The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory
Ratings11
Average rating4.2
15
Ratings11
Average rating4.2
The award-winning journalist and staff writer for The Atlantic follows up his New York Times bestseller American Carnage with this timely, rigorously reported, and deeply personal examination of the divisions that threaten to destroy the American evangelical movement.
Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing—and least understood—people living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints an expansive and profoundly troubling portrait of the American evangelical movement. Through the eyes of televangelists and small-town preachers, celebrity revivalists and everyday churchgoers, Alberta tells the story of a faith cheapened by ephemeral fear, a promise corrupted by partisan subterfuge, and a reputation stained by perpetual scandal.
For millions of conservative Christians, America is their kingdom—a land set apart, a nation uniquely blessed, a people in special covenant with God. This love of country, however, has given way to right-wing nationalist fervor, a reckless blood-and-soil idolatry that trivializes the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Alberta retraces the arc of the modern evangelical movement, placing political and cultural inflection points in the context of church teachings and traditions, explaining how Donald Trump's presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated historical trends that long pointed toward disaster. Reporting from half-empty sanctuaries and standing-room-only convention halls across the country, the author documents a growing fracture inside American Christianity and journeys with readers through this strange new environment in which loving your enemies is "woke" and owning the libs is the answer to WWJD.
Accessing the highest echelons of the American evangelical movement, Alberta investigates the ways in which conservative Christians have pursued, exercised, and often abused power in the name of securing this earthly kingdom. He highlights the battles evangelicals are fighting—and the weapons of their warfare—to demonstrate the disconnect from scripture: Contra the dictates of the New Testament, today's believers are struggling mightily against flesh and blood, eyes fixed on the here and now, desperate for a power that is frivolous and fleeting. Lingering at the intersection of real cultural displacement and perceived religious persecution, Alberta portrays a rapidly secularizing America that has come to distrust the evangelical church, and weaves together present-day narratives of individual pastors and their churches as they confront the twin challenges of lost status and diminished standing.
Sifting through the wreckage—pastors broken, congregations battered, believers losing their religion because of sex scandals and political schemes—Alberta asks: If the American evangelical movement has ceased to glorify God, what is its purpose?
Reviews with the most likes.
Deep Look At American Evangelicalism Falls Just Short In Being All That It Could Have Been. Up front: I too am a former Southern Baptist Convention evangelical. My own sojourn of the last 20+ yrs has taken me from a child raised by a Deacon under the pastorage of a man through my teens who would later become a President of the Georgia Baptist Convention to a wanderer searching for a truly Christian (as the First Church would have truly understood it) community. As politics fails the Church - as Alberta documents well here - I have become ever more solid in my belief that the Church should have absolutely nothing at all to do with politics - which Alberta is less solid on here.
Structured in the wake of Alberta's father's death - a prominent megachurch pastor in Michigan - and some rather nasty political comments some Alberta had known for many years made to him in those darkest of moments, this book travels the United States - and even goes briefly abroad - examining the ways American Evangelicals have allowed the lure of politics to sway them, how some are fighting back, and what others are doing in response. It is a darkly hopeful tale of somehow, someway, potentially maybe clawing back to some semblance of historical Christianity that the American Church has long lost, and the overall narrative here is actually rather solid.
With a *few* holes. One is the complete lack of any documentation whatsoever in the ARC copy I read. Indeed, the ARC copy was so incomplete as to not even have the epilogue to the tale - which alone was an error that I nearly "will not reviewed" the book over, but I was able to obtain an Audible copy instead to at least be able to complete this review. However, the lack of documentation in the ARC was a single star deduction, as I normally expect to see around 20-30% documentation in nonfiction books in my vast experience reading nonfiction ARCs over the years. The other star deduction is the book's intense focus on Jerry Falwell Sr and his progeny - both biologically (Jerry Falwell Jr and his siblings) and ideologically (Liberty University), a focus that nearly derails the book in taking up such a seemingly large chunk of it.
