Lee
[00:00:00] I'm Lee C. Camp and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
Tim
Here we are... save for an intervening event, we're gonna have a rematch of Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
Lee
That's Tim Alberta, journalist and author of the New York Times runaway bestseller, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.
Tim
How did we get into this mess?
Lee
Today, Tim and I discuss the political and social landscape, particularly through the lens of Christian nationalism.
Tim
Christian nationalism is the merging of bad history and bad theology that puts us in a very precarious place.
Lee
Today, is it possible for so-called religious and secular alike to work for a pluralist society?
Tim
We are called to hold one another accountable.
Lee
All coming right up.[00:01:00]
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
As I write these words, I'm sitting in a cafe in Florence, Italy, teaching and traveling with college students for a semester abroad.
One of the things that's so poignantly clear about the history, culture, politics, and art of the glorious city of Florence is that it cannot be understood without an understanding of church history.
Now, this is not, I take it, a value judgment. It's a simple matter of fact.
One may despise that history, another may celebrate it. But whatever the case, the depths and breadth of the history and culture around me at this very moment cannot be sufficiently understood without an engagement with the theological convictions which inform the ways of life which unfolded here.
Here's one simple architectural example. A few blocks away from where I'm sitting on the eastern side of the historic downtown is Santa Croce Church, the [00:02:00] principal Franciscan church in Florence, while on the western side is Santa Maria Novella, the Dominican church, both themselves impressive structures, while between them the city skyline is dominated by another church, which the locals called the Duomo, one of the most celebrated architectural achievements of the western world.
If you want to understand Florence-- well, actually, if you want to understand something about the Renaissance, you have to know something about the history of these churches. In the same way, U. S. history and politics simply cannot be understood apart from U. S. church history.
Our guest today is Tim Alberta, author of a book examining a particular piece of our current political predicament.
Tim
If you were just to try to explain to a space alien who landed here from another planet, how did we get into this mess?
Lee
Well, then, he says, one would have to examine the segment of American Christianity which sought to merge identities, to merge...
Tim
...faith identity with your identity as [00:03:00] an American and your identity as a conservative Republican American.
Lee
He believes this merging, based on some revisionist history and revisionist theology...
Tim
...puts us in a very precarious place.
Lee
Why should we care about this history and its effect on today's politics?
Tim
An aggressive, belligerent, well-organized, really loud minority can run circles around a really passive, complacent majority.
Lee
Here's our interview with Tim Alberta.
Tim Alberta is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and staff writer for The Atlantic magazine. He formerly served as chief political correspondent for Politico. He's also written for a great host of publications, including Wall Street Journal, The Hotline National Journal, Sports Illustrated, and National Review.
Today, we're discussing his newest book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.
Welcome, Tim.
Tim
Hi, Lee. Thanks for having me.
Lee
Grateful to have you with us.
So you, in your book, you [00:04:00] indicate that preaching your father's eulogy has been something of a turning point for you. Would you kind of unpack that for us and give us a little bit of that story?
Tim
Sure.
Yeah, my, uh, my dad was a pastor, and of course that makes me a PK, a pastor's kid, and, and grew up in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. And, and we grew up outside of Michigan, small suburb of Detroit called Brighton, and that's where my dad had really put down his roots and helped to grow a church there - Cornerstone, my home church - from a pretty small congregation when I was a little kid, into a pretty big congregation by the time I was an adult.
My dad died very unexpectedly in the summer of 2019, had a massive heart attack.
And as it so happens, he died right in the middle of a publicity tour for my first book, which was all about the collapse of the post-George W. Bush Republican party and Donald Trump's successful hijacking of the new GOP.
And so, [00:05:00] because my book was critical of Trump, and because it was in the news so much, right at the moment that my dad died, that when I went back home for his funeral, I got an earful about it from some of his congregants.
And, you know, these are people who I'd known most of my life, you know, they'd known me since I was a little kid. A number of them felt that it was appropriate, on the occasion of his wake at the church, to kind of let me have it.
