Tim Alberta: The Political Poisoning of the Evangelical Church
This episode is only available on Bulwark+. If you're a Bulwark+ member (or would like to become one), click here for access.
Episode Notes
Transcript
On this Christmas weekend, we revisit our conversation with Tim Alberta about the morphing of evangelicalism from a spiritual disposition to a political identity, a development Alberta calls “heartbreaking.” He tells Charlie Sykes that Evangelicals are turning against each other over conspiracy politics and Donald Trump. This encore episode was originally released in May.
Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.
This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors and omissions. Ironically, the transcription service has particular problems with the word “bulwark,” so you may see it mangled as “Bullard,” “Boulart,” or even “bull word.” Enjoy!
-
Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m Charlie Sykes. As we head into the Christmas holiday, we’re sharing another one of our favorite episodes from this year. This one, featuring the Atlantic’s Tim Alberta discussing how politics has poisoned the evangelical church. The son of pastor, he wrote about the war for the soul of the church back in May.
-
And Tim shares here how the morphing of the evangelical movement to something with a political identity is heartbreaking for him, and it’s a powerful episode. Tim’s also the author of American carnage. We’re just going to jump right into the interview. So welcome back to him. How are you?
-
Hey, Charlie. I’m doing okay, man. How are you? Well, you know, this is a tough piece to wrestle with. I’ll be honest with you because it’s it’s one of the things that I will admit that I have had the hardest time understanding over the last and now it’s, you know, going on five, six years.
-
The transformation of the, you know, white evangelical churches. And what your piece suggests is that whatever has happened to them seems to be accelerating. And that’s difficult to get your head around. So before we can even get into your story, Tim, this this is a very personal story. What sets your piece aside from a lot of the other commentary is that this feels very, very personal.
-
Because you in fact come from this religious tradition?
-
You’re right. I I grew up in the evangelical Church. I’m a pastor’s kid. My my dad was the senior pastor at Cornerstone evangelical Presbyterian Church in little town called Brighton, Michigan. And I
-
grew up there, not just spiritually, but sort of physically, my mom worked at the church as well. I mean, I I spent most of my time in that church.
-
You
-
know, when I wasn’t in school, summer vacations and whatnot were spent, you know, playing hide and go seek or shooting baskets at the church or you know, I I would just dare all the time. So I I sort of grew up. I was steeped in church life, in church culture, and it was really I think the relationship I had to the church that I I think in some way planted early seeds of of skepticism in my young journalist brain as far as not skepticism, not suspicion of Christ or of scripture, but of of man, of people, of relationships, and power, and transactionalism, and c cynicism and manipulation, some people might roll their eyes at this, and that’s fine. But I can just remember being a pretty young kid you know, sitting in church and and observing things and seeing what my dad had to deal with and what my mom had to deal with. And just being sort of highly skeptical of of what it was I would see and what was playing out around me.
-
And there are a lot of wonderful people in and around the church. There were then and there still are now. But the church is not as much as we might wanna believe that it is sort of a place that is insulated from all of the the pressures and the tension points of society around it. In fact, oftentimes, the church can be the worst place for those things. And and and I saw a lot of that growing up.
-
And obviously, you know, as you said in the book Charlie, some of the political trends more explicitly. They have really accelerated over the past decade. And and that’s what I really wanted to dive into in this piece because it’s something I’ve wrestled with for a long time. And,
-
you know, you describe how evangelicalism is morphing from a spiritual disposition into a political identity and you’re right that for you this is heartbreaking because in so many ways it turns the Christian witness into a caricature. Doesn’t? Yeah. It really does. It it and and the and the the problem is, you know, I I tried to
-
explain this to somebody a while back I know some people from my home church who are just some of the most generous, compassionate, loving people that you’d ever want to meet. I mean, these are people who give just absurd amounts of their money and of their time, their family vacations to, you know, go overseas and build orphanages and, you know, tutor kids and and they’re selfless people who are in so many ways reflective of the love of Christ. But if you were to grab them and do a man on the street interview outside of some political event, they would they would share some political opinions with you, not just like, oh, who this is who I’m voting for, but some conspiratorial and fringing stuff that would make you think that they’re allolithic. Mhmm. And the problem is that it’s become increasingly difficult to to separate some of that political thought from the spiritual thought inside a lot of these evangelical churches, in fact, what we’ve seen is sort of encouraging from many pastors, from many Christian leaders, from some sort of evangelical figureheads to really merge the two together.
