The Bulwark Podcast - Tim Alberta: The Political Poisoning of the Evangelical Church

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

On this Christmas weekend, we revisit our conversation with Tim Alberta about the morphing of evangelicalism from a spiritual disposition to a political identity, a development Alberta calls "heartbreaking." He tells Charlie Sykes that Evangelicals are turning against each other over conspiracy politics and Donald Trump. This encore episode was originally released in May. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P, dot com. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. As we head into the Christmas holiday, we're sharing another one of our favorite episodes from this year. This one featuring the Atlantic's Tim Alberta discussing how politics has poisoned the evangelical church. The son of a pastor, he wrote about the war for the soul of the church back in May. And Tim shares here how the morphing of the evangelical movement into something with a political identity is heartbreaking for him, and it's a powerful episode. Tim's also the author of American Carnage. We're just going to jump right into the interview. So welcome back, Tim. How are you?

Hey, Charlie. I'm doing okay, man. How are you? Well, you know, this is a tough piece to wrestle with, I'll be honest with you, because, you know, it's one of the things that I will admit that I have had the hardest time understanding over the last, and now it's going on five, six years, the transformation of the white evangelical churches. And what your piece suggests is that whatever has happened to them seems to be accelerating and that's difficult to get your head around. So before we even get into your story, Tim, this is a very personal story. What sets your piece aside from a lot of the other commentary is that this feels very, very personal because you, in fact, come from this religious tradition. You're right. I grew up in the evangelical church.

I'm a pastor's kid. My dad was the senior pastor at Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian Church in a little town called Brighton, Michigan. And I grew up there, not just spiritually, but sort of physically. My mom worked at the church as well. I mean, I spent most of my time in that church. You know, when I wasn't in school, summer vacations and whatnot were spent, you know, playing hide and go seek or shooting baskets at the church or, you know, I was just there all the time. So I sort of grew up, I was steeped in church life, in church culture. And it was really, I think, the relationship I had to the church that I think in some way planted early seeds of skepticism in my young journalist brain as far as not skepticism, not suspicion of Christ or of scripture, but of man, of people, of relationships and power and transactionalism and cynicism and manipulation. Some people might roll their eyes at this and that's fine. But I can just remember being a pretty young kid, you know, sitting in church and observing things and seeing what my dad had to deal with and what my mom had to deal with. And just being sort of highly skeptical of what it was I was seeing and what was playing out around me. And there are a lot of

wonderful people in and around the church. There were then, and there still are now. But the church is not, as much as we might want to believe that it is sort of a place that is insulated from all of the pressures and the tension points of society around it. In fact, oftentimes the church can be the worst place for those things. And I saw a lot of that growing up. And obviously, you know, as you said a minute ago, Charlie, some of the political trends more explicitly, they have really accelerated over the past decade. And that's what I really want to dive into in this piece because it's something I've wrestled with for a long time.

And, you know, you describe how evangelicalism is morphing from a spiritual disposition into a political identity. And you write that, for you, this is heartbreaking, because in so many ways, it turns the Christian witness into a caricature, doesn't it? Yeah, it really does. And the problem is, you know, I tried to explain this to somebody a while back. I know some people from my home church who are just some of the most generous, compassionate, loving people that you'd ever want to meet. I mean, these are people who give just absurd amounts of their money and of their time, their family vacations to go overseas and build orphanages and tutor kids. And they're selfless people who are in so many ways reflective of the love of Christ.

But if you were to grab them and do a man on the street interview outside of some political event, they would share some political opinions with you, not just like, oh, this is who I'm voting for, but some conspiratorial and fringy stuff that would make you think that they're a lunatic. And the problem is that it's become increasingly difficult to separate some of that political thought from the spiritual thought inside a lot of these evangelical churches. In fact, what we've seen is sort of an encouraging from many pastors, from many Christian leaders, from some sort of evangelical figureheads, to really merge the two together. And so it's made it more and more difficult to distinguish between the two. So you open your piece in The Atlantic with a scene setter from a Sunday

