- The power of the evangelical vote at the genesis of the 2024 presidential primaries.

This week on "Firing Line."

- In 2016, I declared I am your voice.

Today, I add, I am your retribution.

I am your retribution.

- [Margaret] How did a man with 91 criminal charges, whom a jury also found liable for sexual abuse... - Let's all pray.

- [Margaret] Emerge as the chosen presidential candidate for America's Evangelical movement?

- If you believe that the barbarians are at the gates, then you think to yourself, "Maybe we need a barbarian to protect us."

That's Donald Trump.

That's the evangelical relationship with Donald Trump in a nutshell.

- [Margaret] Award-winning political reporter Tim Alberta set out to unravel this enigma.

Alberta is the son of a preacher who grew up in the Evangelical Church.

- I grew up, this was my family, this church.

- [Margaret] In his latest best-seller, "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory," he traces how Trump has transformed the Christian right.

- We're going to protect Christianity.

- [Margaret] So could any other candidate eclipse Trump's hold on the evangelical base of the GOP?

And what would a second Trump presidency fueled by Christian nationalism mean for our country?

- I have every expectation that things are going to get ugly in the United States of America.

- [Margaret] What does journalist Tim Alberta say now?

- [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Corporate funding is provided by - Tim Alberta, welcome to "Firing Line."

- Hi, Margaret.

Thank you for having me.

- You're out with a new book, "The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory," which is a deeply personal meditation for you and also, a fastidiously reported account of how the evangelical church has turned towards Christian nationalism, especially in the age of Donald Trump.

This was personal.

Your father was a minister of an evangelical church, which you grew up worshiping in.

In 2019 at your father's wake, members from his congregation, family friends, people who had held you as a baby, came up to you and chastised you for your negative reporting about Donald Trump.

This brought you face to face with exactly how poisoned the evangelical church had become in the age of Donald Trump.

Tell us what happened.

- Yeah, I was still, I think, in a state of shock, because you're in this fog of melancholy and grief and trying to make sense of it.

And so to suddenly have people accosting you, confronting you, wanting to argue about Trump, when your dad's in a box over here.

Frankly, it was so shocking and so surreal, that I didn't quite know how to respond at first.

- What was their specific criticism of you?

- I think there is this idea that looms large in the evangelical imagination that this country is not just a country informed by Judeo-Christian ethics, Judeo-Christian values, but that it is a Christian nation, and that that Christian nation is in decline, that it's in danger, and that Donald Trump has sort of stepped in as this protector of Christian America.

And that if you're criticizing Donald Trump, then you're criticizing America, Christian America.

In other words, that this is all very zero sum.

And so you're either on the right side or on the wrong side.

In fact, that's what one person said to me at the viewing, like, "Are you still on the right side?"

- When you responded from the pulpit, your response was about Rush Limbaugh.

- Yeah, so Rush Limbaugh had just recently, like a few days, I think, before the funeral, had been ripping me on his show.

And so that for many people, was a jumping off point.

I didn't realize that my dad's congregation was so addicted to AM talk radio, but apparently they were.

And that was, to me, I think it was like it was symptomatic of the illness here.

Because from my view, if you are a follower of Jesus, if you are someone who believes in just the most fundamental teachings of Christ about loving your neighbor, about loving your enemy, and praying for those who persecute you, then it's hard to simultaneously hold to those ideals and to simultaneously be listening to Rush Limbaugh for three hours every day, right, with sort of an unceasing stream of venom and ugliness and hostility, antagonism, hatred.

Reconciling those two things is very hard.

But I think for a lot of Christians, far too many Christians at least, they've made peace with reconciling those two things.

And that's at the heart of the problem.

- You say that centuries from now, people will pinpoint COVID-19 as one of the main drivers of change in the evangelical movement.

Explain why.

- So I think it's very difficult for folks who are on the outside of this movement looking in who weren't raised in it as I was, who don't have deep roots in it to fully appreciate the extent to which evangelicals have been taught and promised for generations now that one day in this country there will be a cosmic clash between the forces of good and evil.

That the good, God-fearing, Bible believing Christians will square off once and for all with those pagans, those secular progressives in government and in culture who want to eradicate the Almighty from public life.

Right, Margaret, I mean, that has been the message.

I've been marinating in that since I was a toddler.

So when COVID-19 arrives and some of these governors around the country, they issue shutdown orders implicating houses of worship, you know, that was it.

That was the fulfillment of prophecy for a lot of these people.

They looked around and they said, "Well, here it is.

"You know, they told us this day would come "and now it's come."

And the question became, what are you going to do about it?

- As part of your reporting, you met with your father's successor.

You asked him what is wrong with evangelicals in America, and his response was too many of them worship America.

- Yeah.

- Explain.

- Hm.

I think at its core, as he would argue and as I've come to be convinced myself, we are dealing with an idolatry problem inside of the church.