-
And and so it’s made it more and more difficult to distinguish between the two.
-
So you opened your your piece in the Atlantic with a scene setter from a Sunday service at a a church called floodgate church in Brighton, Michigan led by pastor Bill Bolen. And you describe how between forty minutes praise music and forty minutes of preaching, bolen goes off on what you call a diatribe. So just tell us about what pastor Bolen was, what what was the headline
-
news that he was sharing with his congregation? Yeah. So every Sunday, since I’ve been checking out floodgates church and reporting there over the past year plus, there’s a fifteen, twenty, twenty five minute sometimes segment that this pastor would do called headline news where he would rattle off you know, somewhere between maybe seven and ten news items from the week, most of them political in nature. And then he would add a lot of commentary and sort of annotate them and oftentimes there might be sort of a straight news headline from the AP or from Reuters or something. And then he would fill in the blanks with a lot of color commentary.
-
But then sometimes there would also be some headlines from, you know, a far right blog or something that were, you know, I’d be sitting in the back of the sanctuary, googling it, where is he getting this from?
-
And,
-
you know, sometimes his commentary would be the type of thing that would sort of fall somewhere within the kind of political mainstream. Now again, it’s a little unusual to hear that’s in a church on a Sunday morning right after the praise music concludes to to have the pastor get up there and just start sort of Fox News style, Rip, sort of annotate them. It’s a little bit strange it takes them adjusting to. But that’s not the strangest part. The strangest part is that on this particular Sunday that I wrote about, which was reflective and consistent with many other Sundays that I’d checked out.
-
The pastor would start a riff about vaccines and would quickly veer into conspiracy land and talking about how a local hospital only had two COVID patients at the time, but they had more than one hundred patients who were suffering from vaccine complications. Stuff like that. And and he would go on a a rant about Ivermectin. And and by the time he would finish, there was like a call in response with some of his congregants who were chanting Ivermectin. So things like that that sound almost fantastical except it’s real and it’s not just happening in this one church, it’s happening in lots of other church.
-
Well,
-
and and you described the the trajectory of of pastor Bolen’s career. He knew Brighton very, very well, and you’d never heard a floodgate church in part because Until recently, Boeing had been preaching to about a hundred people. And then suddenly, he was thrust into celebrity during the pandemic. Talking about how this sort of obscure guy goes to evangelical star in a couple of years.
-
Yeah. So there’s I’m forgetting whether it’s David French or Russell Moore, but one of them had coined this phrase for churches a little while back that that crazy as a growth model. And crazy was pretty much the growth model here. What this pastor decided to do around Easter of twenty twenty, just in the earliest days of the pandemic, when churches were asked to close down, to prevent transmission while everybody was trying to figure out what was going on with COVID. This pastor refused and he kept his church open.
-
And this is in a very, you know, Charlie, you’re from the conservative suburbs of Milwaukee. So you know that the conservative suburbs of Detroit very much patterned the same way. And for this one pastor to keep his church open, he became sort of a celebrity, and his church became sort of a cause locally. So a lot of people from surrounding churches in the same town and same county who were up in arms with their pastors for having shut their church down, which they believed was an act of fear or cowardice or, you know, bending the need to almighty government, whatever the case may be. They were of outraged.
-
And so when this church remained open, people rushed over there. And suddenly, this church which had been for most of its history holding services that would cater to about a combined one hundred people give or take on every Sunday. Well, suddenly, they’re pushing up into several hundred and then many hundred and then up over a thousand. And within a year of Bolen making this stand and making a name for himself in in the suburbs of Detroit by keeping the church open. Suddenly, they’ve gone from one hundred people to fifteen hundred people.
-
And today, they are pushing towards two thousand people and they bought a brand new facility and they’re growing like crazy. So so there is a growth model here that he tapped into. And and again, too early not to be a broken record, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say. This isn’t just happening at this one church. There are lots of stories of this happening elsewhere.
-
You know, it
-
strikes me listening to that particular story that that the pandemic really has contributed to the radicalization and the classification of our culture and our politics in ways that I’m not sure fully understand. We’re beginning to understand. You know, I I look around right now and I think, you know, things were bad in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen, but they’re exponentially worse now and No. The crazy is accelerating. Did the pandemic and the shutdown have an accelerant effect?