service at a church called Floodgate Church in Brighton, Michigan, led by Pastor Bill Bolin. And you describe how between 40 minutes of praise music and 40 minutes of preaching, Bolin goes off on what you call a diatribe. So just tell us about what Pastor Bolin was, what was the headline news that he was sharing with his congregation? Yeah, so every Sunday, since I've been checking out Floodgate Church and reporting there over the past year plus, there's a 15, 20, 25 minute sometimes segment that this pastor would do called Headline News, where he would rattle off, you know, somewhere between maybe seven and ten news items from the week, most of them political in nature. And then he would add a lot of commentary

and sort of annotate them. And oftentimes, there might be sort of a straight news headline from, you know, the AP or from Reuters or something, and then he would fill in the blanks with a lot of color commentary. But then sometimes there would also be some headlines from, you know, a far-right blog or something that from, you know, a far right blog or something that were, you know, I'd be sitting in the back of the sanctuary Googling it, like, where is he getting this from? And, you know, sometimes his commentary would be the type of thing that would sort of fall somewhere within the kind of political mainstream. Now, again, it's a little unusual

to hear this in a church on a Sunday morning right after the praise music concludes to have the pastor get up there and just start sort of a Fox News style riff, sort of annotate them. It's a little bit strange. It takes some adjusting to. But that's not the strangest part. The strangest part is that on this particular Sunday that I wrote about, which was reflective and consistent with many other Sundays that I checked out, you know, the pastor would start a riff about vaccines and would quickly veer into conspiracy land and talking about how a local hospital only had two COVID patients at the time, but they had more than 100 patients who were

suffering from vaccine complications, stuff like that. And he would go on a rant about ivermectin, and by the time he was finished, there was like a call and response with some of his congregants who were chanting ivermectin. So things like that, that sound almost fantastical, except it's real, and it's not just happening in this one church. It's happening in lots of other churches. Well, and you described the trajectory of Pastor Boland's career. He knew Brighton very, very well. And you'd never heard of Floodgate Church, in part because until recently,

Boland had been preaching to about 100 people. And then suddenly he was thrust into celebrity during the pandemic. Talk to me about how this sort of obscure guy goes to evangelical star in a couple of years. Yeah, so there's a, I'm forgetting whether it's David French or Russell Moore, but one of them had coined this phrase for churches a little while back, that crazy as a growth model. And crazy was pretty much the growth model here. What this pastor decided to do around Easter of 2020, you know, just in the earliest days of the pandemic, when churches were asked to close down to prevent transmission while everybody was trying to figure out what was going on with COVID, this pastor refused, and he kept his church open.

And this is't a very, you know, Charlie, you're from the conservative suburbs of Milwaukee, so you know that the conservative suburbs of Detroit very much patterned the same way. And for this one pastor to keep his church open, he became sort of a celebrity, and his church became sort of a cause locally. So a lot of people from surrounding churches in the same town and the same county who were up in arms with their pastors for having shut their churches down, which they believed was an act of fear or cowardice or bending the knee to almighty government, whatever the case may be, they were sort of outraged. And so when this church remained open, people rushed over there. And suddenly this church, which had been for most of its history, holding services

that would cater to about a combined 100 people, give or take on an average Sunday. Well, suddenly they're pushing up into several hundred and then many hundred and then up over a thousand. And within a year of Bolin making this stand and making a name for himself in the suburbs of Detroit by keeping his church open, suddenly they've gone from a hundred people to 1500 people. And today they are pushing towards 2000 people and they've bought a brand new facility and they're growing like crazy. So there is a growth model here that he tapped into. And again, Charlie, not to be a broken record, but I'd be remiss if I didn't say, this isn't just happening at this one church. There are lots of stories of this happening elsewhere. You know, it strikes me listening to that particular story that the

pandemic really has contributed to the radicalization and the crazification of our culture and our politics in ways that I'm not sure that we fully understand. We're beginning to understand. I look around right now and I think things were bad in 2017 and 2018, but they're exponentially worse now. The crazy is accelerating. Did the pandemic and the shutdown have an accelerant effect? I won't say transformative effect, but an accelerant effect on the crazification of all of this? Oh, no, no doubt about it. And actually, Charlie, I'll say this specific to the church, specific to

