Tim Alberta Quotes

What’s wrong with American evangelicals?” Winans thought a moment. “America,” he replied. “Too many of them worship America.

What you've done is you've baptized your worldview and called it Christian.

The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements.

Christianity is inherently countercultural. That’s how it thrives. When it tries to become a dominant culture, it becomes corrupted. That’s been the case from the very beginning,” Zahnd

You can take up the sword of Caesar or you can take up the cross of Jesus,” Zahnd told me. “You have to choose.

If Jesus warned us that what comes out of our mouths reveals what resides in our hearts, how can we shrug off lies and hate speech as mere political rhetoric?

Scripture has a funny way of cutting political leaders down to size.

American evangelicals have a talent for what some theologians call “baptizing the past.

Why should we care that we're losing power on this earth when God has the power to forgive sins and save souls? And why should we obsess over America when Jesus has gifted us citizenship in heaven?

He continued, “The great fault in the evangelical movement today, is that we’re disobedient to the commands of the one we claim to follow. What were those commands? Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Care for widows and orphans. Visit those in prison. Seek first the kingdom of God.

When Christians are discipled primarily by society, inevitably they look to scripture for affirmation of their habits and behaviors and political views.

They need help to understand that you can care for your country without worshipping your country,” Bacote said. “They also need help to understand that you can care for your country and seek good for your neighbors. Just because other people are getting something, doesn’t mean you’re losing something.

The problem is, blessings often become indistinguishable from entitlements. Once we become convinced that God has blessed something, that something can become an object of jealousy, obsession—even worship.

In a modern evangelical culture that punishes uncertainty—where weakness is wokeness, where indecision is the wrong decision—asking pastors to provide all the other answers is a recipe for institutional ruin. Because what their congregants crave, more and more, is not so much objective religious instruction but subjective religious justification, a clergy-endorsed rationale for living their lives in a manner that might otherwise feel unbecoming for a Christian.

This is the great failing of today’s evangelical lobby. Instead of testifying confidently to the presence of a supreme and sovereign God—a celestial chess master rolling His eyes at our earthly checkerboard—Christian conservatives have acted like toddlers lost at the shopping mall, panicked and petrified, shouting the name of their father with such hysteria that his reputation is diminished in the eyes of every onlooker.

It’s a funny thing about loving your enemies: Once you love them, they cease to be your enemies.

Taking a stand,” Zahnd scoffed. “There’s this false assumption of action we’re called to take. The task of the Church is simply to be the Church. All of this high-blown rhetoric about changing the world—we don’t need to change the world. We’re not called to change the world. We’re called to be the world already changed by Christ. That’s how we’re salt; that’s how we’re light.

We in the United States have such an inadequate view of what a Christian is called to be,” Newell told me. “The Bible tells us that we are broken beyond repair—all of us—and that Christ came to heal us. Churches are supposed to be hospitals for the sick. And once we’re healed, we’re supposed to be helping others get healthy, too.

I’m trying to square this,” he said to Volf. “How can Christianity accommodate itself to such appalling anti-Christian conduct? And once you get to a point where you can say anybody’s conduct can be excused because God has a larger plan and uses flawed vessels, then what is left of an actual Christianity at that point?” Volf could only shake his head, searching for the words. “I think you’ve identified the problem really well,” the professor said.

The reason Trump was able to get away with calling his rivals ugly, with insulting prisoners of war, with belittling women and using vulgar language, was that Americans, particularly conservatives, were becoming numb to the outrage culture.

To be fair, this slow-motion reputational collapse predated Trump; he did not author the cultural insecurities of the Church. But he did identify them, and prey upon them, in ways that have accelerated the unraveling of institutional Christianity in the United States.

People love building houses; they don’t like paying for the housing inspector.’ And I think that’s right. Maybe that’s why all the houses are falling down.

the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.

Pence had knowingly bastardized a precious passage from the New Testament. The epistle to the Hebrews states, “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” In addition to substituting “Old Glory” for “Jesus”—a stunt that was nothing short of blasphemous—Pence deliberately conflated the freedom of being reborn in Christ with the supposedly all-conquering civil liberties enjoyed by Americans.

