The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory

afternoon Welcome to our next session the Kingdom power and the glory power and the glory so happy I am so happy to welcome NJ Sebastian to introduce our speakers NJ is a painting and drawing Professor who's just completed his first year at College of the Atlantic and I had the Good Fortune of spending time with him earlier this month and I was struck not only by his personal work but by the ways he talks about teaching in an iterative process of making and remaking a place where students ideally learn to appreciate differences in perspectives and how those ideas and emotions can be communicated powerfully through works of art Nish thanks Sylvia for that introduction like Sylvia said I try to encourage students to work iteratively making an idea or composition stronger through revision and reworking and now I'm going to offer a perhaps specious analogy between making art and how a democracy functions decisions are made and unmade new laws are passed new techn techologies come into being and uh need to be addressed by lawmakers uh democracies also undergo constant changes in the hope that things get better that there can be life liberty and the pursuit of happiness but as most people know things can go wrong if it's a painting at the end of the at the end of the day you've messed up a painting when it comes to a country it becomes a matter of life and death for many people so that's where the analogy perhaps falls apart a little that being said art continues to be a reflection of society not only what's good and beautiful but also things we'd rather not think about I was in Philadelphia visiting my parents during one of the breaks between terms and I had taken my copy of the Atlantic with me and one day my father said that I had to read an article saying it was incredible and it was Tim Alberta's piece about his father who was the minister of an Evangelical Church in Michigan the piece was about the political conversations he had had with his father and the challenges faced by his father's successor and here's where I say that my father is also a pastor faith and the church have shaped my life and the way I see and engage with the world since I was a child Tim's peace in the the Atlantic where he's a staff writer was adapted from his book The Kingdom the power and the glory American evangelicals in an age of extremism one of the things that stayed with me when it came to the book was Tim's openness to engage in conversations with the people he disagreed with politically it's a reminder that the work of politics not only exists at the national and international level but also at the level of individual one-on one conversations and smaller gatherings in conversation with Tim today is Marie Griffith who is a professor at Washington University in St Louis and her work is also focused on Christianity and in America and her current project is focused on the sexual abuse crisis in the American Catholic church and various Protestant denominations and independent churches she is the author of several books including Moral Combat how sex divided American Christians and fractured American politics Marie is also a trustee of the college she currently chairs the academic policy committee please welcome Tim and Marie thanks so much uh to Sylvia and nage and um it's good evening uh to you all um I think I just just want to invite everyone to give one quick Round of Applause for Sylvia our new president of the College of the Atlantic he's uh just gotten here July 1 and has jumped right in um so it's uh really our pleasure to have her here and it's a delight for me to have this chance to be in conversation with Tim Alberta uh just a few more words of introduction Tim is currently an award-winning journalist and staff writer for the Atlantic which he joined in 2021 he previously spent more than a decade in Washington DC as a reporter for such Publications as the Wall Street Journal the hotline National Journal and National Review and his work is also appeared in Sports Illustrated in Vanity Fair and other uh Outlets he served for a time as the chief political correspondent for Politico and he came to real National prominence with his first book American Carnage on the front lines of the Republican Civil War and the rise of President Trump that book was published in 2019 the same year Tim co-moderated the year's final Democratic presidential debate aired on PBS NewsHour American Carnage debuted at number two on the New York Times bestseller list and number one on the Washington Post list and Tim was all set to write a sequel to it when his father the retired pastor of of an Evangelical Church in Brighton Michigan died very suddenly and unexpectedly Tim went home and in the days before and after his father's funeral he found a church that had changed quite dramatically from his childhood many church members who had known Tim since he was a small child were furious with him because of his criticisms of trump and they let him know that in no uncertain terms even as he mourned and eulogized his father water that experience spurred him to scrap the political sequel to American Carnage and turn instead to what he calls the crackup of the American Evangelical Church and the result is this second book The Kingdom the power and the glory American evangelicals in an age of extremism and he tells that very moving story about his father's death and this book's origin in uh the book's prologue to say that this book has struck a chord among American readers is quite an understatement it has created an enormous Splash and rightly so Tim has been a featured guest on countless news programs across radio as well as Network and cable television and the kingdom the power and the glory has become the most celebrated book on American religion and politics in recent memory it is a deeply reported beautifully written and highly personal exploration of the fault lines both within and Beyond Beyond American evangelicalism and it's based on a remarkable array of interviews with Evangelical leaders and church members across the country the book helps explain how a faith based on Jesus who taught followers to love their enemies has become a politicized religion in which loving your enemies is woke sex scandals are the norm and weekly sermons are filled with exhortations for how to own the libs I enthusiastically commend this book to all of you and please join me in welcoming again Tim Alberto on his first trip to Maine and to the College of the Atlantic so Tim and I are going to talk until about six o'clock and then we will open it up to Q&A and there will be mics coming around so don't worry H keep your questions um but we will get to them as soon as we can so Tim welcome thank you Marie as I noted just now your book has had tremendous resonance with American audiences although presumably not all American Christians um why do you think it's hit such a cord with people and who are the audiences that have been most likely to resonate with it want to talk to you as well as who are the audiences that have been resistant and and critical of it boy um yeah I mean it's well first thank you for the wonderful introduction and thank you all for being being here uh thank you sea and Katie and all the people who worked so hard to put this on um boy I think um probably part of the reason that it's resonated the way that it has is many of us who grew up in the Evangelical subculture have sort of recognized that something is wrong um that something is fundamentally incompatible in this moment with there's a scene early in the book where I'm talking with a professor at Liberty University and he has sort of reached his wits end he is a legacy at Liberty his parents were contemporaries of Jerry fwell Senor he grew up in Lynchberg all he ever wanted was to go to Liberty and then he did and then all he wanted was to teach at Liberty and he did and now this professor is sort of surveying the the wreckage and and and thinking about the damage that's been done and he sort of says to me at one point says you know it wasn't supposed to be this way and he says you know I I can't help but think that the hardest thing for us to do is to challenge our parents to challenge the previous generations on the things that may have gone wrong and the really hard thing is to challenge them with the lessons that they taught us right and I think that that I see some heads nodding that that can be one window into this world you have entire Generations now of younger Believers and younger folks who grew up in the church who have um drifted away from either their beliefs or the church in