Evangelical Trumpism: Then and Now Part II. w/ Tim Alberta
Part II 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 his criticisms of the book. They come down to three main points: It is a normative project in a journalistic format; it reproduces the theological frame it is trying to fix; it poses a neat separation of the religious and the political in a way that is incoherent.
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My name is Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Back today with part two of my interview with the journalist Tim Alberta.
He is the author of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, a new book on evangelicalism in an age of extremism.
You've probably seen this book mentioned somewhere in The Atlantic or on television or In a big news outlet whether on video or in print or somewhere else.
Last week I had my part one with Tim and we really addressed some of the things that I really appreciated about the book and I mentioned those at the top.
As promised today I'd like to jump into some of my Criticisms of the book and what you're going to hear in my interview with Tim this week are me challenging him a little bit in a way that was respectful and I think we had a really good dialogue and none of it was gotcha or trying to somehow be confrontational for confrontation's sake, but I do think it generated a pretty good discussion.
So you'll hear that in the interview.
If you You don't want to hear my criticism or my analysis.
You just want to go straight to the interview.
Fast forward here about 12 minutes and that'll take you there.
But if you do, stay put and you'll hear kind of some of the things that I thought about when I was reading the book that I eventually asked him about in a way that I think are important and other outlets are not necessarily going to cover.
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All right, y'all.
So I want to start with the structure of the book.
And since I've announced this interview and talked about it on social media, a number of you have mentioned this in your reading of it, and I want to flesh it out from my own reading, and that's this.
The book is really an incredible work of reportage.
As we talked about last week, if you read it, you are brought into the homes, the churches, the offices of Run-of-the-mill evangelicals in the country, people who have studied at Liberty University or attended megachurches where the Trumpian train got going and they weren't sure they wanted to be there.
You're also brought into places like Robert Jefferson's office or a breakfast with Ralph Reed or hanging out with David French or something like that.
Here's my criticism, or at least a point that I want to raise, and I think some of you have expressed this and I want to express it in my way.
Much of the book, 75 or 80% of the book, is that kind of reportage.
Tim is obviously an experienced and really seasoned reporter who does an amazing job of bringing people into those scenes.
However, at the end of each chapter, or sprinkled into each chapter, are ways that Tim imbues the book with his own theological vision for what evangelicalism should be.
He cites the Bible a lot.
He does so in a way that's not reporting what others think.
But he seems to sort of slip in or insert his understanding of what Christianity should be, what church should be, what evangelicalism should be in the United States.
What we would call in the religious studies business or the humanities business or the academic business is this is a kind of mixed project because there is a descriptive element he is describing White evangelicalism in the United States in incredible detail in ways that will teach you a lot.
The descriptive parts of the book are really, really helpful.
That's my takeaway.
There's also a prescriptive element to the book.
What that means is that it's not just that he's reporting on the state of evangelicalism in the United States, but he's prescribing what evangelicalism, what Christianity, what the Church should be in the United States, and really anywhere, at any moment, at any time.
The reason I think this is worth bringing to the surface is the fact that it's easy to miss that.
Because I think when you hear him get interviewed on Atlantic Radio or some big outlet, they're going to ask about these great details he was able to get out of the local pastor, out of David French, out of Robert Jeffress, out of Jerry Falwell Jr., whatever.
They're going to want to know what it was like for him, a guy who was a pastor's son, to grow up in this movement, etc.
That's fine.
What they're not going to ask is, hey, it seems like your journalistic project has a normative dimension.
What that means is it seems like you're reporting on a thing, but you're also telling us on what a thing should be.
So there's a difference, right, between what a thing is And what a thing should be.
Well, he's doing both.
And I asked him about that.
And you'll hear us talk about that.
And, you know, he describes it as a weird project because he kind of admits that he is doing that.
One of the things that he talks about in the interview is that he's not a theologian, even though he's in seminary.
And so he's doing the best he can.
And I take him at that phase value.
I understand that.
And we all do what we can in our projects.
But it is worth mentioning, right, that If you're going to present the book in a way that is a description of evangelicals in an age of extremism.
Then it's worth pointing out that you're also telling us what evangelicals, Christianity, the church should be in an age of extremism or any other age, and you yourself are the one doing that prescribing.
So you're acting as some kind of authority, theologian, Christian, something, who thinks they have the perspective to reveal that.
It's worth pointing out, because it can feel like a bait-and-switch, I think, to some readers, and a lot of you have pointed that out to me.
As we have dialogue on social media and other places.
Now that leads to another dimension of the book that I think follows right from this normative dimension.
So if Tim is prescribing what the church should be, not just describing what the church is or what evangelicalism is, it's worth pointing out that the chapters and the reporting he does, along with the prescribing that he does, Reproduces a vision for what evangelicalism should be.
