The Evangelical Roadshow That’s Trying to Make America a Theocracy

I had never seen a sanctuary so full on a Tuesday night.

The people packed into FloodGate Church in Brighton, Mich., weren’t here for Bill Bolin, the right-wing zealot pastor who’d grown his congregation tenfold by preaching conspiracy-fueled sermons since the onset of Covid-19, turning Sunday morning worship services into amrtateur Fox News segments. No, they had come out by the hundreds, decked out in patriotic attire this October evening in 2021, to hear from a man who was introduced to them as “America’s greatest living historian.” They had come for David Barton. And so had I.

It would be of little use to tell the folks around me — the people of my conservative hometown — that Barton wasn’t a real historian. They wouldn’t care that his lone academic credential was a bachelor’s degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University. It wouldn’t matter that Barton’s 2012 book on Thomas Jefferson was recalled by Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest Christian publisher, for its countless inaccuracies, or that a panel of 10 conservative Christian academics who reviewed Barton’s body of work in the aftermath ripped the entirety of his scholarship to shreds. It would not bother the congregants of FloodGate Church to learn that they were listening to a man whose work was found by one of America’s foremost conservative theologians to include “embarrassing factual errors, suspiciously selective quotes, and highly misleading claims.”

All this would be irrelevant to the people around me because David Barton was one of them. He believed the separation of church and state was a myth. He believed the time had come for evangelicals to reclaim their rightful place atop the nation’s governmental and cultural institutions. Hence the hero’s welcome Barton received when he rolled into FloodGate with his “American Restoration Tour.”

Throughout his decades of public life — working for the Republican Party, becoming a darling of Fox News, advising politicians such as new House Speaker Mike Johnson, launching a small propaganda empire, carving out a niche as the American right’s chosen peddler of nostalgic alternative facts — Barton had never been shy about his ultimate aims. He is an avowed Christian nationalist who favors theocratic rule; moreover, he is a so-called Dominionist, someone who believes Christians should control not only the government but also the media, the education system, and other cultural institutions. Barton and his ilk are invested less in advancing individual policies than they are in reconceiving our system of self-government in its totality, claiming a historical mandate to rule society with biblical dogma just as the founders supposedly intended.

This is what the “American Restoration Tour” was all about: restoring a version of America that never existed.

In a baggy dark suit and bright orange tie, clicker in hand, Barton droned through a slide show that patched together quotes and dates and bygone events to make his case that America is a good nation because it was founded as a godly nation. Inconvenient episodes such as slavery were relegated to a footnote. Barton assured us that America’s misdeeds were relatively minor — “All races, all people, all nations, have had slavery and been slaves at some point themselves,” he said nonchalantly — and that secular progressives were deliberately amplifying them to diminish that goodness and godliness of America.

Inside this house of worship, Barton spent an hour and fifteen minutes exalting a curious version of the Christian ideal. He slammed gun restrictions and progressive income taxes, government health care and state-run education curriculum. At one point, while denouncing critical race theory, he posted an ominous slide showing logos for The New York Times’s 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter framed around a Soviet hammer and sickle. Rounding out the collage were antifa and anarchist symbols. The left, Barton said, was encouraging “rioting, rebellion, and radicalization” that threatened our blessed nation from within.

He closed with a quote from Charles Finney. The famed evangelist, Barton explained, had “led one hundred thousand people to Christ in one year” during the early 19th century. He was central to the Second Great Awakening and preached that revival would only come to people who were pursuing it. Part of that pursuit, Barton said, quoting Finney, was to realize that “politics are a part of religion” in America, “and Christians must do their duty to their country as a part of their duty to God.”

When Barton stepped down from the stage, nodding to acknowledge the standing ovation, Chad Connelly jogged up to take his place. Connelly was Barton’s partner, the other half of the American Restoration Tour. He was also an old acquaintance from my time spent covering campaigns in South Carolina, where he had chaired the state Republican Party. Connelly had jumped to the Republican National Committee in 2013, accepting an appointment as the national party’s first-ever director of faith engagement. After mobilizing evangelicals to vote for Trump in 2016, Connelly launched his own venture, a group called Faith Wins, which sought to replicate that model and turn out conservative Christians on behalf of GOP causes nationwide.