many cases both in part because of what they see as a sort of credibility gap um people who were taught to love your enemy people who were taught to turn the other cheek people who were taught that if you are a follower of Jesus Christ that that is a one-way ticket [Music] to often times mistreatment oppression abuse physical harm even I mean that is the story of the early church that is the story of the gospels that is that is sort of part and parcel of the commitment one makes when declaring their faith in Jesus is that none of this is going to be easy in fact Jesus promises you that it's not going to be easy and I think for a lot of us who grew up with those lessons internalizing all of that to then see in recent years the ways in which the Evangelical movement pieces of it at least have lashed out and have declared war on their enemies using as justification this idea that well we're under siege here in America right our status is being attacked our faith is being attacked we're being mocked and belittled in the Public Square God has been taken out of American life and we need to fight back and I think there is this this glaring disconnect and this inconsistency that again for many of us who grew up steeped in scripture who grew up you know like I write in the book about having been raised in the church physically literally raised in the church I mean I was there as much as I was at my home and and none of this is to say I want to offer the caveat right up front that I'm sitting up here with a halo over my head because I'm not I promise you I am as as as broken and depraved as in need of Grace as anyone but I think there is at the core of this Marie a generational Schism here and I think for people in my generation we now have this kind of critical dist from the Moral Majority from what went wrong in that era from this sort of uh this militant weaponizing of Christianity and we can see it in our parents we can see it in our churches that we grew up in and we want nothing to do with it and I think it has created a tremendous amount of angst and tension and heartache in the church and so what's been interesting in the feedback that I've gotten to the second point of your question is I don't go a day without getting a couple of emails from people around my age you know anywhere from early 30s to early 40s who were going through this exact same thing but I'm also getting a lot of emails from their parents from their parents generation who uh some of those notes have been a little bit hostile that's to be expected some of them have been really interesting and really open-minded and have been solicitous and have said okay I can maybe see now what my kids are saying and maybe this is a conversation that's long overdue so it's been sort of a mix that's great that's great I think I told you I was raised Southern Baptist in roughly the same era you were in an era when Jimmy Carter was a southern baptist right I'm very different so I really identify with how you uh describe uh that that sort of the evangelicalism of your youth which I think is very similar to what I grew up with um let's talk about Christian nationalism a little bit lot of ink is being spilled right now on Christian nationalism and in the book you write champions of Christian nationalism would have you believe that their efforts to rule the country are inherently theological that they are in service of a broader effort to reclaim America for God this is a lie end quote um how do you define Christian nationalism and and why do you think it's been so appealing to so many Americans okay this is a uh meatball right down the middle and I will I will try not I will not I'll try not to swing out of my shoes here in answering it um because some of you I'm sure most of you have heard this phrase thrown around a lot Christian nationalism and the problem is that it means 10 different things to 10 different people depending on who you're talking with to me I I look at Christian nationalism as really the intersection of bad history and bad Theology and one is very much a prerequisite for the other so here's what I mean by that if you go back certainly 50 60 years to the pre-oral majority era um and the sort of the Jimmy Carter the and and even in the sort of runup in opposition to Jimmy Carter right around the time in the late 60s early 1970s when all of these churches conservative churches some of them fundamentalists some of them Evangelical all of them were starting to get a little worked up about the culture wars right and there's this moment where everybody feels like things are slipping away prayer is taken out of public schools pornography culture is rampant the drug culture is rampant divorce rates are are are skyrocketing interracial marriage roie Wade you name it right and there's this feeling that our country is slipping away and so what you're starting to see back then is a really a pretty a pretty scaled up effort to begin launching alternative Christian uh K through 12 and then also alternative Christian universities the idea being that this is the fault of the secular education system that they have that they have whitewashed the true history of this country that we were in fact made to be a Christian Nation at the very least we were shaped by and formed by judeo-christian values and now all of that has been pushed aside and the result of it is this Godless pag Pagan secular humanist culture that H excuse me that has indoctrinated all of our children into hating us and hating the church and hating God if that sounds familiar that was happening 60 years ago it's of course again happening now and I think what you're seeing now is an even more explicit and I would argue an even more Shameless effort to go about doing what they're doing and and and to be clear about what they're doing it is quite literally rewriting history so you are seeing a sustained effort around the country in state legislatures in individual school districts trying to rewrite history books to make clear that in fact we were conceived as a Christian Nation that the founders very much invisioned this being a nation ruled by Christians and more specifically by Christian men by by European Christian men and so and there this is a very well-funded very well organized effort you have people like David Barton of who has a massive organization he speaks around the country you have Chad Connelly you have a number of these figures who are going around right now really in a in a kind of uh systematic sophisticated way making the case that the country has been taken from us because our true history has been subverted by the left and we are going to remind this these future generations of what our history is so the problem with this is twofold of course number one that it's bad history a lot of it is just completely inaccurate at a factual level but I think the bigger problem is that this bad history then becomes the sort of um the edifice upon which you can begin to build a bad theology the bad history if you believe it if you believe that this country that was formed this specific way uh and that it has now been taken away from us and that we have to fight to get it back part of the language that is being used here is language of a covenant right and it is running very much parallel to the Old Testament Covenant with the nation of Israel and this is not accidental because the idea is that once you can convince all of these people all of these church leaders all of these uh Christian School teachers all of these homeschoolers all of these parents once you can convince them of the bad history then it becomes very easy to start distorting the Theology and getting them to sort of rationalize and justify ultimately behavior that is antithetical to what one would find in sort of classic reformed Orthodox Christian doctrine and if you have conversations with these folks as I do throughout the book and trying to understand how is it that you are able and willing to so far from the rather unambiguous teachings of Christ so often they will point to this and say well desperate times call for desperate measures this nation was ordained by God and an attack on this country is an attack on God himself and so we are fighting to preserve this Covenant Nation we are fighting to preserve this new Israel so Christian nationalism in that context I think can almost be sympathized with to some degree because if people truly believe that then you can understand the level of panic that they're feeling I think the problem is that the great majority of people I know who I've covered in this space they don't believe it they're counting on a lot of easy marks to