We should think of ourselves as eager dinner guests at someone else’s banquet. We are happy to be there, happy to share our perspective. But we are always respectful, always humble, because this isn’t our home.

And then there was the sad sign that a young woman working at a Tim Hortons in Lethbridge, Alberta, taped to the drive-through window in 2007. It read, “No Drunk Natives.” Accusations of racism erupted, Tim Hortons assured everyone that their coffee shops were not centres for bigotry, but what was most interesting was the public response. For as many people who called in to radio shows or wrote letters to the Lethbridge Herald to voice their outrage over the sign, there were almost as many who expressed their support for the sentiment. The young woman who posted the sign said it had just been a joke. Now, I’ll be the first to say that drunks are a problem. But I lived in Lethbridge for ten years, and I can tell you with as much neutrality as I can muster that there were many more White drunks stumbling out of the bars on Friday and Saturday nights than there were Native drunks. It’s just that in North America, White drunks tend to be invisible, whereas people of colour who drink to excess are not. Actually, White drunks are not just invisible, they can also be amusing. Remember how much fun it was to watch Dean Martin, Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, John Wayne, John Barrymore, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe play drunks on the screen and sometimes in real life? Or Jodie Marsh, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Tweedy, Britney Spears, and the late Anna Nicole Smith, just to mention a few from my daughter’s generation. And let’s not forget some of our politicians and persons of power who control the fates of nations: Winston Churchill, John A. Macdonald, Boris Yeltsin, George Bush, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Hard drinkers, every one. The somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks. They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they are driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the ex-premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star Lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others. More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.

Many evangelicals have come to view politics the way a suburban husband views Las Vegas—a self-contained escape, a place where the rules and expectations of his everyday life do not apply. The problem is, what happens in politics doesn’t stay in politics.

At present, Dickson said, the American Church is suffering from “bully syndrome.” Too many Christians are swaggering around and picking on marginalized people and generally acting like jerks because they’re angry and apprehensive. “Every teacher will tell you, the bully on the playground is usually the most insecure boy. It’s a compensation mechanism. If the boy were truly confident, he wouldn’t need to throw his weight around,” Dickson said. “It’s the same with the Church. The bully Church is the insecure Church.

few trusted advisers, the president confided that he was worried about some interconnected trends taking root in the country—and most acutely within the Republican Party. There was protectionism, a belief that global commerce and international trade deals wounded the domestic workforce. There was isolationism, a reluctance to exert American influence and strength abroad. And there was nativism, a prejudice against all things foreign: traditions, cultures, people. “These isms,” Bush told his team, “are gonna eat us alive.

Two things can be true. First, most of America’s founding fathers believed in some deity, and many were devout Christians, drawing their revolutionary inspiration from the scriptures. Second, the founders wanted nothing to do with theocracy. Many of their families had fled religious persecution in Europe; they knew the threat posed by what George Washington, several weeks into his presidency in 1789, described in a letter to the United Baptist Churches of Virginia as “the horrors of spiritual tyranny.” Washington was hardly alone: From skeptics like Benjamin Franklin to committed Christians like John Jay, the founders shared John Adams’s view that America was conceived not “under the influence of Heaven” or in conversation with the Creator, but rather by using “reason and the senses.

This somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks. They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they are driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the X premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others. More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.

God has His own kingdom; no nation in this world can compare. God has His own power; no amount of political, cultural, or social influence can compare. God has His own glory; no exataltion of earthly beings can compare. These are nonnegotiable to the Christian faith.

How can Christianity accommodate itself to such appalling anti-Christian conduct? And, once you get to a point where you can say anybody's conduct can be excused because God has a larger plan and uses flawed vessels, then what is left of an actual Christianity at that point?

As a believer in Jesus Christ—and as the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community—I had long struggled with how to answer this question. It would have been easy to say something like: “Well, John, most evangelicals are craven hypocrites who adhere only to selective biblical teachings, wield their faith as a weapon of cultural warfare, and only pretend to care about righteousness when it suits their political interests. So, it’s no surprise they would ally themselves with the likes of Donald Trump!

