Evangelical Trumpism: Then and Now Part I. w/ Tim Alberta
Part I of Brad's interview with journalist Tim Alberta, author of the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: Evangelicalism in an Age of Extremism. In his intro, Brad goes through what he learned from the book - and hints at his criticisms of it (those are coming next week). In the interview, Brad asks Tim about his experience as a pastor's kid, what changed in evangelical culture during COVID and the Trump years, and why conspiracy and resentment are now the driving forces of this religious tradition.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Today, I have part one of my interview with the author Tim Alberta.
Tim's book is one that has been It's widely popularized.
I think a lot of people are reading it.
And Tim has been appearing everywhere on big interviews, big podcasts, on television to talk about it.
I think one of the draws of the book is that Tim is a deep insider.
He was born into a family where his dad was He's a minister, and he discusses that at length in the book.
And he also is a kind of Washington insider.
He's a reporter.
And so he had a front row seat to the rise of Trump and his takeover of the Republican Party.
He wrote about that in his previous book.
And so when you put those two things together, you really do get a kind of compelling perspective.
And that's where the book is coming from.
Before we get to the interview, I want to do something that I will be doing more of this year, and that's providing a little bit more analysis and what I liked about the book and what I did not like about the book before we get to the conversation.
Because we're doing two parts, today I want to tell you The three things that I did really enjoy about the book and think that it added to the conversation surrounding religion and politics in the United States.
And next week you'll hear me talk about my criticisms of the book.
In the interview, I do address these and I bring these to Tim, and I think one thing I want to note here is that a lot of the interviews you might have heard with him are with folks who are not necessarily trained or experienced in American evangelicalism, white Christian nationalism, religious studies, and so their focus is more on the kind of insider perspective, like what was it like to live this from the perspective of somebody who's
Dad was a minister who was born and raised in this tradition and then kind of lived it as a Washington reporter.
So the questions really focus there and for good reason.
If you pick up the book or if you've read it, what you'll see in this book is deep reportage from all over the country.
Tim has chapters that are bringing us into the pulpit and the pews of small town churches.
He also has chapters that bring you into the offices of megachurch pastors like Robert Jeffress or influencers and organization leaders like Ralph Reed or Jerry Falwell Jr.
or others.
So the book is really one that I think brings us down on the ground.
And in ways that are rare, it brings us into the perspective of both the elites of this culture, those who are shaping it from the pulpits, from the heads of universities or institutions or movements like Charlie Kirk and TPUSA, but also the everyday person, the person who's on the other end of that, who's being shaped by those people.
And I think that's one of the book's great merits is giving us that double perspective.
I think another thing that is really fascinating about the book and I think really helped me feel good about a thesis I've had for a long time Tim, especially in the early chapters, brings us into the perspective of a number of small-town pastors who were trying to minister during COVID and during the Trump years.
And he shows us that, yes, they were evangelical.
And if you listen to this show, you know our stance on the ways that evangelicalism has developed in this country.
But especially one of them was not Trumpian, not necessarily Republican.
He was one of that maybe 18% of white evangelicals who are not necessarily in the MAGA camp, who are not necessarily in the political position that you might imagine.
And As a result, when the pandemic happened, when the Trump years happened, he was really put in a position where it was almost impossible for him to be a leader in that space.
And we talk about that.
We talk about why.
But one of the things we talked about is the pandemic changing American religion forever, and the ways that the pandemic posed this sort of fork in the road.
And those who are willing to shut down their churches to abide by health guidelines were not seen as people trying to do the best for their congregation, but in this space were seen as people who were capitulating to an evil government.
So we talk about that in the interview.
On the flip side, the final thing I'll mention here that I really did learn, maybe I'll mention one more, is that Those who were willing to use the pandemic as a moment of conspiracy really grew in fame and fortune.
We've talked about this on the show, but there are a few chapters and there's especially one chapter in the book that really highlights this, the ways that if you were willing during the pandemic to say that COVID was a conspiracy and then what if this is a conspiracy, what else is a conspiracy?