believe it but they themselves don't believe it they're not after restoring a God-fearing America they are after power they are after influence they are after control and I would just offer as a brief conclusion to a long rambling definition there there was this conference a couple of years ago called the national conservatism conference and it gathered a number of luminaries from across the sort of right-wing intellectual academic activist space and they sign at the end of it a declaration of principles for their movement it's pretty short list you could read through it and one of the bullet points one of the subheadings was on religion and public life and this statement of principles said explicitly very plainly there was no winking and nodding involved here said very clearly that in our vision of an America ruled by the tenants of national conservatism they said that citizens would be protected from religious coercion by the state in their private homes and in their private lives I'll repeat that citizens would be protected from religious coercion by the state in their private homes and in their private lives but in public they're fair game the people who signed that document are a who's who of some of the most influential people in conservative movement politics today these are people who would absolutely find themselves working in a second Trump Administration some cases people who would be in the West Wing some people who would probably probably be making regular stops in the Oval Office so these are not Fringe characters and what they have put into writing is very clear very plain what they Envision about what they want for this country and so the danger with the Christian nationalist argument and I worry about this in my field of Journalism worry about it in the field of Academia is that the label is being thrown around so haphazardly that it can almost become counterproductive you can offend people with it you can antagonize people with it and suddenly they start self-identifying and they want to charge Into The Fray because well they love this country and they love Christianity so of course that makes them a Christian nationalist but what I'm really describing here is something that is much more Sinister and um and and power thirst power hungry in in its aims and that is a threat it's it's a very real threat and not in the abstract not in the long term it is a threat here and now um i' I'd like to ask you about the sort of more personal dimension of this you know one of the distinctive characteristics of your book are the amazing interviews that you do and one interesting aspect I think that you found is and that this goes a little bit against I think what you just said the ambivalence or uncertainty that a lot of Evangelical pastors actually seem to feel internally about the political turn that they've taken um so I just want to read a short paragraph you wrote about Pastor Greg lock uh from Mount Juliet Tennessee uh lock has just told you in one sentence that he wouldn't take up arms against the government and then he turns around and says but if the Liberals take away Christians guns then we'll meet them at the door with our Second Amendment right and so you you write this this torical turnabout making clear in one gulp of error that he draws the line at violence then suggesting in the next that his congregants would shoot anyone who tried to prevent the church from convening was representative of our longer conversation the pastor was surprisingly pensive and receptive to tough questioning he would regularly admit to having taken something too far and lament how a stray sound bite that went viral had distracted from the substance of his sermon then he would double down on that same soundbite as if fearful that I took his Contrition for cowardice that's a remarkable paragraph tell us more about this what's what's going on there so I think when the history books are written about this period there will be a lot made of Donald Trump there will be a lot made of racial resentment and uh and grievance in this country I think we have lived through an era of just intense radioactive polarization dating back to really the aftermath of 9/11 and I think we're still feeling it economically culturally um I think in this specific context that you're asking about Marie I think the history books would do well to settle first and foremost on the question of what happened during covid-19 the reason I say that is because for those of you who did not grow up in the Evangelical Church um didn't grow up listening to the you know the televangelists or the radio evangelist didn't grow up reading the kids literature this may sound very strange very foreign to you but some of you will know exactly what I'm talking about which is to say that you know for many decades of my life I was really marinating in this message coming from parts of the Evangelical world that said we are in a cosmic spiritual Collision we are heading for Armageddon in this country because the ascendant secular humanist Progressive left that wants to shut down your churches they want to eradicate the almighty from public life they have no tolerance for your religion they hate you they're coming they're coming they are making a concerted effort to seize the levers of power in government and in other cultural institutions and their goal is nothing less than total defeat of Christians in this country and you had better be ready you Christian had better be ready for that day when the rubber is going to meet the road so the beginning of 2020 when churches around the country start to get notices from their Pastor saying hey we don't know quite what's going on with this but we're kind of following the latest guidance from State Health departments and we're g to play this safe and shut down the church for a week or two or three or a month or whatever you know that was the moment for a lot of these folks where they said see we knew this day would come we knew this day would come when the government would shut down our church and they would use any excuse any rationale to do it and now it's here it's here they're telling us in America the land of the free they're telling us that we can't meet on Sunday because the government is deeming this virus which some of us aren't even sure if it is a virus that that we can't meet and we can't worship Our God together this became the Line in the Sand right for pastor for church leaders all around the country and let me be clear here the vast majority of my book is not focused on the mainline of of the Christian tradition is not focused at all really on the Progressive wing of American Christianity I am talking about conservative reformed Evangelical spaces where the Pastors in these churches are themselves by any definition conservative right so for these pastors who had spent years decades in some cases building up this credibility with their congregations for some of them to come out and tell them we're going to stay at home for a couple of weeks we're going to do virtual worship on Sunday morning those pastors became apostates to their congregations they became Heretics they became the Shepherds who fled when the Wolves were within earshot and I cannot emphasize just how dramatic of a reshaping a reshuffling that this is had on the church in my travels all around the country when I've talked with people big churches little churches everything in between I talk with hundreds of pastors talk about George Floyd talk about Donald Trump talk about you know whatever any number of different things always comes back to co co is where this distrust and this is even setting aside some of the conspiracy theories that sort of then spawned out of Co but Co was really the moment where a lot of longtime congregations people who' been worshiping together for 20 or 30 years I mean I've been in churches with people sobbing telling me about how their small group met every Wednesday night for 30 years and they were there crying and praying together after 911 they were there crying and praying together during the financial collapse they were crying and praying together when somebody's kid had cancer and then died that these people were family and then within a couple of weeks in the space of you know March and April of 2020 these people stopped talking to each other and they stopped they stopped being a part of the same congregation together they couldn't coexist anymore so there are these fractures that have been driven into the heart of the church and I'm sorry to say I wish I had a happy conclusion to all of that Doom and Gloom but we're still seeing it now and I think it's going to be