evangelicalism in America. I've had this conversation over and over and over again with pastors and with church leader types and just with everyday churchgoers over the past year while I've been doing all this reporting. And for all of the disruption and volatility of the previous five, six years, Trump's presidency, obviously, and the siege of the Capitol and his impeachments, but then other things, the George Floyd killing and the racial protests and social justice marches, the Me Too movement and these reckonings over sexual abuse, including inside the church. And all of these things have been hugely, hugely disruptive inside American evangelicalism. But I would argue that nothing has been more disruptive and nothing

has been more of an accelerant on these trend lines that we're discussing here than has been more disruptive and nothing has been more of an accelerant on these trend lines that we're discussing here than has been the shutdown, because it plays directly into the fears that have been festering inside the evangelical church for decades, that there is, at the end of the day, a secular liberal plot to shut down churches, to banish God from public life. And it's just difficult for people who have not spent time in evangelical circles to really understand what I'm talking about, but it's a very real thing. And for a lot of these folks, they viewed COVID and church closures, you know, in some cases, churches were only closed for three or four weeks, but it didn't matter. That was it. That was enough to validate this idea that the government was coming for them.

So there is a siege mentality. And a lot of this revolves around, I mean, you've described it, but a lot of this also revolves around the whole issue of religious freedom and the salience of that debate about, you know, should there be conscience clauses? Should there be religious exemptions? This is absolutely incandescent in evangelical churches. And frankly, I'm not sure that folks on the other side fully understand how powerful those questions are when it comes to this sort of, you know, we are under siege, we are victims, they are coming for the secularists want to destroy us. Do you agree with that? I do. It's a very particular mindset. And by the way, this is why in 2016, I write about this a little bit in my book, but I think it was largely glossed over by folks sort of following

the Trump campaign and even folks who were writing in some detail about his alliance with the evangelical movement. Obviously, the Supreme Court list was huge. The pick of Pence was huge. But there was one other thing that did not get a lot of attention. Trump had some folks in his ear whispering to him about the Johnson Amendment, this idea that effectively, you know, that churches could lose their tax exempt status if they were to, you know to get into politics from the pulpit. That is something that, particularly when Trump, right after sealing the nomination, met with a bunch of evangelical leaders and hundreds and hundreds of evangelical pastors in New York at the Marriott Marquis. This is May of 2016. I was there covering it.

And I can remember when he discussed that, people afterwards were discussing it. That is an issue of serious salience in that community. And it's the kind of thing that just doesn't resonate outside of a very sort of narrow strip of American life. But it is there, and it's something that I think has sort of a real galvanizing effect. Okay, so you start with this profile of Pastor Bolin, who has become a superstar because he's leaning into the crazy, but you also showcase another pastor named Ken Brown, who has a ministry in Trenton, which is a suburb of Detroit. And he's a conservative pastor of a conservative congregation. But as you write, he is one of those who's worked hard to keep his

members from being radicalized by the lies of right-wing politicians and media figures. How is that working out for him? You basically have these two contrasting pastors. What is happening with Ken Brown? Yeah, you know, it's interesting, Charlie, what sort of ties these two figures together, these two pastors in the suburbs of Detroit, is that they're so different, obviously, in so many ways. But the one thing they have in common is they feel like they have been sort of pushed too far and that there is no way to avoid politics at this point, right? And now obviously you have the pastor Bill Bolin at Floodgate who's really leaning into it. It's not that he's been sort of pushed into it. He's been political, but he believes that the church can't afford to not be political at this point. Ken Brown is coming at it from a bit of a different perspective. He's looking at what's

happening in the culture and how it's invading his church. As he put it to me in one of our conversations, his job is to look out for not only his people, but for his church and for some of the threats that are infiltrating it. And in his view, what he's seen happen over the last four or five years is that all of these really ugly and tense and polarizing debates over politics and policy and, you know, culture and social issues have infected his church and they've turned people against one another. And he tried for a long time to sort of not engage with any of this and to stay above the fray and just kind of focus on scripture. But it wasn't working. And he saw things deteriorating and getting worse and worse and worse. And specifically what he saw was a real sort of