The final hole, which didn't rise to the level of necessitating a star deduction but *did* rise to the level of necessitating commentary within the review, were the several times Albert used common mythologies - such as guns being the "leading cause of death of children" - without supporting documentation. (Indeed, when one checks the CDC's own data, guns are not the leading cause of death for *any* single age grouping of legal children. It is only when legal adults aged 18-19 are included - legal adults who *can and do serve in the US military* - when guns become a leading cause of death according to CDC data.) The presence of such known and easily disproven myths detracts from the reliability of the overall narrative, which is a shame, since for the most part Alberta's reporting seems to be pretty damn solid, at least from my own part of the world.
Overall, this is a truly strong and truly sobering look at the state of American Evangelicalism circa the late 2010s/ early 2020s, and a clarion call for needed change within the American Church overall. Will anything actually change? Alberta seems hopeful. I too am *hopeful*... if slightly more pessimistic on the actual realities. Filled with case study after case study after case study and interview after interview after interview, Alberta truly does a mostly strong job making his case, with the caveats noted above.
Finally, to be clear, the Audible version (and presumably the fully released text version) does include the epilogue and *hopefully* the also-missing bibliography.
Very much recommended.
Originally posted at bookanon.com.
It's a good book about people who drink the tainted Kool-Aid of radicalized Christian extremism. Unfortunately it's written by someone also drinking the Kool-Aid, if from a less tainted batch. We just call such a person a Christian. In other words, the problem Alberta is trying to dissect and solve from within Christianity is, in my opinion, a problem inherent in religious belief, only solvable from without. Religion is defined by faith and faith is defined by a belief in something for which there is no basis for that belief. The rest of us call that delusion, and the delusion of Bible-thumping, mouth-frothing Trump supporters is different from run of the mill religious delusion only in degree and not in kind. The notion that people are going to believe they possess the unerring word of God and not eventually fall into an egoic craziness, a trance which leads inexorably to places like Jan. 6 — that notion is itself a delusion. We can roll back time, scanning history, and see example after example of just this sort of thing playing out. When the religious say that absence of proof is not proof of absence (something which is true in a general sense but unhelpful for finding truth) they are opening the door for behavior based not on intelligence and logic, but on hope, a need to feel safe and taken care of (‘saved' in the language of the evangelicals). Nothing is more uncomfortable for a societal animal to continually take illogical action when the group does not support that action. And nothing is more uncomfortable for a group taking such action when the society it's part of doesn't support that action. This is the place we find ourselves and it's the reason that the Religious Right is now so desperately interfering in what is correctly secular politics. To highjack a phrase (somewhat ironically) from David Mamet: they are attempting to correct for a raging internal imbalance. (In the original Mamet was referring to writers, also at the best of times not the sanest lot. But that's a different book, a different review.) ‘Cognitive dissonance' is the general psychological term for all of this. Those suffering will stop at nothing to right the balance. It really is a dissonance of belief. They believe that their actions are logical, and yet they ‘believe' this other thing which is inherently illogical and leads to illogical actions. What's more, they're being reminded of it constantly by the society they live in, either explicitly or by comparison.
This is a book worth reading if you are capable of separating the author's own faith out of the larger story he's telling, the story of the modern extreme radicalization and politicization of Christianity. It is a mistake, however, to think that American Christianity was somehow sane and healthy before this modern variant began to take hold. The core belief system is unstable and unhealthy at the core.
The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory is an example of books that need to be written. (They need to be read as well, but the functional illiteracy of the American public is beyond the scope of things being discussed here.) These books need to be written from without, though. With Albert I fear we have a case of the fox guarding the henhouse. Secularism needs to take a serious look at the accumulative power of the religious in our modern, secular, pluralist society. Secularism then needs to take steps to corral and diminish that power until it no longer poses the threat that it currently does.
This is an ugly story, and I wish with all my heart that it had never happened and that it wasn't happening right now. It's the story of the American evangelical church, and it's the story of the corruption of that church over the last forty or so years, especially in the last eight years. It's the story of the use of the evangelical church as a political tool by the right, and it explains why many people I love and admire have become vicious scrappers against migrants and Democrats and women and people of color—Why? Because these people I love and admire are hearing these hate-filled opinions from their pastors and the leaders of their churches.
It's an ugly story, and I want everyone I know who has repeated these awful distorted comments to read this book and see where this is coming from. I want them to hear the truth about people they respect and see if their respect holds up after reading this book.