-
I won’t say transformative effect, but an accelerant effect. On the crazification of all of this?
-
Oh, no no doubt about it. And actually, Charlie, I’ll say this, specific to the church, specific to evangelicalism in America. I’ve had this conversation over and over and over again with pastors and with church leader types and just with everyday churchgoers over the past year while I’ve been doing all this reporting. And for all of the disruption and volatility of the previous five, six years, you know, Trump’s presidency obviously and the siege of the capital and his impeachment. But then, you know, other things, you know, the George Floyd killing and the racial protests and social justice marches the me too movement and these recordings over sexual abuse, including inside the church, and all of these things have been hugely hugely disruptive inside American evangelicalism.
-
But I would argue that nothing has been more disruptive and nothing has been more of an accelerant on these trend lines that we’re discussing here, then has been the shutdown. Because it plays directly into the fears that investoring inside the evangelical church for decades that there is at the end of the day a secular liberal plot to shut down churches, to banish god from public life. And it’s just difficult for people who have not spent time in evangelical circles to really understand what I’m talking about. But it’s a very real thing. And for a lot of these folks, they viewed COVID and church closures, you know, in some cases churches were on the clothes for three or four weeks, but it didn’t matter.
-
That was it. That was enough. To validate this idea that the government was coming for that. So there
-
is a siege mentality and a lot of this revolves around I mean, you’ve described it, but a lot of this also revolves around the whole issue of religious freedom. And the sealants of that debate about, you know, should there be conscience clauses? Should there be religious exemptions? This is absolutely incandescent. In evangelical churches.
-
And frankly, I’m I’m not sure that the folks on the other side fully understand how powerful those questions are when it comes to this sort of, you know, we are under seed, we are victims, they are coming for the secularists want to destroy us. You agree with that? I
-
do. I mean, it’s a very particular mindset. And by the way, this is why in twenty sixteen, I write about this a little bit in my book, but it was I think it was largely glossed over by folks, you know, sort of following the Trump campaign, and and even folks who were writing in some detail about his alliance with the evangelical movement, Obviously, the Supreme Court list was huge. The pick up Pence was huge. But there was one other thing that did not get a lot of attention.
-
Trump had some some folks in his ear whispering to him about the Johnson amendment. This idea — Okay. — that that effectively you know, that churches could lose their taxes and status if if they were to, you know, get into politics from the pulpit. That is something that, particularly when Trump right after sealing the nomination met with a bunch of evangelical leaders and and hundreds and hundreds of evangelical pastors in New York at the Marriott Marquis. This is May of twenty sixteen.
-
I was there covering it. And I can remember when he discussed that, people afterwards were discussing it. That is an issue of serious salliance in that community, and it’s the kind of thing that just doesn’t resonate outside of a very sort of narrow strip of American light, but it is there and it’s something that I think has sort of a real galvanizing effect. Okay.
-
So you started with this profile of pastor Bolen who has become a superstar because he’s leaning into the crazy. But you also showcase another pastor named Ken Brown who has a ministry in Trenton which is a suburb of Detroit. And and he’s a conservative pastor of a conservative congregation, but as as you write, he is one of those who’s worked hard to keep his members from being radicalized by the lives of right wing politicians and media figures. How is that working out for him? You basically have these two contrasting pastors.
-
What is happening with with Ken Brown? Yeah.
-
You know, it’s interesting, Charlie. What sort of ties these two figures together, these two pastors in the suburbs of Detroit is that they’re so different obviously in so many ways. But the one thing they have in common is they feel like they have been sort of pushed too far and that there is no way to avoid politics at this point. Right? And now, obviously, you have the pastor, Bill Bolen, a floodgate, who’s really leaning into it It’s not that he’s been sort of pushed into it.
-
He’s been political, but he believes that the church can’t afford to not be political at this point. Ken Brown is coming at it from a bit of a different perspective. He’s looking at what’s happening in the culture and how it’s invading his church. As he put it to me in one of our conversations like his job is to look out for not only his people, but for his church and for some of the threats that are infiltrating it. And in his view, what he’s seen happen over the last four, five years is that all of these really ugly and intense and polarizing debates over politics and policy and, you know, culture and social issues.