This is what “Make America Great Again” conveyed to many voters. Others heard a message that was altogether different—not an identity-based message, but an anti-elitist screed, or a populist call for government reform. The genius of the catchphrase, and what made Trump’s candidacy so effective, was its seamless weaving of the personal and cultural into the political and socioeconomic. His was a canopy of discontent under which the grudging masses could congregate to air their grievances about a nation they no longer recognized and a government they no longer trusted.

Jesus's words to Pilate echo throughout all of scripture. True power is not reflected in kingdoms, administrations, or campaigns, because these things are counterfeits of God's original, supreme authority. The power to raise taxes is not the power to raise Jesus from the dead; the power to seat senators is not the power to seat Jesus at the right hand of the Father. Every biblical reference to power—every prayer, every reflection, every instruction— affirms that God is all-powerful, and that to the extent He vests that power in man, it is to proclaim God's kingdom, God's power, and God's glory.

Third: Why are we playing? In a finite game, the Church’s objective would be to defeat a competitor. Except that Christians believe that the battle is already won: Unlike Adam, who gave in to the devil’s temptation and doomed mankind to an existence of sin and death, Jesus resisted Satan in the wilderness, conquered the grave, and in so doing extended redemption and eternal life for all of Adam’s descendants. Because of this, the objective of the Church is infinite: to shed our earthly selves, to become sanctified, to transform more into the likeness of Christ. “We don’t win at holiness,” Winans said. Instead, “We strive to become more mature and become better than ourselves.

There's a reason scripture warns so often and so forcefully against fear: It is just as powerful as fait. But whereas faith keeps our eyes steadily fixed on the eternal , fear disrupts us, disorients us, drives us to prioritize the hear and now. Faith is about preserving our place in the body of Christ; fear is about protecting our own flesh and blood.

No, Zahnd is baffled by the so-called shepherds. Scripture says God demands more from these Christian leaders. And yet, whether it’s Strang platforming the MyPillow lunatic, or Liberty University’s leadership trading evangelism for electioneering, or the pastor down the road in St. Louis, a onetime friend who now leads his Sunday services with a fifteen-minute political segment called “Ron’s Rants,” Zahnd sees a reckless abdication of duty on the part of the people in charge. They are, as Jesus said of the Pharisees, blind guides, leading their followers to fall into a pit. “You are forming your people in anger and hate. You are helping to intensify their capacity to hate other people,” Zahnd said. “You are giving them permission to carry around this permanent rage.

If a mega church pastor is exposed for misconduct—if he and his staff are proven to be liars, bullies, scoundrels, enablers of abuse—then what good is the testimony of thousands of people who insist that pastor brought them closer to Christ? One must take a comically small view of God to believe that these people could not have drawn closer to Christ while attending another church—one not guilty of systemic misbehavior. After all, was it the pastor who had brought them closer to Christ or was it the work of the Holy Spirit? Does Jesus need the help of our broken institutions, or do our broken institutions need the help of Jesus?

Christ concerned himself greatly with the poor, Volf said, but the poor are “hardly mentioned” in today’s evangelical discourse. Christ actively avoided fame, Volf said—asking the people on whom He performed miracles not to tell anyone—but today’s evangelical leaders are “drunk on fame.” Christ demanded that we love our enemies, Volf said, but “not even lip service is being paid to this” in today’s evangelical churches. “I can go down the line of the fundamental values of modernity—the fundamental values of most of us—and contrast them to what one finds in the gospel. You find incredible discrepancy,” the professor concluded. “I find it deeply, deeply disturbing.

