Daniel Suhr: The third way for evangelicals in 2024

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is January 2nd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Up next, WORLD Opinions Contributor Daniel Suhr responding to a popular book that creates a false dilemma for American evangelicals in 2024.E

DANIEL SUHR: Atlantic journalist Tim Alberta’s new book is titled The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Alberta seeks to understand what he perceives as a shift in the center of evangelicalism toward the far-right. He believes many evangelicals now prioritize politics and loyalty to Donald Trump as the test of Biblical faithfulness. He draws from his personal experiences and uses chapter-length vignettes to profile evangelical colleges, conferences, and churches.

As he writes, Alberta often sees the worst in people. For instance, he accuses Mike Pence of “knowingly ­bastardiz[ing] a precious passage from the New Testament” in “a stunt that was nothing short of blasphemous” for his 2020 convention speech. (Pence had mashed bits of 2 Corinthians 3 and Hebrews 12 together with a reference to Old Glory.) Alberta has a point: The freedom we find in Christ is very different from our American conception of political liberty. But Pence’s remark fits easily in the broad arc of presidential rhetoric.

Alberta worries about extremism, but he manages to engage in the same error with his own overwrought rhetoric. He dedicates a whole chapter to comparing Russian President Vladimir Putin’s despicable twisting of Russian Orthodoxy to Former President Trump’s use of evangelicalism. On this point he warns that America treads dangerously close to establishing a Trumpy Christianity as the state religion-as-ideology.

But Alberta’s central problem is that he tries to establish his thesis through anecdotal evidence. He cherry-­picks churches and conferences, finds exactly what he fears, then suggests this is typical. But many good churches focused on the gospel, the Christmas pageant, and the person in their small group fighting cancer—instead of Donald Trump’s supposed sainthood.

The book also never grapples with key questions like whether evangelical political engagement today is markedly different from the past. Evangelicals have always connected their faith to their votes and have always had their hypocrites, grifters, and excesses along the way. If anything, one could argue today’s evangelicalism is less political than before: There is no Moral Majority or Christian Coalition leading the effort, and no pastor-pundit serving as its face.

Alberta also never asks whether evangelicalism is distinctly different in its political behavior from other branches of American Christianity. Is it more nakedly political or power hungry than liberal Episcopalian churches with their rainbow flags and BLM yard signs? And what about African American churches that welcome Democratic candidates into their pulpits, or enthusiastically pro-life Catholic parishes? Some of what he reports is disconcerting in insolation, but the book still reinforces a media double standard for evangelicalism.

The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory offers some bracing critiques. He speaks some hard truths, pointing out epic failures of leadership and un-Christ-like behavior. Still, he fails to make his case, creating a false dichotomy, as though the only options are to follow Russell Moore or Jerry Falwell Jr. There is a third way: to agree with Trump or any candidate or party when they’re right, disagree when they’re wrong, and in general to make prudential judgments with the consistent application of Biblical principle and practical wisdom.

I’m Daniel Suhr.

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