Tim Alberta opens his bestselling book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (HarperCollins 2023), by recounting a February 2021interview with Chris Winans, the pastor of Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian Church in Brighton, Michigan. At the time of the interview, it had not been going well for Winans. People were leaving the church. Winans wondered out loud whether he should resign and leave.

Like many other churches at the time, Cornerstone had been politicized, not from the top down but from the bottom up. Remarks from the pulpit that would have been given a pass in earlier times, even if some in the congregation disagreed with them, were now toxic. Say anything at all that could be perceived as “liberal,” and members would show up at Winans office. Or just leave. Winans was perceived as squishy on the issues that matter to people feeding on a steady diet of Fox News, Donald Trump, and social media. Winans was not certain he would survive the onslaught.

I’ve been there. I was interim pastor at a church I had served before at the time when Tim Alberta was meeting Chris Winans in the Brighton Bar and Grill. I, too, noticed a shift in ecclesiastical air. I had always been, in those directional terms we use as shorthand for political differences, a bit left of the church consensus. Mostly the differences were tossed off as my eccentricity: “Oh, that’s just Clay.” But no more. Now a mention of the New York Times from the pulpit got a complaining email sent to an elder. A mention of Rob Bell’s Love Wins occasioned the same sort of complaint. 

In retrospect, it’s not so much that people had changed their minds. At least, not at first. It was that they had been given permission to express thoughts and attitudes they had long been told were not appropriate. This was partially the work of Donald Trump, although others had also been doing the same thing, giving the same permission, even before Trump. Where I grew up it was Rush Limbaugh going and on for hours about feminazis and libs on his daily radio show. Every barn in the county seemed to have a radio, and every radio seemed to be tuned to right wing talk. People were being told it was okay, no, more than okay, to be politically incorrect. And given permission, these thoughts and attitudes came spilling out everywhere, including the church.

At the heart of this was fear—the fear that the culture of the country was breaking down. Or being ripped away from those to whom it legitimately belonged. Conspiracy theories abounded, fed by right wing politicians. And what followed for pastors like Chris Winans was a perfect storm: COVID and the COVID shutdowns, Trump losing the election to Joe Biden and contesting the loss, the January 6 storming of the capitol, the rapid development and deployment of the COVID vaccines, and neighboring churches that refused to shut down and preachers that told their people that those preachers who did shut down their churches were not truly Christian. 

Difficult times. As Alberta tells it, at a point in the conversation with no real answers to how to respond to all of this, he and Winans fell silent. And then Alberta asked a question he had, he says, thought about every day: “What’s wrong with American evangelicals?” Winans thought for a moment, and then said, “America. Too many of them worship America.”

The rest of Alberta’s book unpacks that statement. He could have called the book American Idolatry had not that title already been taken by Andrew L. Whitehead (Baker, 2023), in which the idolatry is based on a (false) image of America. It’s a worthwhile read, written by someone who remains, sometimes distressingly, at his heart an evangelical. But I think the analysis is wrong. The answer to Alberta’s question, “What’s wrong with American evangelicals?” is not “America” but theology. Bad theology. And bad theology leads to bad politics. Evangelical churches, long before the current turn in American politics, have been purveying a thin simulacrum of Christian theology, a theology in which the faith has been transposed from what the Jesus of the gospels teaches to an otherworldly gospel principally concerned about how to get to heaven.

In my next few posts, I’d like to explore that theology, asking the question throughout why evangelicals have proven so susceptible to the blandishments of Donald Trump and his allies. Why in the face of his numerous lies, his business and personal failures, his many violations of basic Christian ethics, and and lack of any apparent allegiance to Jesus as Lord would four out of five evangelicals support him election after election? And why would that support come with the sort of anger that almost drove Chris Winans from the pulpit of Cornerstone Church?

In exploring this theology, I will begin in my next post with the apocalyptic frame of mind that characterizes so much of evangelical theology. It’s no surprise that evangelicals are open to conspiracy theories; they have been thinking conspiratorially for a long time. 

Stay tuned.

Clay