wave of disinformation and untruth and falsehoods and conspiratorial thinking invading the church, which again is a theme that runs across my conversations with pastors all over the country. And so what this other pastor, Ken Brown, decided to do was to lean into these political debates, but in a very different sort of tactical way. the lies and the conspiracy theories and the disinformation that he has seen affecting the people in his church, not just pulling people aside on a one-by-one basis and saying, hey, I saw you posted this thing on social media. Are you sure about that? Let's talk about it, because this might not be true, but actively from the pulpit, preaching to his people on almost a weekly basis, and also using a podcast series and a blog that he has to really try and counter some of the influences in our politics that he believes have distracted his people from the Bible. Well, how is that working out for him?

What kind of reaction pushback is he getting from his congregants? Well, it's been mixed. You know, as you mentioned, Charlie, he pastors a pretty conservative church, and he himself is a very conservative guy. This is, you know, just lest anybody think that this is one of the woke pastors, whatever woke even means anymore. I mean, this is a very conservative guy, lifelong pro-lifer, never had a sip of alcohol, you know, raised in a Christian home. And so what Ken Brown represents here is somebody who, and again, he stands in so well as a representative, a lot of other pastors I've talked with around the country. This is somebody who essentially has come to believe that not just politics broadly, but sort of conspiracy politics specifically, and all of the lies and

the vitriol and the misrepresentation and the manipulation that come with it, that those things are representing a betrayal of the gospel, that the credibility of the Christian witness is being damaged by Christians who are subscribing to these things. So you can imagine that when he says that to his congregants, to some of his very conservative Trump-supporting, all-in-on MAGA congregants, that some of them have really bristled and taken exception to their pastor sort of rebuking them in that way. You know, at the same time, he's had some members who he feels have really responded well to it and who have told them that, you know, they've dialed back the Fox News or

quit watching cable news completely. And what's really interesting is that he said that with those people, albeit they may be a smaller subset of his flock, but he's told me that those people who have dialed it back, where he feels like he has had some success in reaching them, those people have demonstrated a real renewed commitment to Christ and to their involvement with the church. And so, you know, he doesn't view that as coincidental, but it's been a very hard road for this guy. We've had a lot of conversations over the past year, and you can see in his church the toll that all of this has taken. Well, there's also a real cultural gap between these two pastors that you focus on. I just want to read a paragraph because your writing is so

vivid. Brown is polished and buttoned down. Boland is ostentatious and loud. Brown pastors a traditional church where people wear sweaters and sing softly. Boland leads a charismatic church where people dress for a barbecue and speak in tongues. Brown is a pastor's kid and lifelong conservative who's never had a sip of alcohol, which you just mentioned. Boland is an erstwhile radical liberal who once got so high on LSD that he jumped on stage and grabbed a guitar at a Tom Petty concert. So, I mean, there's really, there's a lot going on here. It's the old politics question in a presidential race, like who would you rather have a beer with? I know who I would rather have a beer with. I mean, Ken Brown doesn't drink beer, but yeah, these are two very different guys, obviously, and their

approach to the church is informed, I think, by those life experiences. protests and sit-ins and hunger strikes and chaining himself to buses and all this kind of stuff, how that informed his views of his role in the ministry all these years later. Despite the fact that his views ideologically have shifted in almost 180 degree fashion, his tactical approach is still very much the same. The same guy who as as a hippie, was participating in hunger strikes in the streets back then now believes that his call to protest is going to manifest itself in a bit of a different way. But it's interesting how somebody's entire worldview can change. This is somebody who had this radical conversion experience where he felt that God spoke to him when he was 20 years old, and he became a Christian, and he says he never looked back. And yet, some of his tactics, as I said a moment ago, as far as protesting and rebelling against authority, they're still rooted in that same 20-year-old kid. It is interesting how many