playing out for a very long time yeah I I couldn't agree with you more um Tim okay I want to put you on the spot just a little bit uh uh with this question um I absolutely love the book when I was about twoth thirds or three qus of the way through I wrote and I Was preparing my questions I wrote down a question for me for you which was why did you choose to interview only men now fortunately I continued reading because then you did interview some women so Tiffany thigpin Jules Woodson Julie Roy and Rachel Den Hollander to be precise who come up you get to them about page 367 so now what's interesting to me a couple things here is that these women are known as courageous advocates for sexual abuse reform in the churches in the Southern Baptist convention and other Evangelical settings their survivors themselves um so I just wanted you to talk to me a little bit about your choice to interview them and what particular light they shed on contemporary evangelicalism and then maybe you could say a word about why there aren't more women's voices in the book so would you believe me if I told you that it was intentional okay sure you don't have to you can say no um um listen it's no secret to anyone who's been a part of the this world that the the Evangelical subculture is dominated by men um it can be very difficult to have these conversations um you know I grew up in a very conservative church and conservative on every possible or even theoretical issue that would come before the congregation the default answer was go right um and that's just what it was and yet Every Mother's Day my father who uh was in the Pulpit for nearly 30 years as the senior pastor um Every Mother's Day my dad would invite my mom to give the the the sermon who is a brilliant uh and uh amazing speaker in her own right and someone who knows the gospel as well as anyone in the church and there were I didn't realize this until many years later my mom told me this that there were couples families in the church who'd gone there with us forever who were very close with us who that Sunday they would come in for the worship and the singing and the prayers and then they would leave while my mom preached and then they would come back in at the end for the prayers um and that's in a relatively Progressive Church on the matter of gender roles like my dad had written uh earlier in his career had written an entire position paper on why he believes that women should serve as elders and as Pastors in in his church congregation and he was raped over the coals for it uh by some of his friends and colleagues and other denominations so it's a very it's a very difficult thing to appreciate just how sensitive this conversation is around the idea of complementarianism in the church this idea that versus egalitarianism so a complementarianism being that women are welcome women are valuable but you can't teach men you can't be you can't be in a position to hold any sort of spiritual leadership realer perceived over men um whereas egalitarians take a more you know modern approach um this is a real fault line that runs through American Christianity in general where there's a split on it but in the Evangelical world it is not a split it is like 9010 right and what I noticed in that all the churches I was visiting all of the pastors I was speaking to and I got a pretty good array a pretty good diverse assortment of folks when I would ask hey who should I talk to about this do you have a couple of um of lay leaders who I can speak with you have some other people in the congregation that I might be able to talk with every single time almost without fail the pastors or the church leaders would say yeah talk to him talk to him it was never talk to her and that became very apparent uh very conspicuous as time went on and so as I was thinking about the ways in which I might incorporate not just women's voices generically but women's voices who would be able to speak to some of the ways that they've been mistreated some of the ways that they've been silenced some of the ways that they've been sort of classified as uh second class Christians I wanted to build to it I wanted to get to a place in the book where much as I did sort of similarly with young people I wanted to mostly keep young people's voices out of it because young people are another group that is sort of marginalized in the church and really they don't have a seat at the table often to push for the sort of reforms that they believe and that I believe would be healthy for the church in the long term so I wanted readers to get a little antsy as they were going I wanted readers to reach a point where when those female those incredible Brave female voices come bursting through the page I wanted the ma the the the maximum impact of it because I think any church I'm a part of including the one that my wife and I literally are a part of um any conversation I'm invited to with the pastors with the elders I will make the case not to be woke not to be PC not to be whatever I will just say the healthiest Christian environments I have been in places where people grow where they Thrive where they are Sanctified where they where they really can become more like Christ those are places that feature prominent women in leadership and where they also Elevate young people to have a seat at that table so I think that it was important for me to try to deliver a jolt in that way gotcha um well I want us to sort of shift and and get closer back into some of the Trump the connections uh to Trump here um about Midway through the book you cite a very powerful quote from Russell Moore who is the one-time Southern Baptist leader who was drummed out of the denomination uh even though he's actually extremely conservative um but he was drummed out for his opposition to Trump and uh at one point in your interview with him one of your interviews he says when your Idols begin to disappoint you it can lead you back to God that's page 21 and then on the other hand that Pastor I cited a minute ago Greg lock um he told you about talking politics in church I don't think there's any going back that train has left the station this is who we are so I just wanted to ask you do you think Christians will become disappointed disillusioned with trumpism or do you sort of agree with Lo that this is really what what much of most of Evangelical Christianity looks like now and and will continue to look like oh boy I have a couple of answers and they're not necessarily in conflict with another I think the first thing I would point out is that in 2016 When Donald Trump became the Republican nominee his weakest cell of support in trying to assemble the Republican coalition to come together to win his weakest segment of support was among self-identified white evangelicals they were the people who had voted for Ted Cruz they were the people who had voted for Jeb Bush for Marco Rubio for John Kasich they were very leery of trump and with good reason right we don't need to go through the greatest hits of of Donald Trump and Trump knew it and Trump had a couple of people whispering in his ear who gave him some really shrewd advice and they said look couple of things we can do number one put out a list of Supreme Court Justices and make sure that you are putting forth the a roster of the most staunchly pro-life people that you can find to put that we could have on the bench one day if you're elected so he did that Trump also went to New York City and he met with this massive Ballroom full of Evangelical leaders highly influential people Franklin Graham um uh jari alwell Jr who immediately after this event went to Trump Tower posed for a picture with Trump thumbs up with a Playboy magazine cover by behind them on the wall which was folks you don't get this sort of irony very often I mean you got to you just have to savor it when you get it and the interesting thing is that Trump in that meeting was introduced by these Evangelical figureheads and they were vouching for him saying you know God throughout scripture uses imperfect vessels for his own perfect plan and they could point to Mo mes they could point to King David they could point to Solomon they could point to King Cyrus of Persia and I'll come back to this point in a minute because it's very important I think but really the big one for Trump that helped clinch the support he needed to get across the finish line and to beat Hillary Clinton was picking Mike fence Mike Pence as his Vice Presidential nominee and the combination of these things was a very explicit Trump even said it at one point in one of the debates he said I will only put pro-life justi is on the court