There's probably 25 more like it.
And they're out to get you, Christian.
They're out to get you, white person.
Those folks had churches that were churches of 50 or 100 people that are now churches of 5,000 people because so many folks in this space, in this religious space, wanted to be with them.
They wanted to hear that.
They wanted to have the conspiracy theories.
That they are hearing from other people, from podcasts, from YouTube channels, from Charlie Kirk, from Alex Jones.
They wanted to hear that at church.
And I think that's what ties those two things together.
That if you're the pastor who is just not going to do that, is going to shut down the church for a while during the pandemic, is going to listen to the government's guidelines.
And by contrast, if you're the one who's going to dig into the conspiracies, who's going to flout the government's guidelines and dare them to come shut you down.
Pastoring in America today, a lot of people think it's a matter of being a leader and having sway over a congregation, but it's really a situation where when people walk into the room, they already have 10 or 20 or 30 voices, sources of authority, sources of information that are shaping the world.
And we live in a situation where if you don't, as the preacher, confirm that world, Then they're going to leave.
And I think this is where Alberta is really good on this point in the book, that if you challenge them, if you provoke them, if you make them uncomfortable, it's not like they'll say, well, this is really good.
I'm here in a religious space to be challenged and shaped.
And molded into a person that I normally wouldn't be or wouldn't be on my own.
The reaction is we're getting out of here because these people are compromising or they're not following Jesus by not following the likes of Donald Trump or whatever conspiracy theory is out there.
Those things, I think, are really, really helpful about this book.
And they really do, the book does really bring you into the sort of field of vision of those folks.
And I talk about that with Tim in this first part of the interview.
Finally, I'll say, I think this book does a really good job of showing us some of the remorse and regret that some of the Christian leaders who gave everything to Trump have about those years.
It does so by digging into kind of their psyche and them having moments of thinking that they had gone too far.
Robert Jeffress is one in the book that seems to have moments like this.
There's others who Tim is in their office, they're having a conversation and there are these moments where they're a little bit vulnerable, a little bit reflective and not sure that everything that happened during the Trump years was worth it or is what God would have wanted.
But it's also too late, because not only have they gone down that path, but they've unleashed forces that have created the culture that is now down that path.
That if you turn your back now on Trump, or if you turn your back now on MAGA, as a pastor in that kind of tradition, very little chance you're going to survive and come out the other end.
So I think that's another really good thing about this book, is it shows us some of the psychological remorse and That not only the elites have, but some of the run-of-the-mill people have about what happened during the Trump years, but not really knowing what to do about it, how to go back on it, how to repent might be a word we might use.
So now I will say, and this will just get into some of my criticisms of the book that I'll share next week, and some of the things that I think need to be pointed out about it, is that I think one of the reasons that the likes of Robert Jeffress are willing to be reflective with Tim Alberta is Tim is part of his culture.
Tim is still somebody who attends and participates in a church that is evangelical and is somewhat conservative.
The book, and I'll talk way more about this next week, is almost exclusively 100% focused on white men.
And you might be thinking, well, that's a lot of evangelicals, and it is.
But there's moments here where that...
That comes up in ways that I'll discuss next week.
Here's my point.
I think you're going to get a Robert Jeffress or Ralph Reed or others being a little bit more comfortable in these interviews than they would have been with someone they perceived as being outside or somebody who wasn't one of them.
And so there's a kind of good and bad there.
You know, Tim is really able to draw out, I think, some of their deep reflections.
On the other hand, it means that the book is shaped by That kind of approach, and it means that the blind spots might be elsewhere with the book, and I'll get to those next week.
If you've read the book and you're frustrated by the book, or if you've seen interviews and you're frustrated by some of the interviews, don't worry.
I'm going to discuss that next week.
I'm going to play for you today the first part of our interview, and you're going to hear a lot of the things that I talked about right now, the positive aspects, the things I learned from the book.