I think once you become convinced that this nation is somehow in covenant with God, you start to think that a defeat for America is a defeat for God, that you start to think that fighting for America is the same as fighting for God, as though salvation itself hangs in the balance with every election.

And that's just, it's completely abiblical.

I think there's a genuine sense for a lot of these people that when you think about the culture wars lost, when you think about the demographic changes in the country, when you think about all of the statistics about church attendance plummeting, that we are at the abyss here, and that if something isn't done quickly and dramatically to pull us back from that abyss, then we will never recover the nation that we once were.

I mean, I think that fear is real.

- Why did fear become a driver in the evangelical movement?

- Let me give you a really uncomfortable answer.

Because too many of these people are spending more time watching Fox News than they are reading the New Testament.

One of the most, the most frequently cited command in all of scripture, Old Testament and New Testament, is "Fear not."

Christians are taught time and time and time again that fear is the antithesis of faith.

And so the message that you get from your preacher on a Sunday morning, the message that you get from reading your Gospels, that message of faith is completely contradictory to the message of fear that you're getting from watching Fox News every night, from listening to talk radio every day.

Listen, some people will hear me say that, no doubt, and they'll think, "Well, wait a second.

"Can't I be a Christian but also be an engaged citizen?"

Of course you can.

This is all about proportionality and about balancing where your priorities are and what your information inputs are.

And it's very difficult to be a faithful follower of Jesus if you're getting, if 5% of your diet is biblical and 95% of it is secular.

It's just, it's very hard.

- So it's the fear that allowed evangelicals to justify the leadership of somebody like Donald Trump, which seems so antithetical to outsiders' understanding of evangelicals.

- Yeah, well, look, I mean, if you believe that the barbarians are at the gates, then you think to yourself, "Maybe we need a barbarian to protect us."

That's Donald Trump.

That's the evangelical relationship with Donald Trump in a nutshell.

I mean, for a lot of these people, and I just can't emphasize it enough, I mean, these themes that we're discussing here of fear and grievance and persecution, right, not just that the country doesn't look the same as it used to, but that the country is coming for us.

You know, when Donald Trump gets out on the stump and says, "I'm your retribution," they hear that very differently than just the average-- - How do they hear it?

- Well, I mean, look, you might think to yourself, "Well, how could all, you know, "the criminal indictments and, you know, "found liable for sexual abuse, all these things.

"How can they support him "with those things hanging over his head?"

And it's important, I think, to recognize they're not supporting him in spite of those things.

They're supporting him because of those things.

When he says that he's going to be your retribution, these are people who feel aggrieved and wronged by the culture, by the government that, you know, that the education system has kicked God out of the schools; that the sexual ethics of the culture have run completely counter to what the country's Judeo-Christian heritage was; you know, pornography, drug usage, civilizational decline.

That's what we're dealing with here.

- Even after he was indicted numerous times, Donald Trump has maintained his hold on the evangelical vote.

Talk about the persecution complex.

- Well, it's funny, Margaret.

If you think back to the 2022 midterms when Republicans badly underperformed and Donald Trump responded by throwing evangelicals under the bus, that was the first time his support really started to dip.

And then Alvin Bragg delivered that first indictment in New York and the support went right back up.

And it's been climbing ever since.

The persecution complex is psychologically at the center, I think, of our problems in the evangelical church.

Which is to say that this idea that we're on borrowed time in America, that the forces of secularism and progressivism, that they're coming for us.

And so you then start to process every political defeat, every cultural defeat, every unkind thing said about you through this lens of, "Well, we're being persecuted."

- Sarah Jones of New York Magazine, who, like you, grew up in an evangelical church, in her review of your book, rejected the premise that the church can ultimately be saved.

And she frankly argues there's nothing worth salvaging.

How do you respond?

- So I think what I would say to that critique is just that we have not seen the best of the church in this country because the church in this country, at least for the last 50 years, has just been so consumed with the pursuit of political-- - Power.

- Power.

And that pursuit of power has corrupted the church in many ways.

And we don't know what a healthy, vibrant church looks like because we haven't tried it.

We as Christians, I think, have to appreciate that 50 years ago, unbelievers in this country, they liked the church.

Even if they didn't believe in the God that we believe in, they respected the institution of the church.

They thought that socially, that we were good for society.

And now it's the exact opposite.

They hate us.

And that review speaks to that.

And I think we have the responsibility now to try to demonstrate what real Christianity looks like in a culture that is desperately in need of Christ.

- The transformation of the evangelical community really is marked by the emergence of the Moral Majority.

And the founder of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, appeared on "Firing Line" with William F. Buckley Jr in 1981.

Take a look at what he says here.

- I feel when one aspires to a place of public leadership, a congressman, a president, governor, I think like a priest or a pastor or a rabbi, he is aspiring to lead the people and people are going to emulate his lifestyle or her lifestyle.

