"The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American evangelicals in an age of extremism", by Tim Alberta.
Exposes the corruption inside the Evangelical Industrial Complex. Alberta is eloquent, sincere, and an awesome reporter.
From the Washington Post review, Becca Rothfeld.
In “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” Alberta argues that the “blood-and-soil” nationalism that has gripped many of the country’s Christians is the latest in a long line of unprecedented disasters. The church that has emerged in the wake of Trump’s election is not the quietly principled institution Alberta was raised to revere as the son of a pastor in a Detroit suburb in the 1980s and ’90s. Now, his fellow evangelicals are bellicose and bawdy. According to one Pew study, 77 percent of White evangelicals voted for Trump, a proud philanderer, in 2016 (that number increased to 84 percent in 2020), and Alberta wonders why so many fervent Christians have abandoned their customary “moral litmus test on public officials.” Why has their patriotism taken on such alarmingly violent undertones? Why has their mood grown so paranoid, defensive and apocalyptic? As he puts it, what explains the “crack-up” of the American evangelical church?
(Harper )
Alberta retains deep ties to the conservative community where he grew up and seems ideally situated to answer these questions with empathy and insight. Contemporary evangelicalism repulses him — not because he has betrayed his faith but because he believes so many of his fellow Christians have.
In this book, which is rooted in dozens of interviews conducted over four years, he investigates an increasingly craven religion whose disciples are willing to make excuses for their most corrupt allies, even as they go to great lengths to silence well-meaning dissenters. “We can serve and worship God or we can serve and worship the gods of this world,” Alberta solemnly writes. “Too many American evangelicals have tried to do both.” The result, he says, is that they all too often find themselves kneeling at the altar of Donald Trump.
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