right so Trump was able to get across the finish line and very narrowly defeat Hillary Clinton I mean he Trump wins the election in 2016 by a combined 77744 votes spread across three states right and if you look at the exit polling if you parse out all of the after elction analytics that were done it was the single issue pro-life evangelicals in those states that absolutely put Trump across the finish line so they won him the election but they won him the election holding their nose I mean I talked to people who said to me literally that they stepped in the ballot Booth checked the box for Trump left the ballot booth and prayed for forgiveness right that's how a lot of folks felt what's so interesting is that over the next four years these people went from Trump's softest supporters to his most fervent supporters right and you ask why why you could understand it in 2016 there's Supreme Court vacancy hanging in the balance this is a guy who you know for whatever his warts at least we know what we're going to get with Hillary and it's going to be bad with him maybe we'll get some good policy and let's be clear folks he did give social conservatives some good policy he did put conservative jurists on the court he did deliver some things that he would prom promise to them and yet when you go back and talk to people late in his presidency after he lies about losing the election after he incites the Riot on January 6th and then he's running again and you ask these same people why are you supporting him like you got what you needed out of him but now you've got other options you've got Nikki Haley you've got Tim Scott you've got all these other options you have an offramp now you don't need to support this guy anymore and what came up in those conversations was I think the fundamental theme that I come back to time and time and time again in the book which is that these people perceive Christian America to be slipping out of their grasp they perceive that their way of life is approaching Extinction they perceive The Barbarians to be at the gates coming for them and they have all looked around and decided you know what maybe we need a barbarian to protect us and that in a nut show is the relationship with Donald Trump it is almost a mercenary type relationship where a lot of these people you'll spend an hour in conversation with them and they will not say a single redeeming thing about them in they will point to his language they will point to his extracurricular activities in his marriages they will point to all of these things and then you get to the end and they say yeah but he's going to protect us he's going to fight for us he's going to do the things for us that no good Pious Church going Christian would ever do to protect us and I think that that's a fascinating insight into the sort of transactionalism that has informed this relationship from the start but of course you ask yourself at what point if ever would they say can't do it anymore enough is enough because every time we thought that we were getting to that point it sort of slipped away from us and if anything his his there was a really interesting moment it's a long answer but real quickly I'll add in the aftermath of the 2022 midterms you may have seen this but Trump threw the pro lifers onto the bus he said it was their fault that Republicans lost all these winnable races and for about four weeks after that Trump's numbers for the first time in the last seven years they started going down with Evangelical Christians like considerably down and that's where people like Ronda santis and Nikki Haley and others saw a real opening and then do you know what happened Alvin Bragg's indictment landed in New York and his numbers that had been going down with evangelicals went right back up because it played perfectly into this sense of a persecution complex right that that they're coming for us and they've got to get through him first because he's the one protecting us and so now Trump is almost he's almost supernaturally insulated from any critique any criticism any attack anything the guy does can almost be turned around into a from a negative into a positive because folks think well that's just the Rough and Tumble nature of the guy and that's why he's so effective in protecting us wow yeah uh well let's talk about uh the the current his current pick for VP because you've continued writing this is getting us beyond the book a little bit um but most recently I think your Atlantic piece that was published last week called this is exactly what the Trump team feared and in that piece you wrote that campaign officials acknowledged to you that Trump's selection of JD Vance as the running mate was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing boers in a nailbiter and I think you were you were one of the first you may have been the first journalist to report the Trump campaign's second guessing of the Vance uh pick a selection that you tweeted was born of Cockiness that no longer seems warranted so I'm just curious what you expect to happen now and and what the implications really are uh for evangelicals and and other potential Trump voters even beyond the Evangelical yeah so um the first part about Vance I mean it's look it's really interesting um the Trump campaign for many months had been operating on Parallel tracks where they were thinking with a couple of different theories about what he might want to do on the one track it was listen you pick a boring vanilla non-controversial caretaker type who's just going to stand and salute and do it you tell him to do and he's not going to ever threaten you or steal the Limelight from you kind of like the way that Mike Pence was up until January 6th um small falling out if you may have heard after that and Trump was really leaning in that direction for a long time the other argument on the parallel track was listen you're getting old you've created this movement the likes of which the Republican party has really never seen at least not since Reagan but arguably way past Reagan and maybe you need to pick an era parent maybe you need to put your finger on the scales here and instead of waiting for this to play out after you leave office you make your call now based on who you think is best positioned to carry the magga mantle moving forward the interesting thing is that for much of the Trump campaign as they were deliberating on this they were pretty squarely on that first track only in about the past month or only in about the month leading up to his actual selection did Trump start to veer towards that second track and a big part of this was the Cockiness it was the arrogance that they felt like listen we are running away with this campaign and to be clear they were running away with this campaign all of the modeling all of the polling down to down to Township Precinct levels that you were seeing from Democrats in Battleground States it was abysmal there was they were not going to be over be able to overcome Biden at the top of the ticket it wasn't just Biden going to lose Democrats were going to get slaughtered down the ticket it this was going to be very very bad and they knew it the Trump people knew it and and I wrote about this in some great detail because I'd spent many months inside the campaign what's so interesting is that Trump I think that arrogance that that hubris really started to bleed into his decision-making and ultimately they chose a guy who is 39 years old who's had no taste whatsoever of the scrutiny the white hot Spotlight of a national campaign a guy who's got a history of saying some pretty weird and cringeworthy things and ultimately a guy who at the end of the day adds nothing to the Trump Coalition in other words if you believe that politics is all about addition and multiplication and not about subtraction and division you're looking at where the vulnerabilities are for a republican ticket led by Donald Trump and you're looking at Suburban college educated women who think he's a creep and you're looking at certainly even some of these reluctant pro-life voters single-issue Evangelical voters who they held their nose in 16 maybe they even held it again in 20 but they can't do it again in 24 JD Vance really doesn't do anything to address those weaknesses he sort of doubles down on the core strength of the pugilistic populism of Donald Trump so yes there is a lot of second guing a lot of buyers are more at this point I don't think just to answer the question that I know is popping up in everyone's thought bubble I I don't think that he's going to ditch him because even at a mechanical level it's very hard now he he forly accepted the