Now, what does that mean?
What that means is, let's take Paula White Cain, for example.
If you read the book, there are chapters on so many familiar figures, people that you would expect, people that I've already mentioned.
Could be Jerry Falwell Jr., could be Ralph Reed, could be Robert Jeffress, could be others, Charlie Kirk, and so on.
There are very few profiles of women in the book.
And you might say, OK, well.
Are there evangelical leaders who are women in America?
If this is a book on evangelicalism in an age of extremism, are there women who are in charge?
And while men are most likely to be found in the pulpit, there are many women who are very influential evangelicals.
And one of them seems to be Paula White Cain.
Now, whether she's an evangelical or not, I guess we could debate.
I guess we could sort of say she's not an evangelical.
That's why she's not treated here, maybe.
But Paula White Cain, in terms of Trump, in terms of Christians in Trump, in terms of Christians in the White House during Trump, was one of the most influential there was.
She was a official advisor to Trump.
She was somebody who had her feet planted in the White House throughout the entire administration.
So I think for me, when I kept waiting for a Paula White Cain chapter, and Paula White Cain is mentioned about halfway through the book, but never really treated in depth, I began to see the normative dimension of reproducing an evangelicalism that looks a certain way in line with the people who were treated.
Because this is supposed to be a book about evangelicalism in America.
So my thought was like, well, where are the women in evangelical America?
They don't really show up very prominently.
There are profiles of abuse victims and those who have worked to get justice for themselves and others in the Southern Baptist Convention and other places, Rachel Denhollander and others.
But there's not so much a focus on the leaders who are women.
There are also scant profiles of evangelicals of color, pastors.
And again, you might be thinking, well, are there those?
And the answer is yes, there are many who have been very influential.
Now, don't get me wrong.
If this was billed as a book about the state of white evangelicalism in America, I probably wouldn't be talking about this.
Additionally, if it was a book that did not have that normative dimension I just mentioned, I may not be talking about this.
But if you write a book that's supposed to be about evangelicals in America, and you're going to do this prescriptive thing at the end of the chapters where you're going to kind of insert your vision for Christianity and the church and evangelicalism, then I'm going to start to say, well, it seems like not only did you choose certain evangelicals to report on, to describe,
But your vision of what the church should be seems to follow along with fixing them, while neither of you, either those you describe or the prescription that you're making, are paying attention to the women who are in leadership, the people of color who are in leadership, and so on and so on.
One final thought in terms of a kind of criticism of the book.
And that would be the theology that Tim Alberta proposes.
So this is, if point number one today was that there is a normative dimension, if point number two is that normative and descriptive dimensions don't seem to include women or people of color, then number three would be a theological criticism or a religious studies criticism, depending on how you look at it, of Tim Alberta's vision for the church.
What I give him much credit for, and I hope this comes across in both parts of the interview, is that he really does want to take American evangelicals out of a mode where they are in a craven search for power and doing everything they can to be cruel to other people, whether Christian or not.
He seems to want to separate Christianity from American nationalism, and I'm all for that.
That makes total sense to me.
Where I pushed him on this point was to say that he seems to want to do that.
How do you do that?
By creating a situation where people have a pure devotion to Christ that is separate from their social identities, their social commitments, their social particularities, and where in the religious realm, there is a kind of purity.
There's a sense of being only in Christ, of not being, and he actually cites this verse in the interview, Neither Jew nor Greek, nor slave nor free, nor male nor female.
Okay.
There's two ways I pushed him on this, and two things that kept me up at night after I finished the book.
One is, in religious studies, we talk all the time about how it is impossible to separate those realms of the sacred and the profane, the religious and the non-religious.
That if you go back to the early church, which Tim references in the interview, you're not going to find a pure religious realm that was ever separate from politics.
You're going to find a Jesus Christ, a 12 apostles, disciples gathering in the upper room in Acts 2, and so on and so forth, who are implicated, entangled in the politics of their day.
We can never find a pure origin for religion that is untouched by politics, because as soon as human beings begin to do religion, so to speak, they are doing so as beings that have been touched by, are implicated in, political commitments, political influences, political situations.
Now, one effort may be to just flee completely from The political to say, hey, we're going to go create a place that is outside of here.
We're going to create a monastery or a commune or something that is off, untouched, separate from the rest of civilization.
And that itself is a political decision, isn't it?
Because you're choosing not to stay, not to help those who are there, not to rectify a system that is unjust or anything.
You're simply saying we retreat.
We're out.
We're giving up now.
There's a lot of other episodes where we can discuss the merits of retreating and whether or not that's good or bad, whatever.