Faith Wins is a nonprofit — like Barton’s organization, WallBuilders — and thus cannot explicitly endorse candidates or parties. But the American Restoration Tour made no secret of its partisan affiliations. Connelly, a husky, energetic southerner, had opened the event by declaring that people like them needed “to take this nation back for God.” By the end of Barton’s presentation, there wasn’t much ambiguity about what the white, conservative Christians in the audience needed to do to take America back — or who they needed to take it back from.

As Connelly launched into his own homily, encouraging people to visit his website and join their movement, it struck me that the American Restoration Tour represented more than another moneymaking scheme. (Though it certainly was that: WallBuilders raised $5.5 million in 2021, while Faith Wins, a smaller organization, collected $800,000 in 2022.) This road show was a call-and-response for American evangelicals. It was a lesson in being under siege and a tutorial in going on the attack. Barton and Connelly had cooked up a slick, codependent rendering of the crisis facing Christians in this country. Theirs was an all-inclusive offering that packaged the problem with the solution.

Barton had convinced the people at FloodGate Church that their kingdom was being overrun. Now Connelly wanted to know: What were they going to do about it?

I was raised in the evangelical tradition: the son of a white conservative Republican pastor in a white conservative Republican church in a white conservative Republican town. My faith in Jesus Christ has never faltered; I believe him to be the Messiah, the mediator between a perfect God and a broken humanity. And yet, as I grew older, my confidence in organized Christianity began to crumble. The disillusionment I felt was rooted in something deeper than sex scandals or political hypocrisies or everyday human failures. Perfection, after all, is not the Christian’s mandate. Sanctification, the process by which sinners become more and more like Christ, is what God demands of us. And what that process requires, most fundamentally, is the rejection of one’s worldly identity.

The crisis of American evangelicalism, I now realize, is an obsession with that worldly identity. Instead of fixing our eyes on the unseen — “since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal,” as Paul writes in Second Corinthians — we have become fixated on the here and now. Instead of seeing ourselves as exiles in a metaphorical Babylon, the way Peter describes the first-century Christians living in Rome, we have embraced our imperial citizenship. Instead of fleeing the temptation to rule all the world, like Jesus did, we have made deals with the devil.

Why?

In search of answers, I spent some four years embedded inside the modern evangelical movement to write my new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. I toured half-empty sanctuaries and standing-room-only auditoriums; I shadowed big-city televangelists and small-town preachers and everyday congregants. I reported from inside hundreds of churches, Christian colleges, religious advocacy organizations, denominational nonprofits, and assorted independent ministries. Each of these experiences offered a unique insight into the deterioration of American Christianity.

One of the Bible’s dominant narrative themes — uniting Old Testament and New Testament, prophets and disciples, prayers and epistles — is the admonition to resist idolatry at all costs. Jesus frames the decision in explicitly binary terms: We can serve and worship God or we can serve and worship the gods of this world. Too many American evangelicals have tried to do both. The consequences for the Church — and our body politic— have been devastating. I saw it firsthand during the American Restoration Tour.

Gary Click, the state representative from Ohio’s 88th House District, explained how his recent Sunday sermon had emphasized that the Buckeye State is the only one in the union with a motto (“With God All Things Are Possible”) lifted directly from the scriptures. Then Click, the senior pastor of Fremont Baptist Temple, reminded us, a crowd of a couple hundred, that November 8, 2016, was “the day Christians changed America” by electing Donald Trump and restoring hope to a nation in decline.

Finally, Click, who was standing for reelection in the fall of 2022 — just six months off — said that despite being pitted against wicked progressives who want to “groom our kids” into sadistic sexual rites, evangelicals must remember they have a “secret weapon” on their side. I assumed he was referring to Jesus.