people go from radical right to radical left or radical left to radical right. So maybe the through line is the radicalism of the right or the left. Okay, so let's talk about your discussion of the war for the soul of the church. You write, to many evangelicals today, the enemy is no longer secular America, but their fellow Christians, people who hold the same faith, but different beliefs. How has that shifted? Yeah, I think the shift, Charlie, really is just best understood as a fight that was outward. and evangelical Christians believing that there was sort of this grand struggle against the secular culture and that they were fighting to preserve the influence of God in public life and that there were secularists and liberals who wanted to sort of expunge any trace of the Almighty from public life, that was really the struggle that animated so much of the American evangelical movement during my lifetime. And what you've seen here, really, over the past five years, it traces back a bit further, but it's really intensified here over the last five years,

is that the fight has really moved inward. And you have these massive divisions within the church that are reflective of the massive divisions within society. And I alluded to them earlier, everything from race and sexual misconduct to politics and culture war stuff. And what it's essentially done is it's fractured churches, and it has basically called a bit of a ceasefire unwittingly on that war with the secular world because christians in many cases are now too busy fighting amongst themselves to worry about fighting the secular world and so what you have is i think it might be too reductive to just think of it as a sort of symmetrical struggle or as just two sides i mean i think there is some nuance here, but you do, broadly speaking, have a bit of a warring faction on the one side with people like Bill Bolin, who really believe that time is running short for America and that there is a war on Christians in this country that is therefore also a war on the politicians and the political party

that represents them. And so they are inclined to merge these things together and believe that the church should be very active in politics from the top of the ticket all the way down to the local level, that the church has a responsibility in its community to be a central player politically. And even if that means making alliances with people who are sort of manifestly non-Christian in their approach and in their rhetoric and in their deeds, then so be it. And that is obviously representative of the one side of the struggle. And the other side, I think, is just you have a lot of Christians with a great deal of discomfort about those alliances, and they might be willing to hold their nose and cast a vote for somebody because they might be

the lesser of two evils, but they're not comfortable sort of throwing themselves and throwing the influence and the reputation of the church behind a political cause or a political party. They just don't think it's appropriate. And that is, I think, sort of fundamentally the struggle here. Well, this is a speculative question. Will the return of the abortion issue, will it push these factions back together again in a common cause? Will it exacerbate these splits? How do you see that playing out in this whole story of the radicalization of evangelical Christians? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a fair question. I think the first thing I'd say is even within those warring camps in the evangelical movement that I just described, I think it's important to recognize that abortion has never really been an issue that's divided those camps, broadly speaking. I mean, you may have some folks who attend a predominantly

white, predominantly conservative evangelical church who do not hold sort of conservative views on the abortion issue, but most of them do. In fact, the fissures I'm describing here over politics and culture and some of these key social issues and whether the church should be engaged on them and to what extent the church should be engaged on them. I mean, even a pastor like Ken Brown, who I, as I've described, sort of is firmly in the one camp here and wanting to sort of depressurize these issues inside the church. Ken Brown is a staunch pro-lifer. You know, he, even when he never preached on politics from the pulpit for most of his career, the one issue he would preach on every year on Right to Life Sunday was abortion.

So I don't know that Roe being overturned and that abortion once again being really front and center for American voters and particularly for Christian voters, I don't know that it's going to have any great unifying effect inside the evangelical movement, because, again, largely speaking, there's been a lot of consensus on that already. Okay, so I want to talk about the realignment within the white evangelical church. But as you point out, the evangelical leaders set something in motion decades ago that the pastors can't control any longer. And I think this is important because there will be people who will say, well, nothing's new. It's always been this way. No, this is in fact new the last five years. Let's talk about Donald Trump and the role that Trumpism has played in all of this, viewing him as the apex of the movement's power, but also at

the same time, the beginning of what you describe as the unraveling, these larger battles, you know, cultural reckonings over race, vaccine mandates, elections have also divided the church. So, I mean, it seems that they're at this apex of power and influence, especially when Donald Trump was in the White House. But they're really tearing each other apart. I mean, talk about the Southern Baptist Convention fighting over race relations, women serving in leadership, the United Methodist Church. Looks like it's going to have a divorce over social and ideological divisions, other denominations. Losing churches as pastors and congregations are walking away from the leadership. So, I mean, there is a real realignment going along. What role did Trump play in all of this?