The pro-life movement has not won the public argument-and, arguably, it hasn't really tried. The message of abortion as a moral evil, as an affront to the loving God who made humanity in His own image, has proven curiously ineffective. Why? For one thing, that message seems wildly inconsistent with the politics otherwise practiced by those who claim the "pro-life" mantle If one is driven to electoral advocacy by the conviction that mankind bears the image of God, why stop at opposing abortion? What about the shunning of refugees? What about the forced separation of babies from their mothers? What about the hollowing out of programs that feed hungry kids? What about the lifelong incarceration of nonviolent offenders and the wrongful execution of the innocent?

of refugees? What about the forced separation of babies from their mothers? What about the hollowing out of programs that feed hungry kids? What about the lifelong incarceration of nonviolent offenders and the wrongful execution of the innocent? What about the Darwinist health-care system that prices out sick people and denies treatment to poor people and produces the developed world’s highest maternal mortality rate? What about the fact that, in 2020, guns had become the number one cause of death for children in the United States? Surely even the most devoted anti-abortion advocate could spot the problem when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Trump press secretary who was running for governor of Arkansas, declared, “We will make sure that when a kid is in the womb, they’re as safe as they are in a classroom.” Indeed, America set another new record for school shootings in 2022, and the evangelical movement was silent.

I waited three, four, five minutes, and finally I said, ‘Mr. President, I didn’t get on this goddamn phone call to listen to you lecture me one more time!’” Boehner recalls. “Then I hung up. I’m sure McConnell was shitting in his pants.

The president’s staffers lived in fear of one thing: bad weather. Some spent Saturday nights praying for clear skies the next day, knowing a tweet-free afternoon would give them a window of uninterrupted tranquility, time to spend with their families and decompress from a job known to be demanding under the most normal of circumstances.

invoked the “nuclear option” in the Senate,

The elemental prerequisite for GOP lawmakers attempting to keep their job is to stay out of the president’s crosshairs, to avoid antagonizing his supporters back in their states and districts. This requires considerable sacrifices, chief among them ideological consistency. But it’s a small price to pay for another term with a salary of $174,000; fully funded trips around the world; sprawling staffs catering to their every whim; power-flexing appearances on cable television; black-tie dinners and top-dollar fund-raisers and seats at the table with some of the world’s most powerful and well-connected people.

No matter what turns up—in the congressional hearings probing Trump’s financial entanglements, in the Southern District of New York’s examination of wrongdoing outside Mueller’s purview—the GOP had committed itself to a fully binary view of politics that safeguards Trump’s survival. This was justified not by adherence to principle but by addiction to power: the power to hold office, the power to make laws and influence government, the power to appoint judges, the power to project ideology onto the culture at large, and the power to deny such powers to an opposing party.

The most lasting critiques of the president, and of his enablers, will extend far beyond policy. From the moment Trump took office, Republicans on Capitol Hill and throughout the administration would offer a common refrain: “Focus on what he does, not on what he says.” For all Trump’s bizarre behavior and inflammatory rhetoric, they explained, he was delivering on many policies for which the party had long hungered. But this argument conveniently obscured a self-evident reality about the role of the presidency. Trump, as the American chief executive, is both the head of government and the head of state. His behavior and his rhetoric, therefore, were every bit as relevant as his policies. In certain instances, what the president said was actually more meaningful than what he did.

George Washington, several weeks into his presidency in 1789, described in a letter to the United Baptist Churches of Virginia as “the horrors of spiritual tyranny.” Washington was hardly alone: From skeptics like Benjamin Franklin to committed Christians like John Jay, the founders shared John Adams’s view that America was conceived not “under the influence of Heaven” or in conversation with the Creator, but rather by using “reason and the senses.

The hope of the world is America. The hope of America is the Church. The hope of the Church is evangelical revival.

To understand White’s ascent to the pinnacle of evangelical influence is to study Trump’s own takeover of the Republican Party. Neither had completed any formal education—White in theology, Trump in law or government—to justify their positions of authority. Both had several failed marriages behind them and were shadowed by whispers of infidelity. Both nearly saw their reputations irreparably marred by legal, ethical, and financial improprieties, only to somehow emerge more respected on the other side. They were outlaw survivors, conscience-free swindlers who possessed both the talent to detect what people wanted to hear and the shamelessness to say it to them. Trump knew how to market the nostalgia of an idyllic America. But White had something even better to sell: the prosperity gospel.