“Donald Trump appointed three very constitutional judges” to the U.S. Supreme Court, Click said, who were helping Christians to retake control of America.

At that point, he clarified: “This is not a campaign event.”

You wouldn’t know it. We were inside the atrium of the Ohio state capitol building and Click had just run through a list of Republican dignitaries who were on hand: numerous lawmakers, school board members, the state auditor, and two Ohio Supreme Court justices. Detailing the tight margins of that 2016 election — “It was the Christian vote that made the difference” — Click introduced the Republican operative who had mobilized the masses of evangelicals to tip the election to Trump: Chad Connelly.

Theatrical music filled the atrium. Two massive screens flanking the stage showed Connelly striking a patriot’s pose in front of Old Glory. “Faith Wins when people of faith vote their values!” he announced in his boisterous southern twang, eyes boring straight into the camera. The promotional footage told of Connelly’s exploits: Over the past few years, his organization had partnered with 50,000 church leaders and registered more than one million Christians to vote. These reinforcements were desperately needed. Because, according to the video montage of clergymen who vouched for Connelly’s organization, America was flirting with annihilation.

When Connelly took the stage in front of us, he laid the urgency on thick. This was the sixteenth state visited by the American Restoration Tour over the previous three months; he and Barton had spoken to hundreds of churches. Their goal for election year 2022, Connelly said in Ohio, was to double the one million voters they had registered over the previous few years. “We need to make sure everybody in our churches is registered to vote, and all of ’em are voting biblical values,” he said.

Hesitating, just as Click had done a little while earlier, Connelly added: “We don’t tell ’em who to vote for. This isn’t about party or politicians; it’s about policies and principles that most closely align with our biblical worldview.”

This whole roadshow was expressly designed to turn out voters to help the GOP win elections. And yet, Connelly swore to us, this was not about partisanship. He was not fighting to promote Republican values. He was fighting to promote American values. And that meant he was fighting to promote Christian values.

Here in Ohio, Barton built on Connelly’s same theme. America is special because of our ideas, he said. But those ideas hadn’t come from men; they came from God through the mouths of Revolutionary-era preachers who laid the groundwork for the rebellion against Great Britain with their sermons and appeals to heaven. Citing the works of several long-since-forgotten clergymen, Barton made the case that every issue Americans face today, from war to welfare to health care to taxation, was preached about in sermons in early America. His point was that the Bible is not just a spiritual text, but a governing manual, one that explicitly informed our system of self-rule from the very beginning.

Barton unpacked a scary — and, based on the available public polling, mostly inaccurate — collection of statistics. Three in ten Millennials identify as LGBTQ, he said, whereas less than 2 percent of their parents did. Half of Millennials prefer socialism over capitalism, whereas just 14 percent of their parents did. Only a third of Millennials believe in God, whereas 89 percent of their parents did.

There was hope, however. Barton cited Republican Glenn Youngkin’s surprising victory in the Virginia governor’s race a year earlier. It was proof, he said, that evangelicals had finally gotten off the sidelines — with some help, of course, from his partner organization, Faith Wins. Barton claimed that Connelly’s group worked with 312 churches in Virginia to identify 77,000 congregants who had never voted before. Barton built up to a dramatic reveal: “Youngkin won by 66,000 votes.” The crowd buzzed with delight.

Unlike Click and Connelly, who had played dumb about the nakedly partisan aims of this event, Barton didn’t bother speaking in code. It was a refreshing bit of honesty from the most dishonest man in the room. Barton, who once served as vice chair of the Texas GOP — and who had quietly built a super PAC to aid Ted Cruz’s presidential run in 2016— had long been known for hiding his political agenda behind a scholarly veneer. Not anymore. Time was running out. The fate of America was hanging in the balance, and now he was spoiling for a fight.