That obviously didn't go over very well, and so the next day when I gave the eulogy at the funeral, I let them have it a little bit. And, you know, I tried to be somewhat dignified about it, but, you know, just kind of issued a little bit of a rebuke and a challenge to say, you know, if you're willing to set aside decades of knowing a pastor's son, knowing who he is and what's in his heart and what he believes, because you heard a segment on Rush Limbaugh's show about me, that [00:06:00] suddenly you're willing to turn...
I don't know to this day, Lee, honestly, whether I should have done that or not. I, maybe I should have just taken the high road and let it go. But I said what I said, and that actually made things even worse.
And in some ways set me down this road to write this book, to try and understand not just what was happening in my church, but to understand what was happening in the church.
Lee
Let me ask you to start unpacking this kind of fundamental shift that you're describing.
Throughout the book, you kind of narrate a number of shifts, I think, but talk to us about this fundamental shift that you began to describe, that's occurring in American evangelicalism over the last number of decades.
Tim
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. When I was a kid growing up in the church, you would hear and kind of just feel like you were marinating in this pretty consistent [00:07:00] message around not just spiritual warfare as a general proposition, but more specifically, this idea that in America we were headed towards conflict. That one day there was going to be this cosmic clash between the good, Bible believing, God fearing Christians inside of the church, and the wicked, pagan, secular progressives out in the culture who wanted to, uh, who wanted to defeat God and who wanted to take religion out of American life and who wanted to wage war on Christianity.
So there was that rhetoric, and that kind of message was always there. And yet, even as it was always there, it felt very much kind of on the back burner. It felt very much abstract.
And I will say that maybe one of the biggest changes that I've noticed over the past 30 years is to [00:08:00] see the degree to which it has moved from the back burner to the front burner.
In other words, this sense of imminent conflict, this talk of, you know, be ready, because one day you're going to have to stand up and fight for your faith, that kind of thing, it went from something that felt very abstract to suddenly very immediate and very concrete and very urgent. And I think that that, in a way, is probably the best description of this maybe 30 or 40 year arc of evangelicalism in America.
There's always been-- dating back even farther than 30 or 40 years, I mean, you go back to the, certainly to the late '50s, early '60s, and then into the '70s with Falwell senior and his allies, there's always been that talk around, you know, the militarism that we would one day have to make a choice between cowering or, or fighting for our faith.
That's always been [00:09:00] there. But I think, now, it has actually manifested in many of our churches and in many of our faith communities in ways that we never really expected, at least, at least that I never really expected.
Lee
You recount quite a large number of case studies that kind of take us into the specifics of some of those shifts.
Robert Jeffress is one that particularly stood out to me. Maybe describe his work and some of the ways that you saw, and the shifts occur in his work.
Tim
So Pastor Robert Jeffress is in charge of one of the really storied American megachurches, which is First Baptist in Dallas, Texas.
And, well-- and I should just step back to say, you know, the reason most folks would know that name, both Christian folks and non Christian folks alike, is that, you know, Robert Jeffress has become arguably the most outspoken and most [00:10:00] visible, most loyal evangelical ally of Donald Trump's over the past eight years or so.
It's interesting... as I write in the book, there are sort of these inflection points in, in Pastor Jeffress's own political and professional journey that, that are very much one and the same, I think at times, that suggests that there's a certain incentive structure at play here.
The first one is when you go back, at this point, I think it would probably be about 25 years ago or 30 years ago, where Pastor Jeffress at the time was leading a much smaller church out in Wichita Falls, Texas, and he had a congregant from his church who discovered at the local library that there were two books basically explaining homosexuality to, you know, younger children.
Uh, one of them was called Heather Has Two Mommies. Uh, the other one was, I think, called, like, Daddy Has a Roommate or something like that.
In any event, [00:11:00] Pastor Jeffress-- what began as kind of a very small scale feud with the local library, where basically he called the library and said, "Hey, you know, I'm, I'm not returning these books to you. I'll pay the fines, but these don't belong in your, in your library." Well, it turned into a national flashpoint.
Suddenly, you had media from all over the country descending on his town there of Wichita Falls, the ACLU gets involved, there are lawsuits filed, and it turns into this huge skirmish. And in the process, his church grows, and his celebrity grows, and Jeffress, sort of, in that episode, gets a taste for the culture wars and what is to be gained from the culture wars.