I know not everything is about Donald Trump, but it's hard to tell this story without talking about that. Yeah, of course it is. It's impossible to tell the story without talking about Trump, not necessarily because he was the driver of this divide, but I think in some ways he kind of ripped a bandaid off, if you will. You know, in other words, some of these wounds were already there. Maybe they weren't wide open and actively bleeding, but they were there. And, you know, you had serious disagreements in the church over the past decade on questions of everything from human sexuality to immigration and health care and refugee resettlement and things like that.

Depending on the individual congregation, you'll have people tell you that, yes, we've wrestled with these things, but we've done it very quietly and diplomatically. And other people will say, no, we've kind of had all-out brawls on these things, but we've still held together. Trumpism introduced an element of all or nothing to these debates. Things became zero sum in a way that they weren't before. pastors I've spoken with have described the ways in which over the past decade or so, they have tried to navigate some of these hot button social issues inside the church. And even when there were really strong disagreements, at the end of the day,

things would get settled and maybe a few people would leave. But overall, the church was still fine and relationships were intact and things were pretty healthy and they moved on. I think Trumpism and the divides over Trump, the man and Trump and his presidency, it sort of made things irreconcilable in some sense. I mean, you will hear stories from people who have attended a church for 20 or 25 or 30 years who suddenly had to leave like abruptly, like overnight, because the pastor made a sort of cutting remark about the president. Or you'll have people who were in a small group together since the 1980s, and they've been teaching a Bible study together in a church for all these years, and they suddenly split, and they don't talk to one another anymore. Why? Is it because of a disagreement over abortion or over homosexuality

or over any number of other things? No, it's a disagreement over Trump. And so I think that's the role inside the church. It's not like any of this is new. The church has been arguing with itself since the beginning of the church. I mean, that's why most of the New Testament are letters that Paul was writing to early churches trying to get people to stop arguing with each other. I mean, this stuff is not new, but there is, as I said, kind of a zero-sum nature to the dispute over Donald Trump. Either you're with him or you're against him. There's very little middle ground. And I think that, more than anything, is what has proven so destructive inside these churches. But why? What makes him the touchstone? I mean, here is a, we could run through his private life, you know, everything that he's involved.

Why has he become this touchstone in a way that no other political figure that I can think of even approaches? I can give you my best theory on that, honestly it's it's it's one of many but it's my best theory and i wrote about this in the piece i do think that for a substantial chunk of the white evangelical universe there is a fear that america is in precipitous decline that this country's best days are now far behind it, that God is in fact being sort of bullied and out of public life, that practicing vocal Christians are unwelcome in the cultural discourse, and that the end is near, and that they are going to go down swing. That if this is their last stand, if this is their Alamo, you know, then they're going to go down with. That if this is their last stand, if this is their Alamo, you know, then they're going to go down with a fight. And for those people, they spent years looking for

somebody in the political arena who could be their champion, somebody who could fight their battles. And they found in Donald Trump, just the unlikeliest fighter, somebody who just, again, manifestly does not share really any of their values, does not believe in the things that they believe. And somebody who I think is very clearly not a practicing follower of Christ. the transactionalist to his core that Donald Trump is. He recognized that he could earn the sort of unflinching support of these people if he was willing to do for them what no other Bible-believing Christian politician was willing to do. And that's sort of how much of this came about. No, and I don't know if I see references to how God raised up Cyrus to free Israel. Cyrus obviously not being Jewish, but this muscular Christianity, the Christianity that fights, that kicks ass, takes names, has become more dominant, at least, or louder than the Christianity that preached humility and compassion.

