Latest Dissection Of Trump-Era Evangelicalism Offers Dose Of Insider Savvy
(ANALYSIS) What if Donald Trump wins? That’s the big question in half of the United States.
The Atlantic magazine unleashed an unhappy New Year package of 24 essays forecasting that Trump 2.0 will be an American hellscape on abortion, “anxiety,” “autocracy,” “character,” China, civil rights, climate, courts, “disinformation,” “extremism,” “freedom,” immigration, journalism, the military, misogyny, NATO, partisanship, science, etc. etc.
Spot something missing in that list?
Yep, that would be religion, despite its profound impact on the wider culture, and vice versa.
This odd omission (where are you when we need you, Emma Green?) is somewhat compensated for with a separate item by staff writer Tim Alberta (alberta.reports@gmail.com) excerpted from his new book “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism” (Harper).
It’s a religious follow-up to his 2019 “American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump” (also from Harper).
There’s a pile of other recent books and articles that bemoan the sprawling U.S. evangelical movement over the militant politicization of a Trump-Era growth sector. Some of this literature reminds one of outside anthropologist Margaret Mead scrutinizing teens in American Samoa.
Alberta’s opus thus commands special attention because he’s been immersed in the evangelical subculture since his boyhood as a Michigan preacher’s kid. He’s no “ex-vangelical” dropout, and aspires to “honor God with this book,” just as Southern-Baptist-in-exile Russell Moore sought to do in last year’s “Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America” (Sentinel/Penguin). Alberta here is simultaneously a journalistic chronicler and a conservative Protestant lay preacher who applies numerous Bible verses in favor of good old 20th Century evangelicalism over against the newfangled 21st Century’s New Right.
One favorite biblical text comes from Paul in 2nd Corinthians 4:18: “ We look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
Alberta says six years of legwork showed him “the forces of political identity and nationalist idolatry, long latent, now fully unleashed in the form of Trumpism, were destroying the evangelical Church,” dividing congregations, demoralizing pastors and undermining “the credibility of the Christian witness.”
He visited hundreds of local churches, colleges, agencies and rallies around the nation, and interviewed many of the key players who favor and oppose this trend. He also provides some startling glimpses of fringe personalities, the snake-oil salesmen who cluster at God-and-country events, and the four-letter-word Christians who now compete with “red-letter Christians.” What percentage of these folks worship in totally independent, nondenominational congregations?
A key question for Alberta and similar writers is the extent to which what they portray and decry represents mainstream, denominational evangelicalism as a whole. On that, a prime source is sociologist Mark Chaves (mac58@duke.edu and 919-660-5783), who directs Duke University’s National Congregations Study.
Looking for a news hook? Duke's latest report in 2021 (.pdf here) showed evangelicals to be the nation’s least politicized Christian grouping. Only 43% of local evangelical congregations participated in even one of the 12 types of political involvements that were surveyed, compared with the more liberal “mainline” Protestants (at 52%), Catholics (81%) and Black Protestants (82%) or (not part of this study) the well-known activism at Jewish synagogues and Muslim mosques.
The Guy takes the savvy author to task on one detail, the tic of applying words like “Christian” or “church” while referring only to white evangelicals. We’re told that these past few years the radicals “seemed poised to capture the controls inside of the American Church.” True for Catholicism? For Black Protestantism? How about for mainstream evangelical denominations and parachurch groups?
Personally, Alberta is glad to have landed at Grace Bible Church in Ann Arbor, Michigan, whose pastor trained at the Moody Bible Institute and which affirms belief in the Bible as “without error in the original writings.” The Guy, a University of Michigan alumnus, was quite familiar with this nondenominational congregation’s evangelical influence, perhaps diminished among students after it moved from the campus out to a site near I-94.
Timely footnote for those interpreting the Republicans’ Iowa caucus January 15: Though the media as usual are stressing white evangelicals’ voting power, GetReligion colleague Ryan Burge notes that the state’s populace is 24.6% evangelical, roughly the nationwide average. Iowa has large numbers of white “mainline” Protestants and white Catholics, though few Black Protestants. And what percentage of those evangelicals are in established church traditions, as opposed to — yes — independent congregations.
With subsequent primaries, also note New Hampshire is only 15.1% evangelical, compared with 40% for South Carolina, where Trumpites promise to demolish home-state rival Nikki Haley. Come the general election, keep in mind the evangelical percentages in these swinging states: Arizona (22.6), Georgia (40.6), Michigan (25.3), Nevada (24.1), North Carolina (39.4), Pennsylvania (21.5) and Wisconsin (18.7).
This post was originally published at GetReligion.
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for The Associated Press and a former correspondent for TIME Magazine. He’s also worked in broadcast TV and radio journalism covering religion and received a lifetime achievement award from Religion News Association.