Tim Alberta’s recent book about the Christian nationalist takeover of American evangelicalism, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” is full of preachers and activists on the religious right expressing sheepish second thoughts about their prostration before Donald Trump. Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor at First Baptist Dallas — whom Texas Monthly once called “Trump’s apostle” for his slavish Trump boosterism — admitted to Alberta in 2021 that turning himself into a politician’s theological hype man may have compromised his spiritual mission. “I had that internal conversation with myself — and I guess with God, too — about, you know, when do you cross the line?” he said, allowing that the line had, “perhaps,” been crossed.
Such qualms grew more vocal after voter revulsion toward MAGA candidates cost Republicans their prophesied red wave in 2022. Mike Evans, a former member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, described, in an essay he sent to The Washington Post, leaving a Trump rally “in tears because I saw Bible believers glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, enthused to Alberta about the way Trump had punched “the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around,” by which he presumably meant American liberals. But, Perkins said, “The challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge sometimes.” Perkins was clearly rooting for Ron DeSantis, who represented the shining hope of a post-Trump religious right.
But there’s not going to be a post-Trump religious right — at least, not anytime soon. Evangelical leaders who started their alliance with Trump on a transactional basis, then grew giddy with their proximity to power, have now seen MAGA devour their movement whole.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Tim Alberta’s recent book about the Christian nationalist takeover of American evangelicalism, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” is full of preachers and activists on the religious right expressing sheepish second thoughts about their prostration before Donald Trump.
“People think it’s all a good-and-evil election,” and therefore “we need a strongman — that it’s so serious we can’t play around anymore with a nice guy,” Tim Lubinus, executive director of Iowa’s Baptist convention, told The New Yorker’s Benjamin Wallace-Wells.
(Iowa’s culture-warring governor, Kim Reynolds, has also endorsed DeSantis; she recently used a private social media account to contrast a photo of him and his wholesome family with a picture of Trump surrounded by glamorous women at a New Year’s Eve party.)
“The forces of political identity and nationalist idolatry — long latent, now fully unleashed in the form of Trumpism — were destroying the evangelical church,” wrote Alberta in his book.
As Ruth Graham and Charles Homans reported in The New York Times this week, in Iowa, the percentage of people tied to a congregation fell by almost 13 percent from 2010 to 2020, one of the sharpest declines in the country.
Vander Plaats has been reduced to arguing, as he did in a Des Moines Register essay this week, that Iowans should choose DeSantis because it would position him to protect Trump from his persecutors.
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