And then next week, what you'll hear are not only my critiques, but also the second half of the interview, where I really do challenge Tim on some of these things.
I wanted to be an interviewer in this case who was willing to kind of dig a little deeper, I think, than some of the other folks who are interviewing him, because they're so wowed by the reporting and by the stories, and for good reason.
But I wanted to dig into more of the theological side, the intellectual side, the intellectual underpinnings of the book that I think create its dynamics surrounding race and gender and theology and church and everything else.
So don't worry, that's coming.
It'll be here next week.
For now, I'll just say, please enjoy my My conversation with Tim, I'm going to play for you the first part, and I appreciate you all being here.
I think this was a good interview.
It was fun to do.
I learned a bunch, and I hope you do too.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco, joined today by a guest many of you will be very familiar with or whose book you are reading at the moment, and that is Tim Alberta.
So Tim, I'll just say first, thanks for joining me.
Brad, thank you for having me.
It's a pleasure to be with you.
You've been everywhere.
You're on the television a lot right now.
You're on all the big interviews, so I hope that that's helped you not be nervous for this show with an obscure professor who is... I hope.
No, this is actually, this is the big time.
This is the one that I've been worrying about.
All right, all right.
Well, let me tell folks about you real quick.
I have already discussed you in my intro, but let me just tell them about you again.
So you are an award-winning journalist originally from Michigan.
We're going to talk a lot about Michigan today.
Currently a staff writer for The Atlantic.
The author of two books, the first one about the rise of Donald Trump and the civil war within the Republican Party, and the one we're going to talk about today, which is Kingdom, Power, Glory, Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.
I have written for many publications, been in D.C.
for over a decade reporting on things and just so much experience at this intersection of politics and religion.
Let me start here.
I know you're getting asked a lot about this in interviews, and I know that some folks listening may have already heard you talk about this, but I think it is worth going through because it really is a wonderful and very clear setup to the entire book.
And that's the first opening image you give us of a day that you describe as the worst day of your life.
Returning home for the funeral of your dad, who was a pastor for over a quarter of a century in the church that you grew up in, and then you giving the eulogy at that funeral and a scolding, many of the people who were your elders, your Sunday school teachers, your longtime members of that church.
I'll just ask this, you're at your dad's funeral, you're given a eulogy, what prompted that scolding?
Yeah, well, it just so happened that my dad had died less than two weeks after my first book had come out, and my first book was pretty unsparing in the examination of Donald Trump, his takeover of the party, and the, you know, the demagoguery and the abuses of power, and I didn't hold a lot back, and so I got plenty of heat from right-wing media and
And that was to be expected.
But because all of that happened right at the time that my dad died, you know, I was sort of in the crosshairs at that moment.
And so when I went back to Michigan where I'd grown up for the funeral, you know, it just didn't... I guess in retrospect it should have.
Maybe I was just ignorant at the time, but I wasn't expecting anybody at the church, the people I'd grown up with, people who'd known me since I was a little kid, I wasn't expecting You know, my book, or Donald Trump, or the MAGA political fracturing to be top of mind, you know, at the funeral for my father.
And it was, unfortunately.
I had people, you know, confronting me and wanting to know if I was still a Christian, wanting to know, you know, how could I be writing these things about, he's our president, right?
God's ordained leader of this country.
That sort of stuff, which, again, you probably have some people listening who are like, well, of course they're saying that, but it's like, you know, in a vacuum, yes, you know, you understand that that sort of stuff goes on, but you're, I guess, in my shoes at that moment, the key here is
Just being in the fog of grief and mourning, and you have this tunnel vision where, like, you're just, you know, you can only see the thing right in front of you, which is the casket.
Like, literally the casket.
And suddenly you've got people kind of blindsiding you with this other stuff.
And it was really, I have to say, What was most upsetting was that it wasn't isolated.
Yeah, it wasn't just happening like at the margins.
It wasn't like a couple of stray comments here or there.
I mean, it became like there was a rhythm to it.