As the event wound down and attendees made a beeline toward Barton in search of selfies and autographs, I pulled Connelly aside. We had spoken a handful of times over the years, always in the context of South Carolina politics, and I wanted to reintroduce myself. He remembered me right away — and seemed nervous about why I was there. I told him that I was writing a book about how political extremism was infiltrating American evangelicalism.

Connelly frowned.

“Christians have a responsibility, before God, to get involved,” he said. “How can you be salt and light if you’re not engaged with politics? Churches have failed us. Pastors have failed us.”

Before I could respond, Click rushed over. He looked frazzled. “Why aren’t there any books to sell?” he asked Connelly. “All these people want to buy David’s books.”

Connelly winced. “I wasn’t sure of the rules. I thought it might be inappropriate,” he replied, motioning toward our stately surroundings.

Then Connelly perked up. “We’ll be selling them at the church later today,” he told Click. “Tell ’em to follow us there.”

Standing before hundreds of his members inside a cavernous, beige-and-white colored sanctuary in the small city of Vandalia, Ohio, Pastor Pat Murray asked that everyone “stand to your feet and grab the hand of another American” so that he might pray over the proceedings. Beseeching God to “save the nation,” Murray spelled out the path to salvation: “For those who aren’t registered to vote, God, I pray in Jesus’s name you would touch them right now.”

The Americans inside Living Word Church were treated to something extra on this Monday night. Deviating from the standard American Restoration Tour routine, Connelly decided that after showing the Faith Wins promotional video — and before introducing Barton — he would share his own testimony. Hailing from small-town Prosperity, South Carolina, Connelly had been raised to know the Lord, had tried to walk faithfully in his ways, but found himself at a crossroads upon finding his wife “in a pool of blood” after she’d committed suicide. Connelly said he heard a voice from the devil: “You failed.” He was inclined to agree. But the people of his church wouldn’t let him. They wrapped Connelly and his two young sons in the love of Christ. They protected them, nurtured their faith. Eventually a wise older friend from the church — a Democrat, believe it or not — introduced Connelly to a young widow with two children of her own. “I got to watch God work,” he explained.

Transitioning from his own story to the ongoing struggle for America, Connelly said that God’s work is never finished. The nation could still be spared. But, he emphasized, the Lord needs our cooperation.

“We’re losing the country, y’all. We’re losing the country to people who don’t even understand what made it special,” Connelly said. “Christians need to stand up. And to do that, they need the truth.”

Connelly pointed to Barton: “This guy has got the truth.”

As the two men switched places, and Barton launched into his slide show homily, I wrestled with competing impressions of Connelly. He was hard not to like. He was warm and self-deprecating, someone who quoted scripture as naturally as he quipped redneck one-liners. It seemed plausible that he wasn’t just running a gospel-based grift; that unlike Barton, he was a man of integrity and real conviction. But then why would anyone of integrity and real conviction tour the country with a known huckster like Barton? Connelly had to know how silly this operation looked from the outside. How did he justify the damage being done — not to his own reputation, necessarily, but to the witness of the gospel? The American Restoration Tour was turning pastors into pundits and church sanctuaries into Fox News sets. To what end?

As we sat down in the sleek designer coffee shop situated just outside the worship center — Living Word was the finest building development I saw in all of Vandalia — Connelly could sense my skepticism.

“Let’s go. We’ll do the King James Version. I’ve got it marked,” he told me, pulling out his leather Bible and turning to Matthew, chapter five.

“Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men,” Connelly read. “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”

He put down the Bible and threw up his hands. “How do I be salt and light in a culture, except that I engage the culture?” Connelly asked.

This sounded familiar. Over the past few years, almost every evangelical I’d questioned about the commingling of politics and religion responded with some variation of “salt and light.” The difficulty is, biblical scholars have never agreed on what, exactly, Jesus meant by this. Surely he was encouraging Christians to be distinct — to flavor this world, to shine in its darkness. But people like Connelly were taking it a step further. They supposed — and preached with absolute certainty — that we should be distinct by fighting for Christian values inside America’s secular political arena. Yet plenty of other believers, including believers of a conservative disposition, feel quite confident that we should be distinct by not prioritizing America’s secular political arena at all.

