Book Review: ‘The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,’ by Tim …

What would Jesus do? It’s a question that the political journalist Tim Alberta takes seriously in his brave and absorbing new book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” pressing the evangelicals he meets to answer a version of it — even if a number of them clearly do not want to.

Alberta, a staff writer for The Atlantic, asks how so many devout Christians could be in thrall to a figure like Donald Trump, whom he calls a “lecherous, impenitent scoundrel.” According to one of the scoops in the book, Trump himself used decidedly less vivid language to describe the evangelicals who supported Senator Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican primaries, telling an Iowa Republican official: “You know, these so-called Christians hanging around with Ted are some real pieces of shit.” Many of Cruz’s evangelical supporters eventually backed Trump in 2016; in the 2020 election, Trump increased his share of the white evangelical vote even more, to a whopping 84 percent.

This phenomenon, Alberta says, cannot simply be a matter of evangelicals mobilizing against abortion access and trying to save lives; after all, they have kept remarkably quiet when it comes to showing compassion for refugees or curbing gun violence, which is now, as Alberta notes, the leading cause of death for children in the United States.

What he finds instead is that under the veneer of Christian modesty simmers an explosive rage, propelling Americans who piously declare their fealty to Jesus to act as though their highest calling is to own the libs. No wonder the popular image of evangelicalism, according to one disillusioned preacher, has devolved into “Mister Rogers with a blowtorch.”

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