nomination at the party's convention it would be a mess to try and untangle all of that and then to the second question quickly that you asked Marie because it ties into the point I was making about the single issue Evangelical voters I have been stunned as a political journalist as someone who reads everything that every anybody writes on the subject here I have really been stunned that there hasn't been more attention paid to the fact that this is America's first post Rie Wade presidential election for 50 years activists on both sides of the aisle but particularly pro-life activists have been told listen if you care about the issue of abortion then you have to vote in a presidential year because you're not voting for a president you're voting for Supreme Court Justices and Supreme Court Justices are the ones who will ultimately decide abortion law in America So for 50 years you see this in the exit polling you see this in the social science a huge number of self-identified single issue Evangelical voters who are pro-lifers have come out and reliably voted Republican even though they think in many Cas is at the Democratic platform on social justice on caring for the poor that that the Democratic platform may actually be a better fit for them but they are deeply invested and sincerely convicted about the abortion issue right so now it's taken off the table Republicans are going around the country saying hey it's def federalized it's thrown back to the States you don't have to worry about it now in a presidential election and I think that this is hugely problematic for Republicans I think that they're there is a very real chance that even if you're looking at the margins I said earlier that 2016 was decided by 77744 votes guys 2020 was decided by 429102 two% of these single issue pro-life voters deciding to stay home or vote third party or leave the top of the ticket blank that could create an enormous problem for Trump and I don't think that they have really thought about how going to address it wow okay I'm going to ask you one more very quick question I'll ask you to respond briefly and then we're going to open it up uh I can't really see very well here but I know Sean will be somewhere okay uh just last question quickly what do you see as the political implications for democracy the theme of our summer Institute this week if Trump is elected and brings more Christian nationalist types into his administration well okay let me give you a I even struggle to give you the worst case scenario because people are going to uh need fainting couches to to fall over on um and frankly I don't think the worst case scenario is realistic look I have spent time with the former president I've sat in the Oval Office with him I've spent a lot of time with his campaigns I know people who are very close to him um I don't think Trump there are reasons to worry about a trump presidency I don't think Trump trying to transform America into a theocracy is one of them I I just don't now do I think that there will be people around him who are self-identified Christian nationalists who will try to do everything they can to sort of slip things past him or to coax him into you know hey this is just a symbolic gesture for example there has been talk in the highest levels of the conservative movement people who have Trump's ear about a symbolic Declaration of Christianity as America's State religion right now that may sound sort of Toothless to some I'm guessing based on the reaction I'm seeing here not to you um because last I checked The Establishment Clause of the Constitution says that there will be no establishment of a state religion the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees a freedom of religion and a freedom from religion from religious coercion so yes there is a danger that there will be I think in a more unilateral and symbolic way a push to do some things that could be fundamentally undemocratic and to be clear fundamentally unchristian right now and and I say that I I I I say that if I can elaborate for a quick moment I know my answers go long I'm glad my wife's not here rolling her eyes at me in the back at least I don't think she is when I say fundamentally unchristian folks I just can't drive this point home enough I don't know how many of you are believers in the room um if I can take a back door to proing you for just a moment is really important to understand that in the first three and a half centuries of the church in the earliest moments from the resurrection of Christ the people who went around proclaiming his gospel the people who went around saying to anybody who would listen that listen this Rabbi who we've been following for three and a half years and who we watched nailed to a Roman Tree and and die in front of all of us and then we watched him buried and then we went into hiding because we thought that we were next and now they've burst out of hiding and they're running around telling anybody who will listen that he that he's alive we've seen him he's risen and they've also done these very strange things they've started after centuries of their people their Jewish people not having anything to do with Gentiles suddenly they're calling them brothers and sisters worshiping with them after worshiping on Saturdays for centuries now they're worshiping on Sundays after not eating pork and other foods for centuries suddenly they're eating whatever they want an entire Paradigm Shift has occurred here and everybody's trying to understand what happened right and in those first three and a half centuries these early followers of Jesus were rounded up beaten fed to Lions crucified burned alive used literally as as human candles in Emperor Nero's court right and do you know what they did when they were locked in prisons do you know what they did when they were being taken away to be killed they sang hymns and they prayed for the people who were persecuting them my favorite character in the New Testament is Peter who was sort of Jesus's best buddy and right-hand man the guy Jesus said that they were going to build the Church on the Rock of Peter right on the night of Jesus's arrest Peter pulls out a sword and lops off the ear of one of the guys arresting him and Jesus heals the man's ear and says Peter no dude no you're not with the program here buddy like those who live by the sword will die by the sword that same Peter not long after is writing from a Roman prison and he's awaiting his own execution and what is he writing he's writing an epistle explaining to everyone who is being oppressed and being martyred rounded up for their faith in in Jesus in the early Church all around the ancient near East he's writing this letter telling them listen remember you will be judged by the grace and the love that you show to your tormentors you will be judged by your ability to show Grace and to show kindness and compassion to these people who are treating you so horribly what could have possibly changed for this man to go from The Sword in that way to suddenly the cross the reason that the Christian nationalist argument falls apart the reason that what some of these people want to do if giving the opportunity would fall apart is because it's not just unamerican it is fundamentally anti-christian Christianity has since the first century thrived at the margins it has thrived in being countercultural only when Constantine tried to take control in the 4th century and turn it into State religion that was the beginning of all of our problems because Christians suddenly believed that when they were in trouble they could run to the strong man they could run to the sword they could run to the political ruler who promised to protect them sound familiar right and so we've been fighting this now for 17th century since and what you see throughout the whole Arc of History there's a phenomenal book by a professor at weaton named John Dixon and he writes a book called bullies and Saints and it tracks 2,000 years of how Christians have responded to times of persecution and and and oppression and martyrdom and if you look the times when Christians have turned to the sword is the times at which Christianity has completely lost its credibility in The Wider culture people here tonight who are not Christians I'm sure if I got to talking with you you would probably say in part the reason you want nothing to do with Christianity is because you want nothing to do with the church you want nothing to do with these Christians these so-called Christians who seem to be so so bent on subjugating you and dominating the culture and hating their enemy instead of loving their enemy but if you were just