Having the media spotlight, having the town and then the greater community hanging on the every ebb and flow of this battle. [00:12:00] And then really, I think, framing it as a battle that's about something more than just what scripture says about sexuality, what scripture says about marriage, but really framing it in much bigger terms around this idea of America's core values being betrayed and that if we don't do something about it, we're going to lose this country.
I think that was a very formative episode for Pastor Jeffress, and it's one that I think will echo throughout now many of the more recent episodes that, that we find ourselves dealing with in the evangelical church in America.
The one other thing I would mention, Lee, that I think is very instructive, is that Robert Jeffress, for years after that episode, was still pretty much an unknown commodity. That was just kind of a single flashpoint. Until the 2008 presidential campaign, when Robert Jeffress became, I think, probably the most outspoken evangelical [00:13:00] in the country against Mitt Romney because he was preaching, Robert Jeffress was preaching that a Mormon could not possibly uphold America's Judeo-Christian ethic as president, that we needed a Christian president. And both during the '08 and the 2012 presidential campaigns, Robert Jeffress really became a celebrity by bludgeoning Mitt Romney and bludgeoning Mormonism at large and making this case, very, very passionately, that we needed to decide, once and for all, as Christians, do we or do we not need a Christian president?
What's so remarkable, obviously, in Robert Jeffress's story is not just that he found celebrity by picking these fights and by raising his profile in the political world in this way. But then, just four short years [00:14:00] later, after the 2012 election, after telling, after lecturing so many of his fellow believers on, on, on basically the moral litmus tests and the biblical theological litmus tests that we were to apply to politics, just four short years later, there he is standing shoulder to shoulder with Donald Trump, promising that this is the man who will protect us and who we can trust because he's strong enough and tough enough and mean enough to protect us from persecution from a secularizing America. And, and that is, I think, that transformation is yet another window into how things have changed so quickly.
Lee
You recount how, not long after the Access Hollywood tape had dropped, this, um, distressing episode around Donald Trump, and then Jeffress's response, I think it was on television, interview, where he says, "I don't want some meek and mild leader or somebody who's going to turn the other cheek. I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation." Which does seem to be a very significant kind of shift there. [00:15:00]
Would you, as well, describe for us the way in which Liberty University, which is another kind of significant case study you have in the book, plays into your narrative?
Tim
Sure. I think when you go back and look at the formation of the religious right, at least as we've known it for the past couple of generations in this country, Jerry Falwell Sr. had already been very successful, uh, as of the, you know, mid to late 1960s, building out this megachurch, Thomas Road Baptist in Lynchburg, Virginia. And he'd been really, I think, uniquely successful early on, as a television guy, recognizing that, you know, there had been a lot of pastors who had been successful with radio, but, but Falwell Sr. was really one of the first to figure out exactly how to be successful with television.
And I, and I cite a statistic at one point in the book describing how, I forget the year, but that at one point he was the single [00:16:00] most telecast program in the whole country. Not just most telecast religious program, the most, period.
So this was a guy who had really found incredible success, commercial success, with his church. But as of the early 1970s, Falwell Sr. Is looking around, recognizing that the church alone isn't enough, that the culture is slipping away from Christians, that Democrats and progressives and secular humanists, that they are now posing sort of an existential threat to Christian America, and that the church alone isn't enough to fight back.
And so, he begins to look at ways to kind of form a bigger machine, in which the church is just one cog. And so, he takes this little Baptist college in Lynchburg, Virginia, that nobody had ever heard of, it's got like a thousand students, called Lynchburg Baptist College, and he turns it into Liberty [00:17:00] University.
He really cleverly weaves together the idea of a Christian education with a kind of Republican culture warring institution. He changes the colors of the school from gold and green to red, white, and blue. They become, they become the Liberty Flames. They begin touring the country doing these 'I Love America' concerts to-- with the school choir, to raise money.
And it's fabulously successful. I mean, Falwell was a, was a master entrepreneur. Also a master manipulator, in my view. And this was someone who knew how to both tap into sort of the healthy patriotism of some of his fellow Christians, but also how to prey upon the unhealthy and over-realized sort of nationalism of many of his fellow Christians.