It’s notable that Jesus references “salt” in three of the four gospels. In each account, Jesus warns about salt losing its saltiness, its taste, its character. Jesus talks about salt not as an additive, necessarily, but as something unique that should be guarded against contamination. In Matthew, Jesus says salt without flavor is good only to be trampled beneath our feet along with other ordinary rocks; in Luke, Jesus says it has lost its purpose entirely and should be disposed of.

Most Christians would agree that a healthy dose of civic participation — including political engagement — does not risk contaminating our distinct flavor. But how quickly the unique can become ordinary. Some people hear “We’re losing the country” and decide to run for school board. Others hear it and travel to Washington, D.C., to disrupt the peaceful transition of power. Did Connelly worry, in the context of campaigning inside houses of worship, about a blurry line between engagement and idolatry?

He gave me a puzzled look. “America has been the shining city on the hill for the rest of the world. Just look at the long line of people coming here,” Connelly said. “Our 4 percent of the world’s population gives like 80 cents of total missionary dollars worldwide. So, there’s a reason the enemy would try to take us down and divide us.”

It wasn’t clear if “the enemy” referred to Satan or to the secular progressives he’d been bashing during his American Restoration Tour; the Russians making war in Ukraine or the low-salt-diet adherents here in America; those who wouldn’t buy the Barton books or those who thought it curious that it was just fine to sell them in a church but not in a government edifice.

Before I could ask, a man interrupted us. He was a pastor from a nearby town. Connelly had never met him but quickly vaulted from his seat, shook the pastor’s hand, and complimented his Georgia Bulldogs shirt. The pastor seemed conflicted. He was worried about the country, he said, but wasn’t sure he felt comfortable handing over his church to political operators.

“We do talk about some of the big issues,” the pastor told Connelly. “I just don’t know—”

“Do you do voter registration?” Connelly cut him off.

The pastor shook his head. “We have not. We could, I suppose.”

Connelly was in sale-closing mode. “Listen, hit that QR code,” he said, pointing to a poster nearby. “Here’s my card. Email me. I’ll send you everything you need. We’ll get you set up right.”

The man nodded, still looking torn, and thanked Connelly. As he walked away, Connelly turned to me. “I have a hundred of those conversations a week,” he said. “I don’t think that pastor is going to take things too far. Do you?”

It was evident, I replied, that the pastor himself worried that he might. Not everyone thinks voter registration drives — or any sort of electioneering activity — are appropriate inside a temple of the Lord, much less one that has a tax-exempt status predicated on its avoidance of politics. This returned us to the concept of a slippery slope. The church that wades into politics with a voter registration drive might one day find its Sunday morning worship interrupted with crazed political soapbox speeches like at FloodGate Church in Brighton, Mich.

As we talked, it became obvious that Connelly lived deep inside a bubble. His home church, a Southern Baptist congregation, had only closed for two weeks during Covid-19. The congregation was monolithic: white, conservative, Republican, Trump-supporting. It would make sense that he hadn’t experienced fault lines around elections or vaccines or racism. (“Obama created the race problem in America,” he pronounced at one point, all but confirming the absence of any Black Christians in his Bible study.) I asked Connelly if he could try to understand how these divisions were surfacing in churches different from his own.

“If you keep your focus on Jesus Christ, it washes a lot of those things away, because He keeps preeminence in the Church,” he replied. “If you take the spotlight off Jesus and put it on anything else, you’re going to have division.”

Within moments of these words leaving Connelly’s lips, a man walked out of the sanctuary and approached the coffee area. He was wearing a red Make America Great Again baseball cap. “So,” I said to Connelly, “about taking the spotlight off Jesus . . .”

He gave me a politician’s grin. “I wouldn’t wear any hat to church.”

