coincidentally a slant towards the readers who are praising this book profusely. However, if evangelicalism is about 80% “normal,” to continue using one of the numbers that Alberta, French, and Moore propose, then telling the story about American evangelicals in an age of extremism, as the subtitle suggests, requires giving voices to the remaining 80% of evangelicals who do not fall into these extreme camps. Even a 50/50 split, while still unbalanced, would be a more responsible way to present a true picture of American evangelicals today. An excellent example of how to do this can be found in Randall Balmer’s classic Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, which highlights the fringes while also presenting the ordinary. While that book is dated, it is a worthy portrait of a time and place in American evangelicalism as well as a model of how to do this kind of work.

As we come to the end of my review, I want to emphasize Alberta’s suggestion for how to solve the problem of evangelicals. One of his major suggestions is to reject the word evangelical.

“Speaking only for myself, the answer is obvious: Evangelical has become an impediment to evangelizing. The people to whom we are witnessing—our friends, neighbors, coworkers—are completely and categorically repelled by that word. They sense that it has nothing to do with the teachings of Christ and everything to do with social and political power. That perception must inform our reality. We are called to be followers of Jesus; we are called to make disciples of all the nations. If we allow a word to get in the way of that great commission—a man-made construct, a marker of tribal belonging more than theological conviction—then we will answer to God for our pride” (440, emphasis his).

He is not wrong about the perception of the word evangelical. At the same time, his prescription is not persuasive. He prescribes a more “respectable” Christianity like that of Russell Moore with this new branding. His solution supposes that this is only a branding problem. Perhaps I’m too pessimistic, but this approach will not be sufficient for the age that we are entering. You can change a name as much as you want, and the new name will be trendy for a while until people realize that it is essentially the old name they couldn’t stand re-branded.

For an example of how this might be an insufficient solution, we can use one Alberta’s favorite examples. Russell Moore may not be as conservative as almost everyone profiled in this book, but he is still pro-life and pro-traditional sexual ethics. He is safe now because he is critiquing the right, which is popular. It is an alliance that is not tenable, and I fear that his platform puts him in a vulnerable position. Please know I do not wish that on him and have benefited from his work in the past. However, consider the case of Tim Keller and Princeton University. He was about as well networked and winsome as an evangelical pastor could be, and the mob canceled him. I don’t say that to critique Keller either, but it is a product of the reality that we are in at this moment.

Changing the name evangelical might provide some temporary respite. However, without changing the content of our beliefs, we are still going to be at odds with the contemporary culture that is bent on framing evangelicals in a negative light. I acknowledge that we hold many countercultural positions, but they are going to be countercultural if we call ourselves evangelicals, Jesus people, Christ followers, or something different. The word is just a word, and if that is Alberta’s main solution to the problem facing evangelicals, it will be insufficient.

Yes, evangelicalism can do much work to regain a positive reputation in our communities. We can try to do better. Yes, that means owning up to the skeletons in our closet. However, the posture taken by this book is not helpful to this project. It creates a picture of evangelicals as fully swallowing a radical agenda that even the author realizes is not representative. This picture is then digested by the exact people who we need to remind that the vast majority of evangelicals are actually trying our best to love our neighbor and to stand for truth. It is not about putting on our rose-colored glasses and denying our problems, but it is also not helpful to write a book that reinforces just about every negative stereotype of evangelicalism. These stereotypes are now being purported as normal by certain audiences, and that is another large force that is damaging the reputation of evangelicals from the outside. Alberta practically says as much at the end that he reminds you that, even if this doesn’t seem to be your reality, this is still coming for you, dear evangelical.

Of course, this would come as a shock to many self-respecting Christians who still want to believe that their pastors are nothing like Locke; that their churches are nothing like Global Vision; that they themselves are nothing like the people in that tent. These self-respecting Christians are in denial. It’s easy for evangelicals to dismiss Global Vision as an outlier, the same way they did Westboro Baptist. It’s much harder to scrutinize the extremism that has infiltrated their own churches and ponder its logical endpoint. In this environment, if a pastor begins to dabble in conspiracies and political deception, what guardrails exist to keep him from going off the grid altogether? And what if he does go off the grid—does it even register? Just as with our politics, there is no longer a clear line of demarcation between the fringe and the mainstream. Ten years ago, Global Vision would have been considered a cult. Today, Locke preaches to 2.2 million Facebook followers and poses alongside Franklin Graham at the White House (230).

As an evangelical, this book does cause me to reflect. I give Alberta credit for that. However, I fear that this book is going to be best remembered as evidence to those who want to see evangelicals in a negative light that all of us evangelicals were precisely the kind of crazy, hateful, spiteful, greedy people they knew we were all along. They are going to comment to this conclusion based on a perception of a minority of evangelicals that are not even a properly defined group of evangelicals as the movement has been historically understood. Not only that, but these readers are going to say that this is a book written by an evangelical, so it is inside, credible evidence that will only exacerbate the problems associated with the name evangelical in certain circles. I wish he would have used such a powerful platform to help readers understand the caricature of all evangelicals actually doesn’t reflect on all evangelicals. He admits it in several places, so he knows this is true, but this book must pursue its predetermined thesis and cannot include the layers of complexity that would provide an accurate representation of evangelicals in our age of extremism.