And so, he builds Liberty into [00:18:00] this behemoth over the years. So he's got the megachurch, he's got the, the huge university now, and then he also has the moral majority, as of the late 1970s. And so those three cogs of the machine are working, really, in unison to create a movement that changes the Republican Party, and I would argue that really changes American Christianity, at least changes American Reformed Protestantism in ways that we are still dealing with today. Because, you know, what Falwell and his allies were so effective at doing was effectively merging your faith identity with your identity as an American and your identity as a conservative Republican American. Those lines began to blur in a big way as of the 1980s.
And I think, again, if you were just to try to explain to, you know, a space alien who landed here from another planet, how did [00:19:00] we get into this mess? I think that's where you would trace it back to.
Lee
You're listening to No Small Endeavor and our conversation with Tim Alberta on the implications of Christian nationalism on U. S. politics.
I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at lee@nosmallendeavor.com.
You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen. These notes include links to resources mentioned in this episode, as well as a PDF of my complete interview notes, as well as a full transcript.
We have several other episodes on the intersection of Christianity and American politics. Kristen Du Mez on her book Jesus and John Wayne, or a conversation with New York Times opinion writer David French on conservatism without Trumpism, plus another episode that's a great [00:20:00] conversation between Kristen Du Mez and David French. And also check out our episode with Russell Moore on his journey out of the Southern Baptists, and Randall Balmer on the rise of the religious right.
You can find the links to those episodes by going to the episode page for this episode that you're listening to now.
We'd be delighted if you'd tell your friends about No Small Endeavor and invite them to join us on the podcast, because that helps extend the reach of the beauty, truth, and goodness we are seeking to sow in the world.
Coming up, Tim Alberta and I continue to discuss the ways Christian nationalism is affecting the U. S. political landscape and American Christianity.
There are some important theological categories that are either implicitly or explicitly dealt with in your book, and so I'd like to kind of address a few of those and raise some discussions about how you think of some of these and frame some of these.
The first one, nationalism, you've already used the [00:21:00] distinction between nationalism and patriotism. How do you define the difference between those two?
Tim
Well, if I had to do it off the top of my head, I would say the difference is-- I actually do include a quote in the book from George Orwell, who I think actually does a pretty decent job of defining the two. He says, basically, that patriotism is defensive in nature, that, you know, you are defending your homeland, whereas nationalism is sort of, by definition, offensive. It is aggressive, it is antagonistic.
Yeah, and so I'll kind of merge that into my own definitions of it, which is, patriotism is, I think, about pride, and it's about appreciation. It is about a love of country that is properly realized and that is proportional to your identity. That's how I would define it.
Whereas, I think nationalism is, it is militant, and it is wrapped up in the idea that this is your [00:22:00] dominant identity, and it must subjugate, then, all other identities. And I think that that is where it becomes very dangerous for a Christian, because-- and look, obviously, the term Christian nationalism is thrown around now so much that we're not entirely clear what that means.
And that, maybe that was your next question, Lee, I don't know. But I, to address that briefly... I think that Christian nationalism is not just a contradiction in terms, but I also think that what you are dealing with, with Christian nationalism is the merging of bad history and bad theology. And what I mean by that is, so much of the Christian nationalist ideal finds its power in a version of America that never really existed, right?
This idea, propagated by the likes of David Barton and others, and it's becoming-- you know, if you don't know the name David Barton, anyone out there listening, you know, this is someone who you should familiarize [00:23:00] yourself with, because he is incredibly influential and he is right smack dab in the middle of the curriculum wars now happening in the public schools.
But David Barton is a self-proclaimed historian who goes around the country, you know, lecturing in churches, basically arguing that no, we were meant to be a Christian nation. Not just a nation guided by, informed by Judeo-Christian ethics and ideals, but no, that that really the founding fathers wanted this to be a Christian nation, and that they were winking and nodding at us as they framed the Constitution, and that we have now lost that Christian nation and that we need to take it back.
I mean, that is really at the heart of the Christian nationalist crusade, is this idea that we were given something, that we were bequeathed something, and that it has been stolen from us and that now we must reclaim it, right?