Here's my point.
The idea that there's a pure realm of religion outside of the political realm, the cultural realm, to me does not hold.
And my example that I brought up with Tim is At the end of the book, where the pastor who took over for his father, Pastor Chris, talks about abortion, and he's doing the thing that Tim really believes in and applauds, which is saying, here's my stance on abortion, but that doesn't mean that our approach as evangelicals should be to go out and spend all of our time in a culture war, an American culture war, trying to change policies.
We should be the kinds of people who live out our values, In ways that persuade people and honor God.
So again, Tim Alberta, Pastor Chris saying, we should not be the kinds of Christians who are in culture wars and trying to gain craven power and spend all of our time yelling nasty things at people walking into Planned Parenthood and all that.
You know what?
I think that's good.
That's positive.
Wonderful.
There's more to say about it, but on its face, that would be a positive development for American evangelicalism.
But Pastor Chris, in that moment, when he's talking about abortion, says he believes life begins at conception.
And when I read that, here's my thought.
He's a Protestant.
Most Protestants throughout American, excuse me, throughout Christian history, from the Reformation forward, have not believed life begins at conception.
If we look at the history of Christian practice and faith and tradition and theology, That idea was rarely present.
Now, we can go through the Catholic Church and the ways that it has approached this issue.
It is complex.
There are papal edicts from 1869 and earlier.
There are dimensions of the debate in the Catholic Church that are somewhat complex.
But without going into an hour of that whole discussion, here's what I'll say.
I don't think there's any chance Pastor Chris thinks life begins at conception apart from a political insurgency of the 70s and 80s led by the very people who were the culture warriors that Tim thinks kind of wrecked American evangelicalism, Jerry Falwell Sr., Francis Schaeffer, Paul Weyrich, and all the others who spent their life trying to take America back for God.
There are the ones that taught evangelicals, like Pastor Chris, life begins at conception.
It was a political maneuver to get an evangelical vote.
Now, I've had many evangelicals say, well, it doesn't mean it's not true.
That's what I believe now.
That's fine.
And we can debate it on theological terms.
It does mean that the only reason you're saying that is because of a political insurgency.
And most Christians throughout history probably did not think that.
St.
Augustine probably did not think that.
Gregory of Nazianzus probably did not think that.
Meister Eckhart probably did not think that.
So when you tell me there's a pure realm of Christian devotion, and that pure realm includes thinking that life begins at conception, I'm like, you're already reciting a political motto that is largely a modern invention, at least when it comes to the Protestant side.
In the very place where you're claiming that there's a pure realm of Christian devotion separate from politics.
Now, there's more to that debate, but I guess for me that's a pretty good case in point of how the idea that you can just—the answer to American evangelicalism is, stop with the culture wars, pure devotion to Christ.
That itself, it doesn't hold.
And it's why me and Dan and so many others have said, look, American evangelicalism needs systemic change, not just orientational change or directional change, in order for it to be something that is a net positive in the American public square.
And that's our view.
It's not Tim's, who I think it comes across in the interview and certainly if you read the book, remains committed to evangelical Christianity and is an American and so on.
Those are my criticisms.
Those are my thoughts.
You will hear those in the interview.
And I hope they make sense.
I did enjoy this interview.
I did enjoy talking to Tim.
And again, I don't think this was a confrontational discussion or one that was done in bad faith.
I think we both tried to learn from each other and really try to take some things away.
And I hope you can tell from my tone, I did learn things from this book.
And I do appreciate the fact that this book exists, even if I have my criticisms of it.
All right, y'all.
Here's the interview.
I appreciate you.
Hope you enjoyed it.
Catch you on the flip side.
And the book is exhaustive in terms of the chapters on household evangelical names.
Robert Jeffress, the Falwells, Ralph Reed, Russell Moore, David French, so on and so forth.
There's no way to cover that in a discussion with you.
And I think, folks, it's a really good reason folks just need to pick up this book and take a look at it.
I want to, if we can, instead of trying to summarize those and really kind of, you know, do a bad job of giving people a new window of that, I wanna dig into kind of a little bit about the structure of the book, Because here's a takeaway I had as I finished it.
You're somebody who moved back to Michigan.
I'm not sure if you, I think you're still back there.
You're still close to home.
You know, you mentioned entering seminary, being part of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church denomination that you grow up in.
There seems to be in this book, not only deep reporting, it's not only just fabulous reportage on the small town pastor, on the Russell Moore or Ralph Reeds of the world.
But it seems to be your attempt to give us a vision of what evangelicalism should look like in this age, rather than what it most likely does look like in this age.
Is that a fair takeaway?
I wouldn't fight you on it.
