Tim Alberta begins his book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory with a personal story about the evangelical church in the Trump era. Increasingly angry at its own leaders and fellow members for even minor deviations from political orthodoxy, radical church members even berated Alberta at his father’s funeral.

Right wing Christians were always a cantankerous bunch. But since the election of Trump in 2016, and especially since the start of the pandemic in 2020, they’ve gotten much worse. They’ve fallen deeply into Trump inspired conspiracy theory. And they attack even fellow right-wing Christians like Mike Pence – and even their own right-wing pastors – as ‘woke,’ far left radicals.

Alberta thinks the Religious Right is tearing itself apart. It has jettisoned even its core religious beliefs, falling into more of a warped Trump cult than a religious community. It believes whatever Trump and the far right media circuit say on any given day.

As I read Alberta’s book, I realized I’ve seen things like this in left activist groups. And I want to dwell on that for a bit. I’m hardly the first person to draw a comparison between leftists and evangelicals. And the comparison is usually a trite and uninteresting one.

I’ll see if I can draw it in a more useful way.

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