We want the 1950s without the racism and the sexism.’ His point was, there was a time when things were mostly the way they ought to be, and there’s a path back to that time,

People of the modern world are “living in a gap,” Volf said, stuck between a pre-technology age that is fading away and a futuristic world that has yet to fully arrive. The resulting anxiety—around the crumbling of institutions, the instability of cultures, the insufficiency of economies—creates a crisis at the intersection of religion and politics. Volf fears that Christians are claiming to navigate this rupture via religious identity but are actually navigating it via political identity. When

Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.

Here, in our house of worship, people were taunting me about politics as I tried to mourn my father. I was in the company of certain friends that day who would not claim to know Jesus, yet they shrouded me in peace and comfort. Some of these card-carrying evangelical Christians? Not so much. They didn’t see a hurting son; they saw a vulnerable adversary.

The Second Amendment is among the most sacred of our national texts, a governing maxim regarded as infallible by the American right.

And once you get to a point where you can say anybody’s conduct can be excused because God has a larger plan and uses flawed vessels, then what is left of an actual Christianity at that point?

Americans always want to be number one. They always go for the gold. Canada shoots for bronze, settles for fourth, then talks about how well they represented themselves.

The writer of Hebrews understands that the glory of the latter temple is not a nation of this world, but the unshakable kingdom of Christ,” he told us. “If you place your hope in the politics of this world, you will be greatly shaken.” The sanctuary was silent. “I have so little faith in America. But fortunately, I’m sustained by a faith placed elsewhere,” Zahnd said. “It doesn’t mean I don’t care about America; it just means I place my faith elsewhere. I place it in a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and that is the kingdom of Christ, and that is the glory of the latter temple that is greater than anything that has ever been or ever will be. Amen and amen.

I told them that God was not on our side; that God raised up Jesus, not America,” the pastor recalled.

Looking back, the hardest part was overhearing all the accusatory whispers—how he’d succumbed to a weakened, watered-down Christianity—when precisely the opposite was true. “They would say, ‘Brian’s backsliding,’ and if anything, I was frontsliding,” he said, laughing. “Suddenly, I’m more committed to Jesus than I’ve ever been. But they saw it differently. Because when you’re stuck in that left-right paradigm, that’s all you can see.

Zahnd sees a reckless abdication of duty on the part of the people in charge. They are, as Jesus said of the Pharisees, blind guides, leading their followers to fall into a pit.

Falwell was a mirror image of Billy Graham, who in the early stages of his career had stressed patriotism and courted political power, only to later back away from both.

A LOT OF PEOPLE BELIEVE THERE WAS A RELIGIOUS CONCEPTION OF this country. A biblical conception of this country,” Pastor Winans told me. “And that’s the source of a lot of our problems.

I went to this meeting with pastors of large churches in the EPC. And everyone’s telling the same story. Everyone’s got some of their members saying: ‘He’s woke. He’s teaching Critical Race Theory. He’s a liberal, a socialist, a Marxist,’” Torres said. “It was actually pretty funny. Because we’re all realizing, these words don’t mean anything anymore. They’re just smears.

There’s nothing wrong with presenting our views in the public square. If we really see the world as our mission field, then we should try to shape society as best we can,” Darling said. “But we can’t do it from a place of overrealized patriotism. We can’t do it from a place of red versus blue. We can’t do it from a place of fear. Because to those people watching from the outside, that’s the only thing they see—fear.

In a modern evangelical culture that punishes uncertainty—where weakness is wokeness, where indecision is the wrong decision—asking pastors to provide all the other answers is a recipe for institutional ruin. Because what their congregants crave, more and more, is not so much objective religious

Bunker’s message dovetailed with Dickson’s earlier theory about the world’s vanishing confidence in the Church. The public hasn’t turned against Christians because they act better than the rest of the world, she said. The public has turned against Christians because they act worse than the rest of the world. Bunker argued that much of this bad behavior can be traced back to the Christian victimhood complex, which causes some believers to lash out against enemies real and imagined. Such behavior defies the words of Peter, and the very instruction of Jesus, who famously stated: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

Bunker noted that God doesn’t simply treat sinners with grace; He commands us to do the same. Showing grace, she said, is easy when you’re winning. It’s much harder when you’re losing. Paraphrasing the Protestant reformer Martin Luther—“One plus God is a majority”—Bunker argued that promoting unconditional grace is the defining challenge of evangelicalism today.