I mean, it's...
It's a weird project in a lot of ways, Brad, because, you know, I'm a reporter.
That's my training.
It's my profession.
And I pride myself on being not just a good reporter, but a reporter who's able to sort of divorce personal interest, personal emotion, personal attitude toward a subject matter from just being able to report the facts and being able to tell a story in an honest and fair and fact-oriented way.
I think in this instance, I felt compelled obviously to do more than just lay out the I felt compelled to issue a warning here.
I've had a couple of people say that the book probably did more diagnosis than prognosis, and I think that's fair.
In part, that's probably because of my own insecurity.
You know, when you're a pastor's kid, you kind of feel like you've spent your whole life riding your dad's theological coattails, and you feel like maybe you're not necessarily equipped to stand on your own two feet and deliver that sermon.
You know, but I did feel, I certainly felt comfortable leaning into some of the diagnosis because it was just so, it was so evident to me what was going wrong.
And then, you know, I think to the degree that I'm comfortable Offering up some solutions here.
Those do come, I think, kind of later in the book.
But I'm really hopeful that people, when they read it, are able to see the problem clearly enough where they can start having the conversations on their own as far as, you know, how we find our way out of this mess.
But I don't know that I'm necessarily the guy to write You know, I think this had to be, if you track me as I say this, I think this had to be sort of a project that was going to be broader in its scope than one I would normally undertake, but I still had to place some limitations on it.
And frankly, with the help of a good editor, And a couple of good friends and frankly my own pastor who was kind enough to, who's a dear friend of mine, who was good enough to read the manuscript and give me some feedback.
You know, I did pull back at times because I wanted to make sure that I kept this thing on the rails and that I didn't try to do too much with it, if that makes sense.
It does.
It's, you know, one of the things that for me as a religion professor, somebody who's always thinking about the study of religion and things we talk about in this show, one of the things that I I took away, and this comes through in the early chapters on Chris Winans, your dad's successor at the church, but it also, I think, does come through in the ending too.
There seems to be a desire to Separate what you take to be a kind of myopic obsession on the part of American evangelicals, at least white evangelicals, with culture war, with political dominance, and what actually matters.
What we could put in the bucket of religion, or more specifically, theology, more specifically, even building the kingdom of God.
And that to me, so I, you know, as a professor, that's a point of like, Interrogate, right?
Because I guess the question I'm always going to have is, what does that look like for you to think about riding the ship in terms of separating the political realm from the religious realm?
And then, you know, my follow up and anyone who's been in my classes knows this is always going to be Is that ever really possible?
Is that something that is actually something that can be done or is the idea that religion is here, politics are there, its own form of political maneuvering in a way that might be different from the culture war for dominance but nonetheless remains a political position?
You know, okay, so I'll answer it this way.
It's a really good question, and I would caveat it, of course, by saying, like, I'm not, you know, I can't pretend that I have the answers to all this stuff.
I'm trying to, you know, every day trying to think through these things for myself and as a believer, as a husband, as a dad, as a member of a church community, trying to get it right.
What I would say is we've lived through this really strange self-sorting era in American life here over the last, really over the last 15 to 20 years.
I mean, obviously you could trace it back a little bit farther, but in other words, when you study the social science around consumerism, around politics, around geography, physical relocation, what you see in all the summary research is people basically have clustered Physically and otherwise, they've clustered around people who are more like them.
And so this kind of, you know, this dates back to the conversation a few minutes ago about Floodgate Church and people kind of voting with their feet during the COVID period.
So you are much more likely today.
This is why, like, it's funny, you know, I cut my teeth as a congressional nerd, as a congressional reporter back in the day, and this is why some of the conversations around gerrymandering are almost pointless.
Like, it's not that gerrymandering isn't a problem, but it's that actually the geographical self-selection phenomenon is just as important as gerrymandering.
People want to live In communities, in townships, in counties, in congressional districts, with people who vote like they do, much more than they did just 25 or 30 years ago.
The reason I'm sort of explaining all that, so like, you know, you are now, by all the statistics, you are now much likelier to live in an immediate proximity to people who buy the same kind of cars, who watch the same kind of television, who, you know, who shop at the same grocery stores.
You know, it's the Whole Foods Cracker Barrel phenomenon that Dave Wasserman has unpacked so brilliantly.
So the reason I'm citing all that is that Christianity and church attendance and really sort of faith affiliation, faith identity, should be the one thing in life that is distinct from all that other stuff.
It should be the one thing that is so It's so pure and so beautiful and so uncorrupted that even as we cluster, even as we self-sort and self-select into these little clusters and these tribes based on our identities around economics and politics and culture and all of it,
That our allegiance to Christ and our identity as followers of Jesus should be the trump card that sort of exists separately from all of that other stuff.