A few months later, I rejoined the American Restoration Tour in Michigan — not far from where I’d first seen Barton and Connelly in action the previous fall. The pastor of this host church, a young man named Chris Thoma, opened by noting the privilege of sharing the stage with Barton and Connelly. It was Barton, he said, who had inspired him to enter the ministry, and he had recently gotten to know Connelly at an event in San Diego. I knew what Thoma was referring to: It was the first-ever “Pastors Summit” put on by Charlie Kirk — the activist who described Trump as “the most moral president on record” — and his organization, Turning Point USA. Connelly had gone all in. Partnering with Barton was bad enough. There was something especially foul about allying with Kirk, a serial liar and professional political arsonist, in a campaign to advance Christianity.

Connelly announced to the crowd that the American Restoration was closing in on its voter registration goals. This was being accomplished, he noted, with the help of pastors like Thoma, who weren’t “squishy” in their convictions. Sensing an opportunity, Connelly decided to challenge everyone in the room. “Are you going to be a squish, or someone who stands for truth?” he said. The sanctuary rumbled in response.

As Barton began his presentation, I slipped away to a parlor room at the back of the sanctuary. Connelly wanted me to meet three local pastors who stood for truth. Seated around a large, rectangular folding table were Connelly; Donald Eason, the pastor of Metro Church of Christ in Sterling Heights; Jeffrey Hall, the pastor of Community Faith Church in Holt; and Dominic Burkhard, who described himself as “a full-time missionary to the legislature in Lansing.”

Connelly opened by summarizing for his friends the conversations we’d been having about political activism tearing churches apart. Clearly expecting that they would back him up, Connelly announced that he’d seen no such thing in his tour of hundreds of churches around the country, and asked the pastors to weigh in.

“There’s definitely some political divisions here in Michigan churches,” said Hall.

Eason nodded. “Lots of political division.”

“Covid definitely drew some lines,” Hall continued. “I had people calling and emailing our church asking if we were open. They had come from churches that closed, and they wanted to know if we were taking a hard stance against the government. I never wanted to make a war with the government. We closed for about a month. I just wanted to honor God. But some people weren’t looking for that.”

I reminded Connelly of the story of FloodGate Church, which had made war with the government and increased its membership tenfold. The church’s expansive new campus was miles away from where we were sitting. Connelly gave me a far-off look that had become familiar by this point.

“He’s talking about Bill Bolin,” Eason chimed in.

I asked Eason how he knew about FloodGate’s pastor.

“Oh, I know about Bolin,” Eason said with an uneasy smile. “We all know about Bolin.”

Connelly claimed not to know about Bolin. So the others filled him in — the refusal to comply during Covid, the cries of martyrdom, the alliances with far-right politicians and activists, the Nazi salute he’d given from the pulpit to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

“Well, he’d be a unicorn in our crowd,” Connelly said. “I don’t know any other pastors like that.”

But Connelly had just been in San Diego with Charlie Kirk and a small army of pastors exactly like that. It was true that much of the turmoil in churches was coming from the bottom up, with radicalized members rebelling against the insufficient political efforts of their pastors. But it was also true that a growing number of conservative pastors were doing just what Bolin had done at FloodGate. Meanwhile, it was the pastors who refused — the pastors who didn’t want to host the American Restoration Tour in their sanctuaries — whom Connelly had deemed “squishes.”

We had come full circle from our conversation at the Ohio capitol. Connelly told me then that pastors “failed us” by not getting their churches involved with politics. Now he was doubling down.

“Do you know what the research tells us is the biggest reason people leave church? They say it’s not relevant. Why would they come when the pastor isn’t teaching me how to think through the issues?” Connelly said. “Christianity should permeate the culture, not be separated from it.”

The way for Christianity to permeate the culture, he insisted, was by tackling these great debates of our time: abortion, homosexuality, transgenderism. I didn’t bother questioning why Connelly always listed the same narrow set of topics; the answer was apparent. Talking about other clear-cut biblical issues — such as caring for the poor, welcoming the refugee, refusing the temptation of wealth — did not animate the conservative base ahead of an election.