It was like every, I don't know how to quantify it, every fourth or fifth person, it felt like, at the visitation, at the wake, wanted to litigate politics with me and let me have a piece of their mind.
And so, yeah, I mean, it got to the point where I was pretty upset about it.
And then the next day when I gave the eulogy, I just, I can't even remember exactly what I said because that period is such a haze.
but I sort of let them have it a little bit and just said, you know, what are we doing here?
I think what especially set me off was there were a number of people who were parroting Rush Limbaugh who had been, you know, who had been ripping me on his show recently.
And I'm just saying from the pulpit, like, listen, like if Rush Limbaugh is really your guiding light, if Rush Limbaugh is the person discipling you, and you're so invested in Rush Limbaugh that you're willing to confront me at your pastor's funeral, like, maybe we should rethink our priorities.
Maybe we should rethink our information inputs.
And so it was part rebuke, part, I guess, just Call to action, because I knew that there were a lot of other people in the sanctuary that day who didn't say those things to me and who were doing all the proper things, you know, mourning and grieving and wrapping my family in love and in comfort, who We're struggling with those same things happening inside the church at that moment.
And so it was also, I think, in some sense, just an acknowledgment of that to them.
And obviously, as I write, things soon got a heck of a lot worse, probably in no small part because of my commentary.
I think a lot of us are used to this kind of back and forth on Facebook walls.
People are used to the kind of, you know, digital culture wars.
I think what's so striking about this particular vignette is this is your father's funeral.
And at a wake, when you're, as you say, in the fog of mourning, people are coming up to chastise you about your politics and about, you know, about the statements you've made about a president, et cetera, rather than having the tact and the recognition that we're at a moment where we're going rather than having the tact and the recognition that we're at a moment where we're going to mourn and we're going to be together and pursue that
So, as you say, this is emblematic of things you discovered as you crisscrossed the country, you went, you interviewed pastors.
And I think for me, one of the things that I learned most from this book is that a thesis I've had for quite some time really bears out in your reporting, which is COVID-19, I think, reshaped American religion and American Christianity in specific, in ways that scholars will be catching up to for the next decade.
One of the things that you point out is that your father's successor, I think there's two questions here.
incredibly difficult road trying to pastor the church during a pandemic in which Donald Trump was president.
There's another pastor in upstate New York, Pastor Torres, who has a similar kind of coup attempt against him in his own church.
So I think there's two questions here.
One is, what made it so difficult for pastors to try to be leaders in these moments?
The The 2020s, the 2019s, deep into the Trump years and then into the pandemic years.
I'm not sure everyone understands what it might be like to try to lead a congregation during this moment, especially if you're not a Trumpian, especially if you're not necessarily a committed Republican.
It's not an easy road.
Would you mind just giving us a little window into that?
Yeah, of course.
So I think you have to appreciate the degree to which the messaging, the rhetoric, the imagery inside evangelicalism, going back at least a couple of generations now, had really been wrapped up in this idea of an imminent Collision between the forces of good and evil in this country.
And more specifically, what that meant was that those of us inside the church, the good, God-fearing, Bible-believing Christians, that we are one day going to come into conflict with the forces of liberalism and secularism and humanism and progressive forces in the culture and specifically forces in the government.
That are going to attempt to eradicate Christianity from public life, that they are going to bully us and eventually persecute us, and that we will have to stand up and fight for the church.
That has been, I think, a central component of the evangelical experience for millions of people, this idea that, which, by the way, I would just add, like, there were a lot of folks in secular media who, in 2016, when Trump started talking about the Johnson Amendment, who were like looking around saying, what the heck is the Johnson Amendment?
But the genius of that was, I don't know if you would call it a dog whistle necessarily, but it was certainly one of these things where when Trump said it, and when he started hammering that message talking about the Johnson Amendment, specifically in front of evangelical audiences, you would see everybody nodding, and it was clicking, this idea that Basically, that they are coming for you, it's just a matter of time, and that when they come for you, you'd better have somebody who's willing to stand up and fight back, right?