And instead, I think what's happened, and really we've seen it, this predates Trump, it predates COVID, but I think it's really dramatically accelerated here in the last, you know, six, seven, eight years, is You know, following Jesus and being a Christian has just become another one of those sorting mechanisms.
And so, in other words, you know, during COVID, when people are leaving these churches that they've been members of for Twenty years, twenty-five years.
They're leaving these churches overnight because their pastor has taken a stance that alienates them, not on theology, not on doctrine, but on politics, on culture wars.
You know, to me, when I, you know, so when we wrestle with this question of is it even possible to separate them and how can we, like, I'm not one of these folks who calls for, like, some clean separatist movement.
I don't believe that it's practical and I don't believe that it's useful.
I'm absolutely In the camp that Christians should make their voice heard in the public square, and that they as citizens have every right to try to fight for their values and their beliefs.
But I think the key is always going to be sort of proportionality and perspective.
What I mean by that, at the risk of running incredibly long with this response, what I mean by that is...
You know, John Dixon, the professor at Wheaton, who I quote in Chapter 6 of the book, he's Australian, so of course he has a very cool and different perspective on this.
And he uses this wonderful metaphor where he says, you know, we should think of ourselves as guests at someone else's dinner.
Like, you know, that we're happy to be there and we want to contribute to the conversation, but ultimately it's not our home.
So, like, if we don't win out in the conversation, or if we don't get our way, or even if eventually, you know, somebody flips over the table and tells us to get out of their house and, you know, chases us down, like, okay, then that's what we do, because it's ultimately not our home.
I think that there's a way for Christians to be engaged robustly and healthily engaged with civic debate while still remembering that the debates that they're having in the public square go to political, national, social identity.
But those identities are fleeting and they are ultimately secondary to your identity in Christ.
And if you can just tell yourself that every day, if you're able to sort of really rigidly order those identities, then I think that you'll be okay.
But it's a hard thing to do, obviously.
As I read the book, I understood your very strong desire to reorient the people in the church you grew up in, in the Christian orbit in which you still exist, the denomination, the whole kind of cosmos, to say, look, the emphasis on dominance, the craven desire for power, is doing a couple things.
It's distorting our focus as a community, or as a denomination, or as a religious tradition.
It's also turning people off to us.
Evangelicals are, you know, the least liked religious group.
And you note that several times in the book, I guess.
And this is where I would just push you a little bit and where I'm, you know, this is where I kept going as I read the book was, OK, you talked about Separating those identities, that there's a pure dimension of religious devotion, and then there's the social identities we all have, whether it's political, whether it's vocational, whether it's career-wise, whatever.
But I remember so specifically being in a room where Cornel West and other black preachers were talking, this was years ago, And I believe it was James Cone, I'll have to think back to the panel, was talking about how, you know, I was black first and then I converted to Christianity.
And for me to ever separate my blackness from my Christianity would be impossible.
And so as I thought through the book, I'm not going to lie, part of me thought, The idea of separating those so clearly and adopting a gospel of personal salvation where you want to reorient your community from craven political dominance to let's go out and save souls is its own form of privilege and its own form of political vision making because it is saying, here's what our politics should be.
Here's how our identities should be rendered.
And it may in its own way be a kind of reiteration of a kind of white evangelicalism, if not an evangelicalism writ large.
And even if it's not the kind of Trumpian endless war that we're used to, it does sort of turn to aspects of white Christian American ethos that have been present for large swaths of the country's history.
And for many are kind of sometimes tough to understand just because separating those identities and making those political decisions isn't necessarily a choice they have, or if it is, they're not sure they can make it.
So that's a very muddled question and a very muddled statement.
I apologize for that, but wondering if that makes any sense.
No, I track what you're saying, and I'm not oblivious to the point you're making.
But what I would say is that I think the flaw in that thinking is that it's forcing the conversation to be had in the frame of American Christianity.
And specifically, I guess what I mean by that is that You know, this country is, you know, 200 and, what's my math, almost 250 years old, right?
You know, we are quite convinced that this all began with us and that it'll all end with us, but that's, you know, it's not true.
You know, when you're studying the origins of the church and when you're considering the growth of Christianity in the first, second, third centuries, right, you're dealing with people who are in Extraordinarily difficult circumstances who are brutalized and oppressed and persecuted and martyred for their faith in Jesus.
And it's interesting, you know, and I say this a couple of times in the book, but I think that it's challenging for anybody in a position of comfort.
through the ages.