to shift the Paradigm and go back to the to the earliest Church teachings around what it meant to be a Christian these people back then could never have conceived of controlling a nation they never could have conceived Jesus in the wilderness was tempted given all the kingdoms of the world and he told Satan get behind me when they there's a there's a passage in Mark where the PE the Crowds Are descending on him to make him King these Jews who are under a brutal and dehumanizing Roman occupation and they want to make him King and he fle he doesn't want to be king he doesn't want to be Caesar and he didn't want his followers to pick up swords and go fight the Romans he was preaching an entirely different program but we in the American context had become so coddled and so comfortable and so en to believe that we are owed these rights that we are owed a Christian Nation that we are that we are somehow and it is our Birthright we have completely lost touch with the Christians our brothers and sisters all around the world today who are being persecuted for their faith and all of our ancestors who come before us who could have never conceived of this idea that we need to use Christianity as a means to dominate the world around us and I just hope that people can understand what Christianity really is relative to what some of these folks would want you to believe it is okay okay so we're gonna open it up um Sean are there two mics there or yes there are two mics okay one over here and one over here just raise your arm really high and someone will come to you and and please try to be uh brief and concise hey Tim thanks for being here um I'm sort of wondering in the past uh eight nine years there's been a few different Strategies employed uh to sort of combat Trump like he was a a a con man and vulgar and then after January 6th it was he's a threat to democracy very recently uh post picking JD Vance even you said it a lot of people are calling him just weird and that's sort of the strategy right now I'm wondering if you think that strategy is going to be effective uh or what strategy might be particularly for like the Evangelical Community boy that's a really good question so okay on the weird thing specifically I'll just say I'm not sure how effective it will be I've got to think that there's sort of a diminishing return because some of the same I've had this conversation with Democratic operatives and with Republican operatives some of these same Suburban moderate women outside the suburbs of Detroit and Milwaukee and Philly and Phoenix and Atlanta and Vegas where where the election's going to be decided in those areas right those women do think Trump Advance are are weird on some of their policies there's polling that shows they also think Democrats are really weird about boys and girls Sports they also think that Democrats are really weird that they covered up in a Weekend at Bernie's operation for Joe Biden over the last couple of years there's there's they think that the administration is weird that they chose to basically let the Border stay open for two and a half years before there was such an outcry bipartisan outcry that they finally did something about it I don't know that weird is the terrain you want to fight on because I think a lot of these voters in the middle of the electorate are pretty well convinced that both of these parties are weird um and I'm not sure that that's uniquely effective against Donald Trump what is uniquely effective against Donald Trump and we're going to see just how many eggs Democrats ultimately put in this B it is the fact that he sabotaged the peaceful transition of power after he lost a free and fair election the fact that he surrounded himself with crackpot attorneys who were coming up with extra legal and extra judicial and extra constitutional remedies to keep him in office um I think that in that sense alone never mind his record in the preceding four years I think in that alone he stands a part in American history and voters I think have been somewhat desensitized to it it's been a while since January 6th but I think what we saw in 2022 in the midterms is that the Democrats who really invested heavily in that message of not just democracy as an abstract idea but that this guy cares more about himself than he does about the country he cares more about himself than he does about your children he cares more about himself than he does the the the sort of core democratic institutions of this country I think that that had has been has shown some some glimmers of being really effective for Democrats but Republicans are loaded for bear I'm just going to say this I mean people need to be realistic about what you're going to see over the next three and a half months KLA Harris has quite a bit of baggage of her own namely the things that she's inherited from Biden being his vice president historic inflation the Border a mess Afghanistan withdrawal geopolitical turmoil around the world she's GNA she's going to get they are going to beat her up in ways that I mean I I I've seen some of what they're planning and it's not pretty so this is going to be trench warfare all the way to November but if you're a Democrat the good news is that you actually have a chance to win this election and you didn't a week ago um hi you said ear you didn't think the Trump Administration if there were to be another one has a project to make a the theological Theocratic uh Nation here what do you make then of the comment he made to evangelicals recently that if you vote for me you won't need to vote again and where does that fit into any political strategy for the Democrats from here on so I hope I have some credibility when I say this but if not feel free to throw your tomatoes and cabbage at me up here um I actually had a charitable interpretation of what he said I think what he was saying there is some variation of what he said in a number of other settings which is look I don't care if you vote in any other election just vote in this one because we're going to do so much in the next four years that all these problems are going to be solved and you're never going to have to vote again you won't need to don't bother that was the way I heard it only because I've heard him riffing in similar ways on a lot of other occasions so that is the way that I heard it personally oh did he want right over here nature of humankind is love and U it seems that we're lacking the value of love which is truth and uh in the late 19th century we had some truth communities that did some good is there any place or Hope For Truth at has a principle in creating communities of it to carry the love that we all have that's another meatball down the middle of the plate because you're you're you're asking a preacher son that question okay so I I'll answer it two ways for you if I if I may uh first you know part of the reason that I love my work is that in journalism I am called to pursue truth wherever I find it however uncomfortable it may make me or the people around me I have tended to receive some you know an equal amount of roughly equal amount of hate mail from Republicans and Democrats in recent years um and as a Christian I believe that the Bible is a mirror that I am holding up to my life every day to try and understand where I have gone wrong and where I am not showing a necessary Fidelity to truth particularly the truths that are the hardest to accept um that truth to me is and it and it is in my own communities my small group Community my church Community friends family that is the truth that is uh a sort of uh an organizing Truth for my life right I think moving to a just a secular space lower case as secular space I think what we have to come to terms with here is that We As Americans no longer have a shared Baseline of information and we haven't had one for a very long time I I remember some years ago I was writing a very long magazine profile about John Boehner the former speaker of the house and I asked him I said listen you know you you were in Congress for 25 years I was interviewing him shortly after he left I said what's the biggest change he got there in 1990 he left in 2015 and he didn't even hesitate he said biggest change is that in 1990 my neighbor and I both got the Cincinnati inquire dropped on our doorsteps and we both watched the same local newscast and when we' come out afterwards to smoke a cigar and cut our grass we would argue about everything because he was a liberal and I'm a conservative but we were arguing from a shared Baseline of facts of information that was established right and he said you fast forward 25 years most of the calls that are coming