So, you place COVID-19 in the context of that history.
Suddenly, in the spring of 2020, when you've got these governors issuing shutdown orders in California or in Michigan or in any number of other places, this is not seen as a public health It's not seen as some sort of bureaucratic administrative call for pastors and for elder boards to make.
No, this is seen as like the culmination of prophecy, the fulfillment of prophecy.
This is the moment that they warned us about, right?
We knew that one day they would try to shut down our churches.
You know, depending on the sort of church you went to and the people who comprised it, you know, and there's a really vast spectrum here, right?
I mean, we're talking about millions of people with unique experiences.
I mean, obviously, you have some people in these churches who are All the way off the reservation who think that the virus is fake, that it's not even a real thing, and that it's a hoax cooked up to control the population and to get Trump out of office.
And then you've got people who are, you know, they know that the virus is a real thing.
They're still not sure they want to shut down their churches over it.
And then you've got people over here who, you know, they don't want to ever leave their house again, and they're completely petrified.
And then, of course, lots of people in those crevices in between.
But the point is, in that moment, pastors had this incredibly fraught decision to make.
And the ones who chose to comply with the government and to close down their churches, even for some short period of time, like three, four weeks,
That was seen by some significant chunk of their congregations as capitulating, as basically cowering before those forces, those evil secular forces who have been coming for the church for decades, and now the barbarian is at the gates, and you have decided to let them in.
And I think that's hard for people outside of the church to really appreciate just what a predicament that was for the pastors.
One of the things I've discussed in the past with Sam Perry, with Phil Gorski, with others in various contexts has been You know, you mentioned Rush Limbaugh.
So we go back to the 90s, early 2000s.
We have a situation where a Christian 43-year-old suburban guy who's driving to work listens to Rush Limbaugh.
And on the way home, Rush Limbaugh.
Okay, great.
And then he goes to church on Sunday and church on Wednesday.
And Rush Limbaugh's got a lot of influence on this guy.
He listens to him five days a week.
But now we're in a situation in 2020, 2023, 2024, where the people who are attending churches, they have Rush Limbaugh, or maybe they have reruns of him, but they also have the seven podcasts they listen to, they have the nine YouTube channels, they have Charlie Kirk, right?
And so if you're a pastor and you see somebody once a week, twice a week for an hour, your ability to influence their understanding of Christianity itself Maybe significantly less than Charlie Kirk, maybe significantly less than Eric Metaxas, maybe significantly less than some of those other voices that are swirling around.
And so if you don't conform to them, then that congregant is going to look at you and say, well, I'll go find somebody who sounds more like the voices on my podcast, on my YouTube channels, on my radio.
And that's exactly what happens.
So you report on another church, Growing up, you knew this church.
It was moderate size, 100 people, 200 people.
But they don't close down.
They stay open.
And this opens the floodgates.
For them to say, and how about all those other conspiracies they've tried to throw at us and all those other things?
And so COVID-19 turns into the launchpad for the church to become a kind of fountain source of right wing talking points, conspiracy theories and others and what happens.
And I'd love for you to give us a little insight into this and as someone who reported on this and was there.
The church blows up, right?
Now we don't have 100 people, now we got 1,000.
Hey, our monthly tithe wasn't 10 grand, it was 180 grand.
And now we're really in business, let's keep it going.
Is that what it looked like sitting in that pew near your hometown in Michigan?
Yeah man, look, I forget who first coined this phrase, the idea of crazy as a church growth strategy, but that's exactly what it is.
When you kind of strip away all of the, you know, I mean, it's amazing.
It's one of these things where I think, you know, who said that everything that starts as a cause turns into a business and then eventually turns into a racket, right?
And, you know, people on the outside look at church that way, right?
You know, it started as a cause and then it turns into a business, winds up, you know, the natural progression of things, it becomes a racket.
You know, and it's hard to blame them when you look at the sort of church profiteering around COVID-19, because it is exactly what you just described.