But particularly challenging for Americans, white evangelical Christians in this country, I think it's extraordinarily difficult for us to relate to the Gospels and to relate to the epistles and to relate to the struggles in the early I think it's extraordinarily difficult for us to relate to the Gospels and to relate to the epistles and to relate
We cannot appreciate what it is that the, not only what it is that these people were going through, but how they strengthened their relationship with Christ, not in spite of it, but because of it.
So the reason I'm saying all that is that I truly believe that, you know, when Paul says that there is no slave or free, no Jew or Gentile, no man or woman, but that we're all one in Christ Jesus, like, I don't take that as like a rhetorical flourish.
I take that as gospel.
I take that as a command to us to Subjugate all other identities and make them secondary.
So, now, in the most immediate context in writing the book, I think that's looking at the American identity and, boy, oh boy, does that get people upset, right?
I mean, you know, including, you know, people who I call friends and family and, you know, people who, what, you don't love this country anymore?
Like, no, stop.
You know, of course I love the country.
I think what's lost in these conversations, and I appreciate the Black Church tradition.
I've had quite a bit of experience with it in my travels over the years.
I have friends in the Black Church, people who I respect enormously in the Black Church, and have had some really good, constructive, and challenging conversations with folks in the Black Church about this very thing.
I think at the end of the day, though, If we try to, the conversation I'm trying to force with the book is one that has to take place outside of the context of the American experience and really have a 20 century long running dialogue about what does it look like when people are willing to abandon all of these identities
That have been primary, so tribal, ethnic, political, national identities through the ages.
What does it look like when they're willing to lay down those identities and pick up the cross and try their very best, imperfectly, you know, inconsistently, but try their very best to live in just that identity?
And what you see, typically, is that it produces something really beautiful.
And conversely, what you see when people fail to do that, when they elevate those secondary identities ahead of their identity in Christ, what it tends to produce is oftentimes something really awful, something really violent, something that tends to
It tends to be quite destructive, and not just destructive to its immediate targets, but also destructive in the sense that, as you said earlier, it turns away
Anyone on the outside looking at Christianity, anyone looking at the church who might otherwise be interested, they see something that they see a means to an end, sort of weaponizing a wielding of faith, really just as a way to dominate their opponents in the culture.
Yeah.
So, one more question.
I'm going to push you one more time and then we'll sign off because I know I've taken up some of your afternoon here.
No, no.
Push away, man.
This is great.
Let me throw one more question at you here, which is, okay, so I understand the kind of vision you just outlined there to say one's identity should be In Christ, to leave behind the social identities.
And that verse that you cited is quite interesting because Paul talks about, you know, a social identity as neither slave nor free, but also talks about a gendered identity, neither man nor woman.
So, I think there's an interesting thing to discuss there with that verse.
So, I understand, though, the theological vision to say pure identity in Christ, earthly identity that is fleeting, is finite, etc.
Okay, great.
I was struck at the end of the book, at the very last pages, when Chris Winans is giving a sermon that seems to really move you.
It's one that seems to really sort of provide a really wonderful kind of tying together of your vision for what you hope evangelicalism might be in the United States, rather than what it largely is in the United States.
And he's talking about abortion, and it maps onto statements you make throughout the book about abortion and the ways that evangelicals have fought for the pro-life stance based in policy, right?
Based in a, let's overturn Roe v. Wade and so on.
And whether or not those victories have come, there's been a large loss of The persuasion battle.
Most folks aren't persuaded that life begins at conception.
And Chris Wyndon says in the sermon, life begins at conception.
That's what he thinks, right?
This is, for me, one of those moments where, like, that pure identity and the political identity can never be separated.
Because when I hear someone like Pastor Chris say, life begins at conception, my immediate thought is like, That's largely a modern position, right?
Like that's a position that if we talk about the Catholic Church, we can talk about 1869 or a little bit sooner in terms of adopting that.
When we talk about Protestants, like 1971, the Southern Baptists are all about abortion in some form.
90% of Texas Baptists are like, you know, we should have abortion in some form.
And then that flips.
It flips really quickly because of the culture wars that you discuss at such length.
Throughout the book.
Here's my point, is even in the attempt by Pastor Chris to articulate a vision that is one where you are a guest at the table, right?
That, as you mentioned earlier, and you still have this firm belief that is in that realm of the pure Christian belief of, I want to protect life because that's what God does.
As soon as he says life begins a conception, I'm thinking, That's as much a modern political belief as it is a Christian theological belief.
Like, we may have Gregory of Nyssa in the second century believing that.
Maybe not.
Augustine surely didn't.
Thomas Aquinas probably not, right?
Like we could go track it and there's a lot of disagreement and most Christians throughout history probably don't believe that.