So that is bad history. It's, it's really bad history. But what makes it, I think, [00:24:00] especially dangerous then, Lee, is that that bad history is sort of parlayed into bad theology.
This idea that, as Steve Bannon and others will tell you, that we are a covenant nation. That the United States is not just a blessed nation, but that we are a covenant nation. That we are, by fighting to preserve America as an idealized post-World War II, Leave it to Beaver America that we are all so, so keen to reclaim, that by fighting for that, that we are simultaneously fighting for the kingdom of God. We have a responsibility, as Christians, to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance.
Again, that bad theology would be dangerous on its own. The bad history would be [00:25:00] dangerous on its own. But I think it's the converging of the bad history and the bad theology that puts us in a very precarious place.
Lee
One of the ways that I have found helpful to frame it, that I think overlaps with what you just said, but in a slightly different way, is to think of Christian nationalism as giving some sort of messianic salvific role to a nation state in the unfolding of human history. And that, moreover, it adopts the means and methods of nation states, as opposed to the means and methods of Jesus of Nazareth, in putting such a salvific role on that nation state.
And so you say, for example-- this actually relates to us here in Nashville, you were here in Nashville in 2022 at a conference. And you say, quote, "These themes of patriotism and divine commission, of [00:26:00] nationalism and savage conquest, were ubiquitous."
And so I, I think that, you know, as I read your book, I want to believe that it's not ubiquitous. You know, in the sense that, I'm not in circles where I, I regularly hear the things that you're reporting on. And not that I doubt it, but I, I want to think that it's just such a insignificant minority. But, you know, talk to us about that ubiquitous nature of this sort of militant nationalism.
Tim
Sure. It's hard... one of the questions that I'm asked all the time, Lee, is, how do you quantify the problem? How do we get our arms around the numbers here?
And it's really hard. You know, in that particular passage of the book, I'm writing about those themes being ubiquitous at this particular event that was hosted, the Faith and Freedom Coalition event, which is run by Ralph Reed.
And basically, that is an annual [00:27:00] gathering where, particularly in recent years, uh, in kind of the Trump age, if you will, you have thousands of these Christian activists from around the country, pastors and church leaders, and just rank and file church members, who will come out to this event.
And for two and a half days, they listen to Republican politicians get up on stage and just scare the ever-living heck out of them by saying that the country is, as they know it, is about to be lost and that Democrats are working in tandem with Satan to defeat God in America, and that if they don't do something about it, then we're all doomed. And it's really quite a thing to behold.
And, and it's a self selecting thing here, right? I mean, most people who wind up at an event like that-- not all, because I do meet some people at events like this one who are sort of wide-eyed, looking around, like, oh my gosh, what did I get myself into? But I think the great majority of folks who wind up there, or [00:28:00] who wind up at the Reawaken America tour with Michael Flynn and, you know, the Trump kids, and that sort of traveling road show, the Christian nationalist crusade, very proud Christian nationalist events, you know, they, they know what they're getting themselves into.
But is that representative of evangelicalism on the whole? I believe the answer is no. From what I have seen, I still think that what we are dealing with here is a decided minority. So it might be a good news, bad news, uh, situation, because the good news is, I do believe that it is a minority.
In fact, many of the pastors who I spoke with, who have been through really catastrophic fractures inside of their congregations, who have just been exposed to and who have had to deal with awful situations, where-- with basically civil war breaking out inside of their churches, those pastors, time and again, when I'll, when I'll ask them, okay, so like, [00:29:00] what percentage is this of your church that we're dealing with, the folks who have really been radicalized and who are deep into the conspiracies and, and deep into the sort of violent rhetoric... and whenever I've asked that question, Lee, these pastors will say, "Ah, I mean, maybe 15, 20 percent tops," right?
So-- which is really interesting, because it tells you that it is still a minority, and that is still good news. And yet, the bad news is that, what we've seen is that an aggressive, belligerent, well organized, really loud minority can run circles around a really passive, complacent majority.