-
Have infected his church, and it turned people against one another. And he tried for a long time to sort of not engage with any of and to stay above the fray and just kind of focus on scripture. But it wasn’t working and he saw things deteriorating and getting worse and worse and worse and and specifically what he saw was a real sort of wave of disinformation and untruth and falsehoods and conspiratorial thinking invading the church, which again is a theme that runs across my conversations with pastors all over the country. And so what what this other pastor, Ken Brown, decided to do was to lean into these political debates, but but in a very different sort of tactical way, he has decided to confront head on a lot of the lies and and the conspiracy theories and the disinformation that he has seen — Mhmm. — affecting the people in his church not just pulling people aside on a one by one basis and say, hey, I saw you posted this thing on social media.
-
Are you sure about that? Let’s talk about it because this might not be true. But actively from the pulpit preaching to his people on almost a weekly basis and also using a podcast series and a blog that he has to really try and counter some of the influences in our politics that he believes have distracted his people from the bible. Well, how is that working out from what kind of reaction pushback
-
is he getting from his congregants? Well,
-
it’s been mixed. You know, he he as you mentioned, Charlie, he pastor is a pretty conservative church, and he himself is
-
is
-
a very conservative guy. This is just lest anybody think that this is one of the woke pastures, whatever woke even means anymore. I mean, this is this is very conservative guy, lifelong pro lifer, never had a SIP about the alcohol, you know, raised in a Christian home. And so what Ken Brown represents here is somebody who and again, he he stands in so well as as a representative. A lot of other pastors talked with around the country.
-
This is somebody who essentially has come to believe that not just politics broadly. But sort of conspiracy politics specifically and all of the lies and the obitryol and the misrepresentation of the manipulation I’m with this. That those things are representing a betrayal of the gospel, that the credibility of the Christian witness is being damaged. By Christians who are subscribing to these things. So you can imagine that when he says that to his congregates, to some of his very conservative Trump supporting all in on MAGA Congregants that some of them have really bristle and take exception to their pastor sort of rebuking them in that way.
-
You know, at the same time, he’s had some members who he feels have really responded well to it and who have told them that they’ve dialed back the Fox News or quit watching cable news completely. And what’s really interesting is that he said that with those people, albeit they may be a smaller subset of his plot, but he’s told me that those people who have dialed the pack where he feels like he has had some success in reaching him. Those people have demonstrated a real renewed commitment to cry and and to their involvement with the church. And so, you know, he doesn’t view that as coincidental, but it’s been a very hard road for this guy. We’ve had a lot of conversations over the past year and you can see in his church that told that all of this is taken.
-
Well,
-
there’s also a a real cultural gap between these two pastors that you focus on and that we sort of read a paragraph. From because your writing is so blah. Brown is polished and buttoned down. Bolen is ostentatious and loud. Brown Pass was a traditional church where people wear sweaters and sing softly.
-
Bolen leads a charismatic church where people dress for a barbecue and speak in tongues. Brown is a pastor’s kid in lifelong conservative who’s never had a sip of alcohol, what you just mentioned. Bolen is an erstwhile radical liberal who once got so high on LSD that he jumped on stage and grabbed the guitar to Tom Penney concert. So, I mean, there’s really there’s there’s a lot going
-
on here. There’s a it’s the old politics question in the presidential case. Like, who who would you rather have a beer with? I know who I would rather have a beer with. I mean, Ken Brown doesn’t drink beer.
-
But, yeah. But,
-
yeah, these
-
are two very different guys, obviously. And their their approach to the church is is is informed, I think, by those life experiences. I mean, one of the things that was was really interesting in talking to Bill Bolen. Was he described how being a radical liberal in California in the seventies and participating in all of these protest and, you know, sit ins and hunger strikes and chaining himself the buses and all that kind of stuff. How that informed his views of his role in the ministry all these years later despite the fact that his views, ideologically, have shifted in almost a hundred and eighty degree fashion.
-
His tactical approach is still very much the same. The same guy who as a hippie was participating in, you know, hunger strikes in the streets. Back then, now believes that his call to protest is going to manifest itself in a bit of a different way, but it’s interesting how somebody’s entire world view can change. This is somebody who had this radical conversion experience where he felt that God spoke to him when he was twenty years old, and he became a Christian and he says he never looked back. And yet, some of his tactics, as I said a moment ago, as far as protesting and and rebelling against authority, they’re still rooted in that same there’s that
-
same
-
twenty year old kid. It is
-
interesting how many people go from radical right to radical left or radical left to radical right. So maybe the through line is the radicalism. Right.
-
Right. Okay.