So for me that's case in point of even as we try to separate these two and we try to have the pure versus the impure, the earthly versus the infinite.
They end up mixed in ways that sometimes we're not even aware of as we articulate our understandings of those identities in those realms.
Again, long statement there.
Hope that makes some sense.
As soon as I read those last pages of the book, it's something I wanted to bring up with you and see if it registered at all.
Well, yeah.
I mean, it does.
It's tricky because when we, yeah, we don't know, if we went back to, you know, the first century, if we, I just said a minute ago, if we had like a 20th century running, you know, conversation with the church fathers and with the leading thinkers, what would they have said about X, Y, and Z?
We don't know.
We have some idea, right?
So, is it, Is it fair to conclude that certain social advancements, or not even social advancements, certain knowledge that we have gained over the centuries that would not have been available to people earlier on, that we have perhaps reached new conclusions about certain things
And I don't know that that's necessarily a change in theology, or is it just a change in thinking.
I don't know.
I mean, that's hard.
You know, like in the case of Pastor Chris saying that, I mean, what's interesting is that he's saying, like, I personally believe that life begins at conception, but then in the next breath, talking about how that belief is not going to
How that belief does not then extend itself into a desire to dominate the country through culture wars and through political campaigns.
How he would like to protect unborn life because he believes that he has a biblical mandate to do so, and yet he Divorces that biblical mandate from the desire to win campaigns and to sort of dominate the society around him.
To me, that's actually a pretty good example of being able to compartmentalize, more or less, what one's own closely held and most sincere religious convictions are, being able to have those here, but then also being able to sort of survey the cultural, societal landscape and say,
I think here's the appropriate way for me to go about carrying out that conviction.
I don't think there's ever going to be a, and I, you know, if I didn't get this across earlier, I would just say it again, like, I don't have all the answers here.
I certainly don't believe that there's like some magic formula where we can Where we plug in these really thorny, complicated questions and kind of spit out a neat resolution on the other side.
But I think that if you are, like Pastor Chris is, really, really self-aware and really on guard against allowing your sort of, your base, primal your base, primal instincts for conflict and for vanquishing one's foes and, you know, dominating the culture around you,
If you're able to be aware of that and are able to, even on an issue that really animates you, really galvanizes you, like the abortion issue does for him, I actually think that that's, in many ways, a blueprint for You know, looking at an issue that's so important and that you don't, in his case, you don't even view it as a political issue.
You've used it as a spiritual issue, right?
That humanity is made in the image of God.
And yet, because it's not a political issue, why are we politicizing it?
If you look at the issues that are the most pressing inside of evangelicalism today, When you think about abortion, when you think about sexuality, you know, the things that tend to really get the dander up at a Charlie Kirk, you know, TPUSA, America, what is it?
Freedom Night in America rally, you know?
Those issues, You'll hear people say, well, it's right here.
Like, we can see, you know, God made the man and woman, right?
Like, it's right here.
Okay, so if the issue is actually not a political issue, if it is in fact a spiritual issue, then why are you so invested in political solutions to that issue?
And I think the reason I highlight Pastor Chris being so eloquent in speaking about that at the end of the book is he's saying, look, I'm deeply invested in the abortion issue, but I'm not invested in it so much as a political issue because I don't think that we ultimately change the equation here.
I don't think that we ultimately win hearts and minds.
I don't think that we persuade anyone by trying to beat people over the head politically or by trying to by trying to own the libs or beat up on our opponents in the culture wars here.
I think the way that we try to honor God and the way that we try to dignify human life and protect human life as much as possible is to get back to our biblical ethos of the value of human life.
And in his case, yeah, he says, you know, I believe that life starts at conception.
Whether others believe in that position, whether they hold that same position, whether they're somewhere else, I think that if they were to engage with Pastor Chris and understand the sincerity of his conviction and also, I guess this is the most important part, and also understand that he's not holding that position to try to defeat them somehow.
He's not holding that.
He's not wielding that position as a way to sort of outflank them politically, but he's holding it as a...
As a belief and as a starting point for a conversation around this question of the dignity of human life, then I think that that's a better starting point for us, just whether you're inside the church or whether you want nothing to do with the church, if we're going to start having some of these
If we're going to make any headway in having these really hard conversations, I think it's better, I think it's more constructive to use that model.
And in the case of Pastor Chris, it just so happens to be, you know, what he really believes.
It's not that he's like holding himself out there trying to show some better way.
That just, you know, it happens to be the way that he approaches these things, which is what I think makes him You know, incredibly effective, but also, as I write about early in the book, sort of makes him a target for people who, you know, they would rather wield the sword than the cross.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it certainly does.
And the way you describe him, I have met many Pastor Chris's who are targets.