And it's interesting, because, you know, I've been asked a number of times whether this book about the crack up of the American evangelical church was meant to be a sequel to my book about the crack up of the Republican Party, and the honest answer is no, it was not. But I can understand [00:30:00] why people would ask, because there are certain uncanny parallels here, seeing the ways in which institutions, or at least, kind of established leaders, are challenged and in some cases overrun by forces that they either don't fully understand or are not fully equipped to kind of push back against.
And I think that in the case of many pastors-- and you know this better than I do, Lee, but these pastors went to seminary to learn Greek and Hebrew and systematic theology, you know, maybe marital counseling. They didn't prepare for a QAnon inspired civil war inside of their congregation.
And so, and many of the congregants at these churches, even though they don't agree with a lot of the kind of far right extremist stuff, they also don't really have any stomach for conflict. And so they just kind of, you know, stay quiet and let it be. And that just kind [00:31:00] of makes the problem snowball.
And so, it's hard to quantify the problem. It really is. I don't think that those themes of nationalism and divine commission and religious justification for conflict against our enemies-- I choose to still, through my reporting and analysis, believe that that is a minority within the evangelical church. But if we're not careful, and if it goes unchecked, then I think that it could become a majority in short order. And that's something that's pretty uncomfortable for us to deal with and think about.
Lee
So what have you seen happen as far as pastors, various approaches that they're trying to take to respond to this? If you, if originally your distress in a local church community is, is a vocal, loud, organized minority, and those who keep silent see it escalate, at the same time, it seems that you're also recounting stories where pastors speaking up [00:32:00] about some of these things also precipitate a crisis in the church.
So, so what have you seen as options there for how to begin to make a case for a different way of thinking about Christianity and its engagement with American politics?
Tim
Great question. You see how there's a bit of a 'damned if you do damned if you don't' element to this question of how do you confront the craziness? How do you try to address it?
And I have seen a vast spectrum of responses in that sense. I've seen pastors who have chosen to just tackle it head on and who have actually created entire sermon series around the idea of disinformation and discernment and the need as Christians to properly train ourselves to know when politicians and media personalities are [00:33:00] lying to us.
And then I've seen the other end of the spectrum with pastors who-- there's that meme, it's like a popular cartoon meme on the internet of a cartoon dog sitting in a room that's on fire. There's a thought bubble and the dog says, "everything is fine." I'm sure some of your listeners have seen that. And that would be some pastors at the other end whose churches are just, are just falling apart, and are fracturing in real time, and the pastor is just sort of paralyzed, not sure what to do, what to say, but oftentimes pretty convinced that anything they would say or would do would only make the problem worse.
So those are kind of the extremes. What's interesting-- I will say, and I write about this towards the end of the book, just in the example of the pastor at my own home church who succeeded my father in the pulpit, but I've also seen this same thing playing out in a lot of other places, here in the last couple of years.
I think [00:34:00] that the paralysis, the fear, that was there for a lot of pastors during, certainly during Trump's rise and during much of Trump's presidency, I think that it started to change toward the end of his presidency, and certainly, I think, after January 6th and then after Joe Biden took office. And that's to say that a lot of these pastors, I think, became a little bit more emboldened to-- not to turn their Sunday morning worship into political rants, but to be a little bit more assertive from the pulpit, and also in more direct one on one situations or smaller group situations, to speak to the ways in which partisanship and kind of tribal political identity had begun to infiltrate.
Really, Lee, what's interesting is, now... here we are, 2024. Save for an intervening event, we're going to have a rematch of [00:35:00] Joe Biden and Donald Trump. And all of these pastors who I've spent time with in recent years were kind of, like, hoping that the storm was going to pass and that they could survive it. And I think a lot of them have probably started to realize that the storm is here to stay, at least for a while.
I think many of them have now sort of adapted to that new reality, and we'll see. Some of them have had success with it, and report that their churches feel healthier because of it. But it's always going to feel healthier when it's an odd numbered year. But here we are, heading into election season, and I think a lot of them are bracing for a return of some of that ugliness and combativeness.
Lee
We're going to take a short break, but coming right up, Tim and I discuss when and how to [00:36:00] speak up, what kind of responses he's gotten to his book on Christian nationalism, and whether he's hopeful or not.