-
So let’s talk about the your discussion of the war for the soul of the church, you write to many evangelicals today. The enemy is no longer secular America, but their fellow Christians, people who hold the same faith but different beliefs. How has that shifted? Yeah. I
-
think the shift Charlie really is just best understood as a fight that was outward, in other words, evangelical churches and evangelical Christians believing that there was sort of this this grand struggle against the secular culture and that they were fighting to preserve the influence of god in public life and that there were secularists and liberals who wanted to, sort of, expunge any trace of the almighty public like. That was really the struggle that animated so much of the American evangelical movement during my lifetime. And what you’ve seen here really over the past five years it traces back a bit further, but it’s really intensified here over the last five years, is that the point has really moved inward and you have these massive divisions within the church that are reflective of the massive divisions within society. And I alluded to them earlier everything from, you know, race and sexual misconduct to politics and and to culture war stuff. And and what it’s essentially done is it’s fractured churches and it has basically called a bit of a ceasefire unwittingly on that war with the secular world because Christians in many cases are now too busy fighting amongst themselves to worry about fighting the secular world.
-
And so what you have is I think it might be too reductive to just think of it as a sort of symmetrical struggle or as just two sides. I mean, I think there is some nuance here, but you do broadly speaking have a bit of a a warring faction on the one side with people like Bill Bolen who really believe that time is running short for America and that there is a war on Christians in this country that is therefore also a war the politicians and and the political parties that represents them. And so they are inclined to merge these things together and and believe that the church should be very active in politics from the top of the ticket all the way down to the local level that the church has a responsibility in its community to be a central player politically. And even if that means making alliances with people who are sort of manifestly non Christian in their approach and in their rhetoric and in their their needs and so be it. And that is obviously representative of of the one side of the struggle.
-
And the other side I think is just you have a lot of Christians with a great deal of discomfort about those alliances. And they might be willing to hold their nose and cast a vote for somebody because they might be the lesser of two evils, but they’re not comfortable sort of throwing themselves and throwing the influence and the reputation of the church behind a political cause or a political party, they just don’t think it’s appropriate. And that is I think sort of fundamentally the struggle here. Well,
-
this is a speculative question. Will the return of the abortion issue? Will it push these factions back together again in a common cause? Will it exacerbate these splits? How do you see that playing out in this whole story of the radicalization of evangelical Christians?
-
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a fair question. I think the first thing I’d say is, even within those warring camps, in the evangelical movement that I just described. I think it’s important to recognize that abortion has never really been an issue that’s divided those camps. Broadly speaking.
-
I mean, you may have some folks who attend a predominantly white, predominantly conservative evangelical church. Who do not hold sort of conservative views on the abortion issue, but most of them do. In fact, these pictures on this scribing here over politics and culture and some of these key social issues and whether the church should be engaged on them and to what extent the church should be engaged on them. I mean, even the pastor like Ken Brown, who I, as I’ve described, sort of, is firmly in the one camp here and wanting to sort of depressurize these issues inside the church. Ken Brown is a staunch pro lifer.
-
You know, he even when he never preached on politics from the pulpit, promoted his career. The one issue he would pre Shawn every year on right to life Sunday was abortion. So I don’t know that Roe being overturned and that abortion once again being really front and center for American voters and particularly for Christian voters, I don’t know that it’s going to have any great unifying effect inside the evangelical movement because, again, largely speaking, there’s been a lot of consensus on that already. Okay.
-
So, you know, would I wanna talk about the realignment within the white evangelical church. But, you know, as as you point out, you know, the evangelical leaders said something in motion decades ago that the the pastors can’t control any longer. And I think this is important because, you know, there would be people who say, well, nothing’s new. It’s always been this way. No.
-
This is in fact new the last five years. Let’s
-
talk about Donald
-
Trump and and the role that Trumpism has played in all of this. Viewing him as the apex of the movement’s power, but also at the same time, the beginning of what you described as the unraveling these larger battles cultural reckoning over race vaccine, mandates, elections have also divided the church. So, I mean, it it seems that they’re at this apex of power and influence, especially when Donald Trump was in the White House, but they’re really tearing each other apart. I mean, they talk about the southern Baptist Convention. Fighting over race relations, women serving in leadership in the United Methodist Church.