I tell it through the eyes of this local pastor, this local church in my hometown in Brighton, Michigan, where I grew up and where my dad had been the pastor of our home church.
But yeah, there's this little roadside church called Floodgate that I'd never even heard of.
You know, they had maybe a hundred people that gathered on Sunday mornings for some number of years and they, kind of a charismatic bent, they did their thing.
Again, I just wasn't even aware of them.
And suddenly when COVID hits and when most of the local pastors, including the guy who took over for my dad at my home church, they all decided to close down and comply with the government orders for some limited period of time.
This pastor, Bill Bolin, at Floodgate, he made the very strategic decision not to close down.
Now, mind you, I just think that this point bears emphasizing.
I am in the camp of folks who believes that the government did, in certain cases and in some ways, overreact and overreach during COVID, and I think that there are perfectly legitimate
I think there's arguments to be made for people who say that, you know, certain areas that weren't being affected shouldn't have closed down or certain policies didn't make sense in certain circumstances.
I'm totally sympathetic to that.
I'm also sympathetic to the idea at its core — I don't really agree with it, but I think the argument can be made in good faith — that churches shouldn't have been closed down, that churches were needed at this moment more than ever, and I think that there's I think that there can be a good faith and plausible argument made there.
However, what happened in this particular case was they didn't just keep the church open because they believed it was really important for believers to be gathering together on Sunday mornings.
They kept the church open as a sort of political rallying cry.
They basically turned the church into a garrison in the culture wars.
They started inviting in all of these kind of fanatical right-wing groups and right-wing figures who have nothing to do with the church.
They're not spiritual in nature.
Some of them are really quite militant and decidedly unchurched in the way that they are approaching things.
And yet the church sort of became a staging ground for this attack on, not just an attack on the left, but an attack on their perceived enemies on the right.
The apostates in the community, like the people at my home church, who would cower in this moment of choosing, right?
All the chips were in the middle of the table and These people had taken the cowardly way out, and so this church and this pastor decided that they were going to call them on it, and that they were going to make a spectacle out of staying open.
What happened, of course, predictably, is that this church grows tenfold with its attendance, and I think they grew six or sevenfold with their revenues, and they wind up purchasing a massive new, you know, building, and now they're a megachurch, right?
This, you know, this congregation of a hundred is now a congregation of a few thousand.
And the really remarkable thing, Brad, that I have to say, whenever I've shared that story over the last few years, in different settings is somebody will say, oh yeah, we got a church like that.
It's called whatever.
It's called Living Water.
It's down the road.
The pastor's name is Bob Johnson, and he did the exact same thing here.
In other words, this was not some isolated example.
We, in fact, have a pretty good idea now that there's been a business model here that's easily duplicated, and it's proven to be fabulously successful.
Yeah, I'm thinking of Awakened Church, the San Diego Church.
There's Rob McCoy's in Ventura County, the Calvary Chapel Church.
They've just blown up one of the One of the things that you do report on too in the book is that the people you say that they bring in, the fanatics, the others, that's the other play is, okay, fight the culture war, don't close during COVID, and then invite Charlie Kirk, then invite David Barton, then invite Dinesh D'Souza, whoever it may be, and wow, yeah, so all of a sudden you're that church in town that can get Charlie Kirk to come or David Barton?
Yeah, of course we're going to go there.
there.
Of course, we're going to feel like we're part of it rather than, like you say, to be part of a church that just doesn't feel as if it's at the forefront of this whole sort of culture war that folks feel like they need to fight.
All right, y'all.
That was part one of my interview with Tim Alberta.
Like I said, part two is coming next week, and we'll dig more into my criticism of the book and the second half of our conversation where I challenged Tim on some of those things.
I think we had a really good discussion, one where we didn't always agree, but we both were willing to kind of hear each other out and make some good points and try to learn from each other.
As always, check our link tree, check the show notes for everything we're up to, find ways to be involved with our community, and get access to everything we're putting out every week.
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