The Alberta witness

It's not that the mystery has been left unexplained. You can find, on any library shelf, dozens of books that try to peer into the madness of contemporary evangelicalism, most specifically, the not-to-be-believed dalliance of Bible-believers with a man whose great gift to American culture, pre-Presidency, was posh golf courses, luxury hotels, and gambling dens. The salient political fact of our time is that President Donald J. Trump would never, ever have succeeded without the fervor of Christians who would not like their own children and grandchildren to say aloud or even think the things Trump says and does.

How on earth is it that "people of the book" have become Trump's most dedicated warriors? That question many have attempted to answer, the latest of whom is a terrific journalist named Tim Alberta, who grew up in eastern Michigan, attended Michigan State University, has a bona fide background in evangelicalism himself, and wrote one of the first go-to books, Carnage, on the early Trump years. This new one--THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, out today, in fact.

I love what he's doing, love his energy and his acumen. He's a professional, a journalist committed the facts, the truth. He deserves my support--and I'm giving it to him right now.

Just don't ask me to read the book. I'd druther not--I honestly don't care to know what I already know too well--that good, Christian people, American evangelicals, have sold their souls to a man who uses them like a concubine. I'm not likely to read Alberta's book because I don't need to know the truth that already darkens my days. Last time around, the county I live in, bursting with church-going traffic every last Sunday morning, voted for Trump, 80/20.

I know it because my rep in Washington, a good, good man named Feenstra, who voted to accept the electoral college results of the election, remains purposefully silent about Trump's apparent descent deeper and deeper in into madness, channeling the old Nazi bigots last month by calling anyone who doesn't believe in him "vermin." Trump's danger to American democracy will not be understood or battled when good men and women, like Feenstra, say nothing. Feenstra is saying nothing.

Even though I may be scared to read it, I deeply appreciate the fact that during his rounds on the talk shows yesterday, Tim Alberta admitted freely and openly that he was and is and likely will remain an evangelical Christian. His father was a preacher; he's a veteran of youth groups, camps, and all kinds of evangelical mainstay traditions. And if you hear him speak almost any time in the next few days, you'll hear him own his birthright religion as his own. He professes his faith, not in Trump, but in his Lord and Savior.

In his interviews yesterday, what often comes up is a concept Alberta claims originated with his boss at the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who, in an ordinary conversation was quizzing Alberta about his findings. Goldberg suggested that Trump's relationship to American evangelicals was almost "mercenary." Donald J. Trump is like a hired gun for Bible-thumpers who believe that, as Christians, they are totally under siege from the evils of secularists and secularism, that ever since Roe v Wade or the Monkey Trial or banished prayers in public schools, American culture--God-denying American culture--is out to get them. A desperate people, Alberta says, got so desperate they married a despot, a liar, a womanizer. They hired him to do their dirty work.

Because he will. He manicured the Supreme Court and got rid of Roe. They may not love Trump, but they love that he'll do their dirty work as long as they vote for him. They take him, he takes power, a mercenary relationship.

At the core is the belief that American culture has no use for American evangelicals. What I love about the book--I didn't read it, but that's not germane here--is the fact that it's written by a man who's raising his children in an evangelical church, a man who is unafraid of saying that he too is an evangelical, a man who is in no clear sense outside the fence because he's an orthodox Christian.

Tim Alberta is himself a walking, talking, writing evangelical, and he's saying what he is from the top of the NY Times Bestseller list. If Christians were under siege in American culture, there would be no Tim Alberta.

That's story is worth telling, too.