-
Looks like it’s gonna have a divorce over social and ideological divisions, other denominations, losing churches as pastors and congregations are walking away from the leadership. So, I mean, there is a real realignment going along what role did Trump play in all of this? I know not everything is about Donald Trump, but it’s hard to tell this story without talking about that. Yeah. Of
-
course, it is. It it’s impossible to tell the story without talking about Trump. Not necessarily because he was the driver of this divide. But I think in some ways, he kind of ripped the band aid off if he will. You know, in other words, some of these wounds were already there.
-
Maybe they weren’t wide open and and actively bleeding, but they were there. And you know, you had serious disagreements in the church over the past decade on questions of everything from human sexuality to immigration and healthcare and, you know, refugee resettlement and, you know, things like that. Depending on the individual congregation, you’ll have people tell you that, yes, we’ve wrestled with these things, but we’ve done it very quietly and diplomatically. And other people will say, no, we’ve kind of had all out roles on these things, but we’ve still held together. Trumpism introduced an element of all or nothing to these debates.
-
Things became zero sum in a way that they weren’t before. I guess the clumsy point I was trying to make a minute ago is that a lot of churches that I’ve visited and pastors I’ve spoken with have described the ways in which over the past, you know, decade or so they have tried to navigate some of these hot button social issues inside the church. And even when there were really strong disagreements, at the end of the day, things would get settled and maybe a few people would leave, but overall, the church was still fine. And relationships were intact and things were pretty healthy and they moved up. I think Trumpism and the device over Trump, the man, and Trump and his presidency, it sort of made things irreconcilable in some sense.
-
I mean, you you will hear stories from people who have attended a church for twenty or twenty five or thirty years who suddenly had to leave, like, abruptly, like, overnight because the pastor made a sort of cutting remark about the president, or you’ll have people who were in a small group together since, you know, the nineteen eighties and they’ve been teaching a bible study together in a church for all these years and they suddenly split and they don’t talk to one another anymore. Why? Is it because of a disagreement over abortion or over homosexuality or over any number of other things? No. It’s a disagreement over Trump.
-
And so I think that’s the role inside the church. It’s not like any of this is new. The church has been arguing with itself since the beginning of the church. I mean, that’s why most of the new testament are letters that Paul was writing to early churches trying to get people to stop arguing with each other. I mean, this stuff is not new, but there there is, as I said, kind of a zero sum nature to the dispute over Donald Trump.
-
Either you’re with them or you’re against them, there’s very little middle ground. And I think that more than anything is what has proven so destructive inside these churches. But why? What
-
makes him the touch down? I mean, here is a Okay. We we could run through his private life, you know, everything that he’s involved, why has he become this touchstone?
-
In a
-
way that no other political figure that I can think of even approaches. Howard
-
Bauchner: I can give you my best theory on that, Charlie. And I and honestly, it’s it’s It’s one of many, but it’s my best theory. And I wrote about this in the piece, I do think that for a substantial chunk of the white evangelical universe, there is a fear that America is in precipitous decline that this country’s best days are now far behind it, that god is, in fact, being sort of bullied and out of public life that practicing vocal Christians are unwelcome in the cultural discourse and that the end is near and that they are going to go down swing — Yeah. — that if this is their left stand, if this is their alamo, then they’re going to go down with the fight. And for those people, they’d spent years looking for somebody in the political arena who could be their champion, somebody who could fight their battles.
-
And they found in Donald Trump just the unlikeliest fighter. Somebody who just again manifestly does not share really any of their values, does not believe in the things that they believe. And somebody who, I think, is very clearly not a practicing follower of Christ, and yet the transactionalist to his core to Donald Trump is he recognized that he could earn the sort of unflinching support of these people if he was willing to do for them what no other bible believing Christian politician was willing to do and that’s sort of how much of this came about. You
-
know, and and I’ll find references to, you know, how God raised up Cyrus to free Israel. Cyprus obviously not being Jewish, but this muscular Christianity, the Christianity that fights, that kicks ass, takes names, has become more dominant at least or louder than the Christianity that preached humility and compassion. It feels like it’s almost cripps it in some of the churches that you describe?
-
Well, it does feel like that. But let me offer a note of caution, of course. Because we see the same thing play out in politics and in other institutions of American life. You know, the loudest voices always sort of rule the day. Right?