It feels like it's almost eclipsed it in some of the churches that you describe. Well, it does feel like that. But let me offer a note of caution, of course, because we see the same thing play out in politics and in other institutions of American life. You know, the loudest voices always sort of rule the day, right? And what you have in a lot of these churches are the loudest voices. I mean, I remember visiting with a pastor at another church who I didn't write about in the piece, who told me about this sort of crusading group of people in his church of, you know, five or 600. This group that was just making life miserable for him and really sort of torturing him, confronting him publicly, sometimes sort of almost physically after he would leave the pulpit and

yelling at him in front of other people and starting sort of petitions and circulating letters about him trying to make his life miserable because they disagreed with some of his sort of political and ideological stances. And he described all of this and it sounded like just psychological warfare. And I said, how many people are we talking about here? And he said, 10 or 12. And I said, in a church of five or 600, it was just 10 or 12. And he said, yeah. And I said, so, but were they representing a majority view? And he said, no, no, no, this was a decided minority view, but they were really loud and they were really organized. That's the great danger, Charlie, in writing a piece like this. You know, we're talking about tens of millions of people when we write about white evangelical Christians in America, right? Tens of millions of people. And it's at least the sort of outward-facing momentum that you see

in the evangelical movement, is around that sort of muscular, combative, like, come-and-take-it Christianity. But I still don't know that that represents anything near a majority of the evangelical movement. So one of the things that we're seeing is, and you referenced this, is sort of a Christian nationalism, a Christian hyper-nationalism. And you talk with Russell Moore, who's the extraordinary former president of the Southern Baptist Policy Arm, who was basically pushed out for not getting on the Trump train. He's traveled around the country and he's talked to pastors and he's convinced that this fanaticism inside the church poses real threats. You quote Russell

Moore as saying, I'm telling you, there is a serious effort to turn this two countries talk into something real. There are Christians taking all the populist passions and adding a transcendent authority to it. So this two countries talk, where does this lead, Tim? What is he concerned about? Is he actually talking about the kind of, you know, spiritual civil war, actual civil war? You know, Charlie, there are two distinct views of January 6th. One view holds that January 6th was the culmination of something that had been building and building and building and that finally sort of the powder keg exploded. I think the other view, which is, I believe, a minority view, but one that I personally hold, is that January 6th was actually just the beginning of something that what you saw that day and yes uh specifically in the context of this conversation the christian imagery the christian influence you know the people

marching with flags with crosses on them and singing hymns right next to the gallows outside the capital that is representative of a threat that is real and a threat that is growing now how real is it? And how would we quantify it? I don't know the answers to that. I don't pretend to. But I can tell you, again, this was a year's worth of reporting that I put into this piece. And it's a lot of conversations with a lot of people, a lot of different places, and a lot of different faith traditions within the sort of broader construct of American evangelicalism.

And I can just tell you that it's real. You do have, as Russell said, people who are already predisposed because of all the cultural and political turmoil in the country, who are taking this kind of abstract rhetoric of red states and blue states and irreconcilable divides and secession or breaking away or taking to the streets, right? That kind of irresponsible rhetoric, they are taking it and then sort of infusing into it this transcendent authority, as Russell said, that if you shut down our church, that is an act of war, not just against the Constitution, but against our God, right? So bringing it back full circle to the conversation earlier about why the pandemic and why COVID was

such a catalyst here, such an accelerant, it's really hard for people, again, outside of the church to connect all these dots and to sort of understand how all of this sort of ties into the grand narrative of God's plan for America and even sort of ideas of prophecy and how all of this sort of ties into the grand narrative of God's plan for America and even sort of ideas of prophecy and how all of this may end and what the Christian's responsibility is in times such as this. But it is real and it is a threat and it's something that has to be dealt with, not by the government, not by media types. It has to be dealt with inside the church. And that is the great challenge here, is that a lot of pastors, Charlie, are completely burned out. They're scared. They've been bullied. A lot of them have retired, or they've just gone silent completely,

and they're not willing to confront this stuff anymore because they've got bills to pay and they just want to ride it out to retirement. So it's a really scary thing to think about because I'm really a believer that the only forces that can help to sort of de-escalate this do exist inside the church. But those forces have been sort of bulldozed. Tim Alberta's latest piece is How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church. You can find it online and in the June issue of The Atlantic magazine. Tim, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. Charlie, I'm happy to. Glad it was another cheery and uplifting discussion like always.

Thank you for listening to The Bulwark Podcast. We'll be back next week with more selections from our best of from 2022. Merry Christmas and have a great weekend.