I read Tim Alberta’s book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism using the Libby app from my public library. It is a depressing analysis of how idolatry infiltrated the American Evangelical church. Tim has researched and interviewed popular church leaders who have succumbed to the same power offered to Jesus in the wilderness.
Here are some quotes from the book.
- God has His own kingdom; no nation in this world can compare. God has His own power; no amount of political, cultural, or social influence can compare. God has His own glory; no exaltation of earthly beings can compare.
- We can serve and worship God or we can serve and worship the gods of this world. Too many American evangelicals have tried to do both. And the consequences for the Church have been devastating.
- “What’s wrong with American evangelicals?” Winans thought a moment. “America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.”
- Suffice it to say, the beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount (“Blessed are the meek . . . Blessed are the merciful . . . Blessed are the peacemakers”) were never conducive to a stump speech.
- The story of the Southern Baptist Convention, after all, was inseparable from America’s original sin. Formed in 1845 by slave-owning whites who were alarmed at abolitionist efforts within the national Baptist Church, the SBC became an avatar of religious justification for the trafficking and ownership of human beings.
- Falwell denounced the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954, saying “the devil himself” was pushing integration and that “the true Negro” did not want it. (“What will integration of the races do to us?” Falwell asked his all-white congregation. “It will destroy our race eventually.”)
- Disparaging the weak leadership at the highest levels of American government—and the soft, turn-the-other-cheek mentality that this particular audience was wont to possess—Trump offered two words of advice to the ten thousand students inside the Liberty auditorium: “Get even.”
- For his part, Falwell lauded Trump as “one of the greatest visionaries of our time” and “one of the most influential political leaders in the United States.” In front of his students, the university president saluted Trump for having “single-handedly forced President Obama to release his birth certificate,” and then awarded him an honorary doctorate.
- The NPR host asked Jeffress for his response. “I don’t want some meek and mild leader or somebody who’s going to turn the other cheek,” Jeffress told the host. “I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.”
- The corner of Jeffress’s office was a shrine—his secretary used that specific word to describe it—to President Donald J. Trump.
- “Who’s preaching to them about idolatry? I mean, really, in evangelical churches, how many sermons are people hearing about idolatry of any kind, much less national idolatry?”
- When I pressed him on these beliefs—offering evidence that Biden won legitimately, and probing for the source of his conviction—Tony did not budge. He is as convinced that Trump won the 2020 election, he told me, as he is that Jesus rose from the dead two thousand years ago.
- By the end of Barton’s presentation, there wasn’t much ambiguity about what the white, conservative Christians in the audience needed to do to take America back—or who they needed to take it back from.
- As recently as five or six years earlier, even as the evangelical-political brand was becoming more disputatious, it would have been scandalous to see such vile and violent symbolism at an event associated with Christianity. But Ralph Reed didn’t really care. He was giving the people what they wanted. He was giving them Donald J. Trump.
- The enemy was people who failed to appreciate how endangered their kingdom was, people who would let principles and laws obstruct their quest for power. The enemy was people like Mike Pence.
- Maldonado said that Christians had a responsibility before God to expose voter fraud because “Jesus Himself was the first politician to walk the earth.” I replied by mentioning how Jesus told Pontius Pilate, before His execution, that His kingdom was not of this world. “No. It is of this world,” Maldonado told me. “God gave us this country. We are the keepers of this kingdom. And right now, we are allowing the enemy to take it from us.”
- Winning campaigns had become more important than winning converts; scolding the culture had become more important than sanctifying the Church.
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