-
And what you have in a lot of these churches are the loudest voices. I mean, I remember visiting with the pastor at another church who I didn’t write about the peace. Who told me about this sort of crusading group of people in his church of, you know, five or six hundred, this group that was just making life miserable for him and really sort of torturing him, confronting him publicly sometimes sort of almost physically after he would leave the whole message, yelling at him in front of other people and starting sort of petitions and circulating letters about him trying to make like miserable because they disagreed with some of his sort of political and ideological stances. And he described all of this, and it sounded like just psychological warfare. And and I said, how many people were talking about here?
-
And he said, ten or twelve. And I said, in a church of five or six hundred, it was just ten or twelve. They said, yeah. And I said, so but were they representing a majority view? And he said, no.
-
No. No. This was a decided minority view, but they were really loud and they were really organized. That’s the great danger, Charlie, in in writing a piece like this. You’re you know, we’re talking about tens of millions of people.
-
When
-
we write about white evangelical Christians in America, write tens of millions of people. And it’s really dangerous to sort of paint with any kind of a broad brush or to stereotype or generalized. But I do think that what you said is true, that a lot of the momentum at least the sort of outward facing momentum that you see in the evangelical movement is around that sort of muscular combative, like come and take it Christianity. But I still don’t know that that represents anything near a majority of the evangelical
-
group. So one of the things that we’re seeing is, and you referenced this, is sort of a Christian nationalism, like a Christian hypernationalism. And you talk with Russell Moore, who’s the extraordinary former president, the Southern Baptist Policy arm, was basically pushed out for for not getting on the Trump train. He’s traveled around the country and he’s talked to pastors and he’s convinced that this fanaticism inside the church poses real threats you quote Russell Moore is saying I’m telling you, there is a serious effort to turn this two countries talk into something real. There are Christians taking all the populace passions and adding a transcendent authority to it.
-
So this two countries talk, where does this lead to him? What is he concerned about? Is he actually talking about the kind of you know, spiritual civil war, actual civil war? You know, Charlie, there are two distinct views of January sixth.
-
One view holds that January sixth was the culmination of something. That had been building and building and building and that finally sort of the powder gig exploded. I think the other view, which is I believe a minority of you. But one that I personally hold is that January sixth was actually just the beginning of something. That what you saw that day And yes, specifically in the context of this conversation, the Christian imagery, the Christian influence the people marching with flags with crosses on them and singing hymns right next to the gallows outside the capital.
-
That is representative of a threat that is real and a threat that is growing. Now how real is it? And how will we quantify it? I don’t know the answers to that. I don’t pretend to.
-
But I can tell you Again, this was a year’s worth of reporting that I put into this piece. And it’s a lot of conversations with a lot of people, a lot of different places. And and a lot of different faith traditions within the sort of broader construct of of American evangelicalism And I can just tell you that that it’s real. You do have, as Russell said, people who are already predisposed because of all of the culture on political turmoil in the country who are taking this kind of abstract rhetoric of red states and blue states and irreconcilable divides and secession or breaking away or taking to the streets. Right?
-
That kind of irresponsible rhetoric. They are taking it and then sort of infusing into it this transcendent authority as Russell said that if you shut down our church, that is an act of war not just against the constitution, but against our God. Right? So bringing that full circle to the conversation earlier about why the pandemic and why COVID was such a catalyst here, such an accelerant. It’s really hard for people again outside of the church to connect all these dots and to sort of understand how all of this sort of ties into the grand narrative of God’s plan for America and even sort of ideas of prophecy and and how all of this may end and what the Christian’s responsibility is in times such as this, but it is it is real.
-
And it is a threat and it’s something that has to be dealt with not by the government — No. — not by media types. It has to be dealt with inside the church. And and that is the great challenge here is that a lot of pastors, Charlie, are completely burned out they’re scared, they’ve been bullied, a lot of them have retired, or they’ve just gone silent completely, and they’re not willing to confront this stuff anymore. Because they’ve got bills to pay and they just wanna write it out for retirement.
-
So it’s it’s a really scary thing to think about because I’m really a believer that the only forces that can help to sort of deescalate this do exist inside the church, but those forces have been sort of bulldozed. Kim Alberta’s
-
latest piece is how politics poison the evangelical church. You can find it online and in the June issue of the Atlantic Magazine. Tim, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Charlie,
-
I’m happy to. It’s Glad it was another cheery and uplifting discussion like Oleg. Thank you for listening to
-
the Bulwark podcast. We’ll be back next week with more select from our best of from twenty twenty two. Merry Christmas, and have a great weekend.