into our office are about these conspiracy theories that nobody that my staffers don't even know how to answer the questions right so that's a problem and it's a problem in our political life it's a problem in our Civic life I mean we saw in the aftermath of January 6 I had to write rather uh in a rather impassioned way maybe I guess the better way to put it would be a pissed off way because I like some others in my profession I think I see my friend Dave werman in the back some of us have actually spent years studying how election laws work especially in these key States and I live in Michigan where there were these completely Looney Tunes unhinged conspiracy theories about things happening that could not possibly possibly have happened and I'm quoting on the record Republican elections officials who have spent decades monitoring these elections in Detroit and elsewhere trying to explain that no folks you don't you don't know what you're talking about right and they would in oh yes we do I read it online I read it on Facebook I read it on Breitbart I read it on the Federalist I heard it on some podcast that becomes really problematic in a shared Civic space and with shared Civic Democratic institutions to sustain them if we cannot agree on even just the simplest of Truth um and that's I think part of the uneasiness a lot of us feel heading into this election again because one of these candidates has proven himself uh not only willing to lie cheat steal do whatever he has to do but but very effective in his lying very effective in reaching many millions of Americans who are just good decent hardworking people they're not political junkies they haven't spent time studying the Michigan Secretary of State website to know what the rules are they believe him when he goes into the Oval Office or or into the the Roosevelt room on November 4th or 5th and says we live in a Banana Republic they've stolen this election from us us they say well he's the president he knows things we don't know clearly he's he's privy to good information when in fact what he was privy to was the Mike the Mike Lindell the my pillow guy and Sydney Powell a disgraced attorney coming into the Oval Office and telling him a bunch of hogwash so there's a we are living through a sort of epistemological Crisis here and I guess I return to the place I started which is that for me knowing what absolute truth means and knowing that the truth shall set you free and knock and the door will be open to you it gives me an enormous amount of comfort in these otherwise very uncomfortable times last question over here hi there thank you so much this has been super interesting and forgive me if I'm mistaken but in this um session I don't believe I've heard you say the words race racist racism and given that Evangelical Christianity is the Bedrock for many non-white um Americans how do you feel that race plays into the Christian Movement today politically It's a Wonderful question thank you for asking it so um it's really interesting when I talked earlier about the ends justifying the means the desperate times calling for desperate measures we are being oppressed and persecuted can't you see that and can't you see why that justifies our lashing out in this way when you present that argument to black Christians they sort of their head to the side and say really tell me more about this persecution of yours you know it's really interesting there was this essay written a couple of years ago by a smart guy it was published in first things magazine and this essay the entire thesis of it was that for Christians in America we have lived through three worlds we lived in a positive World predating 1994 which is when Christianity was embraced by the culture and to be a Christian was a net positive in society and then we lived through the neutral World from 1994 to about 2008 I believe and in that world it wasn't necessarily a net positive to be a Christian but it really was n negative either you were just sort of tolerated and then in 2008 onward we live in the negative world where if you are a Christian in this country people are hostile to you it is a disadvantage you will be persecuted against so far so far and so forth right the really interesting thing in that essay and it's an interesting essay he makes a couple of really interesting points that I think are worth grappling with but at no point in that essay does he talk about how previous to 1994 how black Christians didn't exactly live in a positive world how Catholic Christians didn't exactly live in a positive World in other words for wealthy white Protestants in reformed spaces yeah it was a hoot but what about for everybody else one of the reasons that Russell Moore the former head of the uh ethics and religious liberty Commission in the Southern Baptist convention I mean Russell Moore was really uh the darling of American evangelicalism probably the most influential well-recognized figure in American Christianity as of about five or six years ago Russell Moore was run out of the Southern Baptist convention for three reasons number one he had the audacity to question the morals of Donald Trump number two he had the audacity to shine a light on the sexual abuse and the coverups that had run rampant inside of the Southern Baptist convention and number three he had the audacity to suggest that racism was alive and well in the Southern Baptist convention a denomination that was founded on the principle of slaveholding theology being reconcilable to the message of the gospels I think a lot of people don't recognize this that the largest Protestant denomination in America the Southern Baptist convention it was born in the mid 19th century out of a split with the mainstream Baptist tradition because the mainstream Baptist tradition had a lot of Abolitionist Movement in it and so they started the Southern Baptist convention which was explicitly pro-slavery and anti-abolitionist and it grew to become the largest Protestant denomination in America and Russell Moore in the aftermath of George Floyd and all of the racial unrest of the summer of 2020 Russell Moore said folks I think we have a here in the church too and maybe we should be having some conversations about it and that's what made him a heretic he hadn't denounced his faith he hadn't said anything he hadn't had some moral failure he hadn't run around with some woman he just said sexual abuse is bad racism is bad and Donald Trump probably wouldn't be allowed to serve as the janitor in any of your churches much less serve as a deacon or an elder as a pastor and for those three things he was run out so the racial component of this to your question is very delicate to address in the church and I think one of the really discouraging things is that we saw 10 15 years ago we really saw a trend of multi-racial Evangelical churches growing and proliferating and there was a real hope that that was going to be the moment when we would break through some of this sort of generations old racial grievance and racial tension and it's really started to fall apart what you hear from a lot of black Christians in particular who have been involved in those efforts is that in the last six seven eight years for reasons that you might be able to imagine they have now withdrawn and they have gone back to the black church because it's been too painful for them to be in these situations to be in these communities where they feel fundamentally misunderstood um and unheard and so so if there is to be a Renaissance in American Christianity it will have to be a multi-racial renaissance and it will have to be black black and Latino and asian brothers and sisters locking arms with their white counterparts to demand something better from the church but I think what we've seen in the last 10 years has been an enormous setback to that goal and I think we are probably quite a ways from moving in that direction so thank you thank you Marie and Tim if you were here yesterday you'll remember that I talked about human ecology being a powerful frame for the big questions of our time as well as a set of tools and Tim I know you're not an Alum of college of the Atlantic but you might as well be because you just demonstrated human ecology you managed to weave together history religion politics human nature psychology with the evolution of a virus and the Ecology of a pandemic in a way that felt like a moving sermon thank you we're so fortunate we here do come back tomorrow when we will hear from Joe Scarboro and Will William EO about media misinformation so a great segue from this talk to that talk and now please join us in the guy oval for uh reception