The work of the kingdom can’t be hit-and-run evangelism,” she said. If Christians want to win souls for Jesus, they can start by showing grace to those who don’t deserve it; by showing kindness to the culture; by seeing in everyone, especially our enemies, “the image and likeness of God.” None of this can be accomplished with a mentality of fear, Bunker said. She pleaded with her audience to overcome it.

The Black kids of the city of Chicago; the gay kid who struggles with suicidal ideation; the single mothers; the prostitutes; the broken of society. The only way they will know is if we go,” Bunker preached. “They are not going to come to us. They don’t care about our steeples. They want to know, is my life redeemable? Does my life have purpose?

Stetzer focused on what needed to be purged from evangelicalism—starting with the nastiness. The love of a merciful God “is not what we’re known for,” he said, but it could be again if Christians would check themselves. Without naming names, Stetzer was speaking to an obvious truth. This idea, promoted by the likes of Robert Jeffress, that the Church’s unpopularity has nothing to do with its ugly behavior, simply does not pass the smell test.

It makes for an unflattering comparison, he told me, with the attitude of the American Church. Much of what drives evangelicals here is “fear that we’re losing our country, fear that we’re losing our power,” Dickson said. “And it’s so unhealthy. We should think of ourselves as eager dinner guests at someone else’s banquet. We are happy to be there, happy to share our perspective. But we are always respectful, always humble, because this isn’t our home.

Richard Land, my predecessor at the ERLC, used to say, ‘We want the 1950s without the racism and the sexism.’ His point was, there was a time when things were mostly the way they ought to be, and there’s a path back to that time,” Moore told me. “In that sense, Christians could point to these single events—Supreme Court rulings, or the sexual revolution, or whatever—as the moment America fell. Which assumes we were blessed until something went wrong. But that ignores that America has always been fallen. Because humanity has always been fallen.

Winans believed evangelicals in congregations like his had created needless barriers to entry; that they had allowed tribal litmus tests to supersede biblical mandates, squandering key opportunities to introduce Christ to people who needed Him the most.

This compartmentalization of standards is toxic to the credibility of the Christian witness. Many evangelicals have come to view politics the way a suburban husband views Las Vegas—a self-contained escape, a place where the rules and expectations of his everyday life do not apply. The problem is, what happens in politics doesn’t stay in politics. Everyone can see what these folks are doing. Just as you might stop taking marital advice from your neighbor if you saw cell phone footage of him paying for prostitutes and cocaine in Vegas, you might stop taking spiritual guidance from your neighbor if you saw him chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” at the Capitol Building.

The pastor chuckled. “I’m not gonna take responsibility for somebody going to hell. If they go to hell, it’s because they’ve rejected God’s invitation of forgiveness.

The simplest explanation—at the risk of hermeneutical overload—takes us back to Greek linguistics. Among the weightiest biblical concepts is aphiemi, which means to detach, to abandon, to leave alone, to let go. Simply put, many American evangelicals cannot let go.

He added: “In the sense in which Christ is the key to Christianity—you cannot have Christianity without Christ—we are, in a certain sense, in this crisis of Christianity precisely because of a certain alienation from Christ.

Something was happening on the religious right, something more menacing and extreme than anything that preceded it. This was no longer about winning elections and preserving the culture. This was about destroying enemies and dominating the country by any means necessary.

sorry, but I don’t think we should aspire to be a Christian country anyway. I don’t see America in the Bible, you know?

Wagner nodded. “Let me put it this way. We’ve had a lot of people wanting to put an American flag up on the platform at our church, especially around the Fourth of July and times like that. But every time, I’ve said no. We’re there to worship God, not America,” he said. “We love America, but that’s a separate thing.