Coming right up.
I want to bracket politics a moment and think about the moral life and virtue just a moment, especially the issue of prudence. You started-- at the very beginning of our conversation, you recounted this episode with you speaking up in your father's eulogy and pressing back on some of the pressing that you had gotten.
And then you said, to this day, you still don't know whether you did or did not do the right thing. It seems to me that, generally speaking, journalists are always on the side of speaking about whatever it is that you're learning and, you know, you're writing about. Because it's, it's part of the role, I suppose, is that you're reporting on what you discover, right?
But going back to that question of whether you should or shouldn't have done what you did in standing in that pulpit for your father's eulogy, but also as a, as a journalist, what have you learned about prudence, and what have [00:37:00] you learned about when you speak and when you don't speak or when you wait to speak?
How do you measure all of the things that need to be measured about when and how to speak and to speak up, or to keep your mouth shut?
Tim
Boy, oh boy. I'm still failing and still learning every day.
You know, "when words are many, sin is not absent, but he who holds his tongue is wise," right? I teach journalism students now, I mentor journalism students, and one of the things that I'll always stress is, you know, it's better to be right than to be first.
We live in a crazy media environment here that incentivizes a lot of the wrong things, and among, you know, not just speed, but it also incentivizes snark and putting down the other side to make yourself look brilliant and all of this stuff. And it's something I struggle with, Lee.
I think part of the reason I struggle with it so much is I'll have these conversations with folks all the [00:38:00] time, in secular settings, but also in some Christian settings, and they look at this kind of extremist sect of the evangelical world and say, you know what, they're gone. They're too far gone, and forget about them. That they are the enemies of democracy, they are the enemies of pluralism, you know, they must be conquered. They must be defeated.
I understand why people would think that way, because I do think that we face some real pressing dangers in this country, and if we do not resolve some of this growing appetite for a sort of violent Christian nationalist reclamation of the country, then, then, you know, we're going to pay a price for it.
That being said, I do want to, even though I don't always succeed, I do want to measure my words. I do want to modulate my message [00:39:00] when these people are going to hear it, because I believe that redemption is always possible for everyone, and I don't accept the premise that these people are too far gone. I want to keep a heart of grace and compassion for those people and keep an outstretched hand, because I think some of them will come back into the fold. I really believe that.
Lee
One more follow up related question to that, what you just shared there. How have you thought about-- I mean, clearly, and you don't hide this in the book, you've got two identities that are working in the book for yourself. One is the journalist, and one is the person who is reporting on a community and a tradition in which you were raised and in which, in significant ways, you still adhere and are a part of. And so, how have you thought about the way in which, those two identities for yourself... is there tension there or is there not tension there? What's that been like for you in this process?
Tim
I [00:40:00] always used to envy my dad, because when he described his journey out of atheism and out of a very successful life in finance, where he and my mom were living in New York and making a ton of money and driving a Cadillac and living the high life, he came out of that life and eventually entered the ministry, and spent, you know, uh, forty some odd years, uh, in ministry, because it was a calling. And I was always envious of that language, that idea of a calling.
And I will say, Lee, that for the first time in my career-- I've been practicing journalism for pushing towards twenty years now, I suppose. For the first time in my journalism career, I really started to think of it as a calling as I was writing this book. [00:41:00]
And I say that, not to sound grandiose or self important or anything, but because I think that what is paramount to both the Christian identity and to the journalistic identity is the pursuit of truth. And when you have that pursuit of truth serving as the, the bridge between those identities, then you don't feel a tension.
Listen, at the outset of conceptualizing and setting out to actually do the reporting, sure, I felt some tension, because who wants to, uh, air the dirty laundry of your community to the world, right?
I mean, telling the full, unvarnished, uncomfortable truth about evangelicalism is the job of a journalist in this position, but it's really agonizing for a fellow believer, [00:42:00] for a fellow traveler, for a kid raised in the EPC, and for, for, for someone who still, for many intents and purposes, would identify as an evangelical, at least sort of sociologically, even if I think the label now does more harm than good... there was tension there.