There were more pressing questions on my mind. Connelly’s organization was called “Faith Wins,” but what did that even mean? Could faith really win or lose something? It all just felt so trivial. If we believe that Jesus has defeated death, why are we consumed with winning a political campaign? 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?

Burkhard, the lobbyist-slash-missionary in Lansing, jumped in.

“People need to be saved and America needs to be saved. It’s perfectly good to want both,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with trying to save America. Somebody needs to try to do it. Somebody needs to try to save America.”

Eason, seated to Burkhard’s right, shook his head in disagreement. The more we’d been talking about this, he confessed, the more uneasy he felt. He believed, like Connelly did, that Christianity was in the crosshairs of the American left. But he had just preached a sermon that was weighing on him. It was about the uniqueness of the early Christian Church. He had described for his congregation how Christians had gained influence — and won converts — by being countercultural, by rejecting the trends that preoccupied so much of the world around them. American evangelicals, Eason said, would do well to study that tradition.

“Our goal should be to save souls, not to save America. The reality is, we can’t save America anyway, unless we’re saving those souls first,” he said to Burkhard. “We can fight for America all day long, but if we don’t save the people here, it won’t matter.”

The great obstacle to saving souls, I suggested, wasn’t drag queen performances or critical race theory. It was the perception among the unbelieving masses — the very people these evangelicals were called to evangelize — that Christians care more about reclaiming lost social status than we do about loving our neighbor as ourselves. I relayed what one local church leader had told me about evangelicals: “Too many of them worship America.”

Connelly looked incredulous. He turned to his pastor friends. “I don’t see that happening,” he told them. “You see any of that?”

“Oh, I see it,” Hall said. “I know of a pastor who just recently stood up in his pulpit and told people that they’re insane if they vote Democrat this fall.”

Eason had similar stories to tell. I pointed out that Al Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of America’s most prominent Christian conservatives, had recently said something similar. This was not an anomaly. Pastors and church officials and evangelical leaders were feeling the pressure to classify Jesus as a registered Republican — and they were feeling it from people like Chad Connelly.

Thoroughly flustered now, Connelly argued that if pastors didn’t address current events head-on, the Christians in their care would resort to “secular sources” to form their political viewpoints. The way to ensure that Christians vote biblical values, he said, was for pastors to preach politics.

This struck me as completely backward. If pastors were doing their job — going deep in the word, discipling their flocks, stressing scripture and prayer above social media and talk radio — their people wouldn’t need to be infantilized with explicit partisan endorsements. Those Christians would know how to vote biblically, because they would know their Bible.

Connelly whipped his head back and forth. “I’d love to meet a pastor who thinks he’s doing a good enough job discipling to where he doesn’t need to engage with this stuff, because that pastor is deceived. He’s badly deceived,” he said. “I’ve told my Sunday School class: Don’t tell anybody you’re doing a good job telling people about Jesus, because we’re losing the culture. If we were doing a good job telling people about Jesus, we wouldn’t be losing the culture.”

This fixation on winning and losing was revealing. In the sanctuary behind us, a body of Christians had just sat through an hourlong lecture that was designed to make them more powerful citizens. They were supposed to take the information Barton had given them, Connelly instructed, then charge into the trenches of America’s political battlefield.

And yet, there was no instruction on how to fight. There was no perspective on the appropriate way to win. There was no lesson on what John Dickson, an Australian theologian I’d met at Wheaton College, described as “losing well.” This was very much by design. Because losing, in the eyes of men like Connelly and Barton, was no longer an option. “The stakes are too high,” Connelly told me at one point, to cede any ground to the opposition.

Unsavory alliances would need to be forged. Sordid tactics would need to be embraced. The first step toward preserving Christian values, it seemed, was to do away with Christian values.

From the forthcoming book THE KINGDOM, THE POWER, AND THE GLORY: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism by Tim Alberta. Copyright © 2023 by Timothy Alberta. To be published on December 5, 2023 by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpted by permission.