I have so little faith in America. But fortunately, I’m sustained by a faith placed elsewhere,” Zahnd said. “It doesn’t mean I don’t care about America; it just means I place my faith elsewhere. I place it in a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and that is the kingdom of Christ, and that is the glory of the latter temple that is greater than anything that has ever been or ever will be. Amen and amen.

Augustine of Hippo, Gregory of Nyssa, Irenaeus of Lyons, Maximus the Confessor.

The following Sunday, and in the Sundays that followed, Zahnd made clear to his congregation what the new Word of Life Church would be about. “I began to critique the American empire as not a kind of biblical Israel, but a kind of biblical Babylon. I told them that God was not on our side; that God raised up Jesus, not America,” the pastor recalled. “I was pretty direct about it. You didn’t have to read between the lines anymore. They got it. And then they left.

Postcards from Babylon: The Church in American Exile,

These people have lost their souls,” Zahnd told me, tapping on the cover of Strang’s book. “That’s not being dramatic. That’s being analytical. Stephen Strang knew better than this. He could have done the right thing. He chose not to.

This is one major difference between Islam and Christianity. Islam has designs on running the world; it’s a system of government. Christianity is nothing like that. The gospels and the epistles have no vision of Christianity being a dominant religion or culture.

You see, the kingdom of God isn’t real to most of these people. They can’t perceive it,” Zahnd said. “What’s real is America. What’s real is this tawdry world of partisan politics, this winner-takes-all blood sport. So, they keep charging into the fray, and the temptation to bow down to the devil to gain control over the kingdoms of this world becomes more and more irresistible.

No, Zahnd is baffled by the so-called shepherds. Scripture says God demands more from these Christian leaders. And yet, whether it’s Strang platforming the MyPillow lunatic, or Liberty University’s leadership trading evangelism for electioneering, or the pastor down the road in St. Louis, a onetime friend who now leads his Sunday services with a fifteen-minute political segment called “Ron’s Rants,” Zahnd sees a reckless abdication of duty on the part of the people in charge. They are, as Jesus said of the Pharisees, blind guides, leading their followers to fall into a pit. “You

The problem is, the mission is lost once you’ve adopted that mentality. And that’s what happened here. Liberty has taken a by-any-means-necessary approach to the ends, because they think those ends glorify God. But the means have distorted those ends so badly.

Lord, I pray that we would not fall into the trap of thinking we know who the right or the wrong people are; that we would extend the mercy and grace, the forgiveness and the message of Jesus, to everyone,” Winans said, bowing his head. “And, Lord, may we be on mission to be a faithful presence, to communicate the gospel, that all who hear may turn and be healed.

The bully Church is the insecure Church.

The core truth that’s been lost, and needs to be recovered in our time, is that every human has value because they bear the image of God,” Myers said.

Christianity in today’s sad manifestation treats the “lesbian in a wheelchair” as a punch line. Christ would have treated her then—and He regards her now—as a treasure.

I’m really tired of this talk about how these poor people don’t trust anything anymore. Oh no—you trust. You just trust all the wrong stuff. You trust awful people, with awful intentions, for no good reason other than they tell you what you want to hear,” French seethed. “You come home after work, put on Fox News, and leave it on until you go to bed. You trust Fox News—despite the Seth Rich conspiracy theory, the election bullcrap, all the revisionist history on January 6. You sit there for hours, listening to this garbage, rotting your soul. And then you turn around and say, ‘Why would I trust the New York Times?’ Really? Why would you trust Tucker Carlson?

The problem is, as Moore pointed out, “That vocal minority will always push around a timid majority. The people who care the most usually get what they want.

Humility doesn’t come easy to the American evangelical. The self-importance that accompanies citizenship in the world’s mightiest nation is trouble enough, never mind when it’s augmented by the certainty of exclusive membership in the afterlife. We are an immodest and excessively indulged people. We have grown so accustomed to our advantages—to our prosperity and our worldly position—that we feel entitled to them.

Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally,” Orwell wrote. “Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.