But what's interesting, is that the longer I traveled down this road, the less tension there was, because it just became clear to me that, look, if the Apostle Paul can write his occasional letters calling out the church and calling the church to repentance, and if the early church councils saw fit to include those Pauline epistles, clearly, they believed that accountability and truth telling, even when the truth hurt, we are called to hold one another accountable.
Lee
As you have had your kind of journalistic star [00:43:00] rise with your two books, and you're getting called upon more and more to comment on these things, are there challenges to you personally that you've had to, had to navigate in all that? You know, are there, are there ways in which you are having internal discernment struggle about how you process all this?
Tim
Well, other than the people who email saying that they wanna, you know, kill me or something, that, like, that's, you know, that, that, that part's, uh--
Lee
Do you get, do you get that kind of feedback a lot?
Tim
Well, I wouldn't say a lot, uh, but I get it. I mean, it's, uh... Actually, I'll be honest with you, I've actually been, I've gotten some of it, uh, in response to this book, but way less than I expected, frankly.
I mean, having lived through the Trump years and having written my first book, and then having really been in the trenches during Trump's reelection, and, you know, January 6th and calling out the lies as vocally as just about anybody in my profession, I mean, every day, in print and on TV and on radio, I mean, I was pretty [00:44:00] dogged in, in calling out the election lies for what they were. So, I, you know, and so I got a lot of it then. I mean, I, I was basically almost every day getting death threats then.
So, no, I mean, relative to all that craziness, this has kind of been a walk in the park. I mean, I've, I've actually I've been overwhelmed by the positive feedback I've gotten. A lot of folks around the country, just regular folks who read it and wrote, saying, hey, this same thing's happening in my church and I'm, you know, not really sure what to make of it, but this helped, so thank you, God bless you. That's been great.
I think the ongoing challenge I have is to step into secular spaces and do it in ways that can help to bridge the gap between the secular world and the evangelical world, and that's a, that's a big responsibility, and it's one that I guess I didn't really think all that much about [00:45:00] before I, before I jumped into this, but here we are, and it's something that I, I can't shy away from.
Lee
So, near the end of the end of your book, there seems to be a implicit shift, at least I read it that way, and you can tell me whether my reading was careful enough or not. But you seem at least to share enough anecdotes to make the reader think that you might be hopeful.
And yet, you seem to be holding on to this, it might be really bad, but there might be some space for hope. Is that fair, to kind of say that you leave us at least with both possibilities at the end of the book?
Tim
Yes, I think that's fair. And to be clear, I did not intend to go out of my way to put any sort of a happy ending on the story.
Now, it does just so happen that for the epilogue of the book I went back to my home church for the first time since my dad's funeral, and his successor, [00:46:00] who's a great guy who I just think the world of, but who had really, really, really struggled... as I documented in the first chapter of the book, when he took over the church for my dad, it kind of fell apart on him, and he, he was agonizing over, you know, what to do. And so, to return then, to the church for the first time, for the epilogue of the book, and to see him having kind of been transformed into this really fearless and mission driven leader, who was speaking hard truths to his congregation and and doing so in such a such an inspired way, that obviously then does put kind of a, a hopeful, optimistic flavor into the ending of the story that, that had never been planned.
But, but I am glad that it's there, because I do think that there is a way out of this. I do sense that more and [00:47:00] more Christians, just based on the anecdotes of the hundreds and hundreds of emails I'm getting from people who are basically saying that same thing, that like, hey, this has happened in my church, I've been kind of quiet about it, you know, but now I'm sensing that maybe I need to do more, that this really is a problem that we have to address. I think that's a, that's a positive.
Lee
I've been talking to Tim Alberta, award-winning journalist, bestselling author, staff writer for The Atlantic, on his most recent book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.
Thank you, Tim. Grateful for your time and thank you for your work.
Tim
Lee, thank you for having me. Really enjoyed talking with you.
Lee
Our guest today is Tim Alberta, discussing his New York Times bestseller, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American [00:48:00] Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion.
And the support of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hays, Mary Eveleen Brown, Cariad Harmon, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osburn, and Tim Lauer.
Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life, together.
No Small Endeavor is a production of Tokens Media, LLC, PRX, and Great Feeling Studios.