I, at one point, was a Pastor Chris, just, you know, didn't want to go hunting or shooting, wanted to read books, wanted to, like, hang out.
Be a Christian man in ways that oftentimes did not fit the mold of those around me, so I understand what that's like for him.
I think also, though, You know, as you spoke there, I think it's interesting to think about, and you say this in the book, and I think you've said it today, is that something like abortion rises to the level of doctrine in many churches.
It's not about, do you believe in the Trinity?
You know, it's, where are you when it comes to abortion?
Where are you when it comes to the pronouns?
And when I think of Pastor Chris, the vision you articulate for his understanding of political engagement on the part of the church is certainly in my mind, an improvement upon the endless culture war, the craven desire for dominance that we've seen in so many other an improvement upon the endless culture war, the craven desire for I think the question that I would have, and you can't answer this 'cause you're not Pastor Chris, is what happens if I do come to the church?
You know, and I say, hey, actually, I don't think life begins at conception.
I love Jesus, but I think abortion should be allowed in these cases, up to this many months, this many weeks.
Here's the reasons.
Here's the Christians from history that agree with me.
Here's the folks that talk about it scientifically.
Are we good?
Can I attend your church?
You know, and I don't know what Pastor Chris would say.
I do know, and I think you chronicle this in the book really well.
Most evangelical churches in the country would say, Here's the door.
Thanks for coming.
Come back when you decide to love Jesus, a.k.a.
when you decide to get right on the abortion issue.
That's an interesting thing.
Alright, I have taken up way more of your time than we planned.
I appreciate so much.
Just all of the, not only the incredible reporting that goes into this book, but the really, you know, thoughtful answers to my questions today.
You're everywhere at the moment, but I'm sure people will still want to connect with you.
What's the best way to do that as you kind of continue to talk about the book and everything surrounding it?
Boy, that's a good question.
Well, I'm still on Twitter, or X as they call it.
And I say, I emphasize still because one of these days Elon's going to push me too far and I'll probably have to get off.
But for now, you can just find me there.
I try to tweet out most of the media things that I do.
So it's just at Tim Alberta on the X app, as it's now known.
But yeah, thank you for having me, Brad.
And you know, I wish that
I wish we could do this over a coffee or a beer or something and do it for hours because, you know, I think the secret ingredient to all the questions you're asking is a big old question mark that, you know, we just... It's really hard, I think, in a constructive and good faith way to start to peel away at
The essence of what is Christianity in this country, in this context, in this moment?
Because what you said at the end there is right.
I mean, we've, and I think I say this in the second chapter, talking with one of the pastors, like, we have taken In so many churches, not just in conservative white evangelical churches, in churches across the board, I think we've taken the biblical standard and we have set it aside and we have embraced a different standard.
And there is a litmus test, a barrier to entry, a whatever you want to call it that sort of, you know, it goes back to my point about the self-sorting mechanisms.
Like, you have to hold to a certain viewpoint, a certain tribal identity.
You have to present a certain membership card.
To be a part of some of these churches now, to be a part of most of these churches now, and that is really troubling.
But actually peeling back the layers to get to the why and to the how we might go about fixing it, that's really hard.
And boy, you know, I'm grateful for you and for a lot of others who are willing to have the hard conversations to get there.
Yeah, no, this is why we, at least for me, when I left the church and left ministry, I never left the religion game, so to speak.
And, you know, I'm in my 40s now.
There's times I wake up and I'm like, why didn't you just try to make a lot of money, man?
What's wrong with you?
And anytime I get down that road, I think to myself, why am I alive?
If it's not to ask these questions, then that would be a big waste of a chance to be a breathing, living being who's aware of himself and aware of others and aware of this very complex and painful condition we have as human beings.
And so, anyway, I agree with you.
You know, I think for me, there's always a question of what is that biblical standard?
Who gets to decide what the biblical standard is compared to the other standard?
You know, I mean, there's endless questions here.
What is a biblical standard?
Whose are we talking about?
Are we talking about Teresa of Avila?
Are we talking about Tertullian?
Are we talking about, you know, Gregor of Nazion?
Are we talking about James Cone, James Baldwin, Cheon?
We could go on and on and on.
Tertullian and James Baldwin in the same sentence.
There it is.
Look, you can be on CBS and have great conversations, but you have to come here to hear Tertullian and James Baldwin in the same sentence, so there it is.
Amen, brother.
Amen.
All right, y'all.
As always, check the show notes.
You can support us.
We do this show three times a week best we can, and you can find me at Bradley Onishi.
You can find us at Straight White JC.
We'll be back later this week with It's in the Code, the weekly roundup, but for now we'll say thanks for being here.