And I think that we have an obligation to go a step beyond the average person because in leadership more is demanded of us.

- "In leadership more is demanded of us."

I know you write extensively about Jerry Falwell, Jerry Falwell Jr., Liberty University, his own failings.

While he preached this message, he didn't live up to his own standard.

- That's the irony.

Jerry Falwell Senior in that clip, he's speaking to a biblical doctrine that is true and that is right.

The irony is that had he lived by that doctrine, had his movement lived by that doctrine, then we wouldn't be in this mess that we're in today.

And it's tragic.

- Prominent evangelical leaders Russell Moore, even in Iowa, Bob Vander Plaats, stood up to Donald Trump in 2016.

But their perspective didn't make a dent in evangelical voters' views of Donald Trump.

Are there any voices, and put your political hat on, your political reporting hat on.

Are there any evangelical leaders who could catalyze the evangelical voting bloc against Trump?

- No.

- Explain why.

- Because it's the evangelical leaders who created this monster in the first place.

I mean, let me-- - This monster being Donald Trump?

- Yeah.

I mean, it's easy to forget now, but when Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, evangelical Christians were his softest group of supporters.

There was a lot of suspicion of him, a lot of skepticism.

He really had to work hard to earn their votes.

That's why he put Mike Pence on the ticket.

That's why he released the list of Supreme Court nominees and promised to pick pro-life Supreme Court justices.

All of that was meant to assuage the concerns of those voters.

But take it a step further, Margaret.

In the summer of 2016, as he's courting these people, Donald Trump gathers about 500 prominent evangelical leaders in New York City at a Marriott, and they have this daylong conference.

And Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr., Mike Huckabee, a number of these prominent high-profile evangelical leaders, they take turns getting up on stage and vouching for Trump, vouching for his character.

In other words, not just saying, oh, you know, listen, this is a binary choice, lesser of two evils.

You know, we need to hold our nose and vote for the pro-life candidate.

No, no, no.

This was, "God uses flawed people throughout the Bible "to advance his purposes.

"How is this guy any different "than King David or King Solomon, or Moses even?"

I mean, I was there that day, and I heard comparisons to Moses.

That's how far some of these folks were willing to go.

Well, you fast-forward eight years.

Some of those same people privately are horrified of Donald Trump.

They know how dangerous he is, but they've locked themselves into this position now where even if they came out today, all of them locking arms and denouncing him and saying, "Never mind, we were wrong, "please forgive us for what we said," the people wouldn't listen because they've already made their judgments on him.

- After the midterm elections, Trump cast blame on Republican losses and the lack of a Republican red wave into Congress on the pro-life movement, rather than on himself, and the strategy around Republicans and how they handled the issue of abortion.

And you write in your book that many evangelicals were angry at Trump.

Yet Mike Pence, an evangelical himself, Senator Tim Scott, an evangelical himself, even Ron DeSantis, none of them have earned the support of evangelicals.

Why?

- I think for 50 years, abortion was used as the chief mobilizer for millions and millions of evangelical Christians.

Abortion is no longer this great galvanizing issue for Republican primary voters in the way that it once was.

In other words, if you're Mike Pence, if you're Tim Scott, if you're Ron DeSantis and you're campaigning on the issue of abortion, at a presidential level, a lot of voters now might tune you out and say, "Well, okay, yeah, "but you're not going to sign a law on that.

"It's not going to be debated in Congress.

"This is now at the states.

"So, what else do you got?"

So I think for a lot of these Republican voters, a lot of these evangelical primary voters, now, they push abortion to the side and say, "Okay, well, what is our priority?"

I think for many of them, the priority is what we've been discussing, which is who's going to protect Christianity in America?

Who is willing to stand up and fight against our enemies in the culture?

You know, the education curriculum, the transgender issue, critical race theory.

If that's your belief, then you are looking for the person who can fight back against it.

And Donald Trump checks that box in ways that Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, these people could never dream of because none of them are willing to say the things that Donald Trump is willing to say.

I mean, just the other day, Donald Trump is out there campaigning, talking about how he's not going, maybe he's not going to let non-Christians into the country anymore.

And this is the sort of thing that we've become desensitized, we've become numb to the things that Donald Trump says and does.

But if you're wondering, well, if theocracy comes to America, if the wall between church and state gets demolished, then how does it start?

Well, it probably starts like this.

It probably starts with a strongman leader taking all of the authoritarian impulses over here, merging it with all of the religious zealotry over here, combining the two, and having a movement of people behind him who believe that he's an instrument of the Almighty to accomplish God's will on earth, no matter how flawed he is.

- An influential piece that you published after January 6th was about Nikki Haley.

You wrote that she told you, quote, "We shouldn't have followed him," meaning Donald Trump.

"We shouldn't have listened to him.

"And we can't ever let that happen again."

You say that Haley has the ability to shapeshift and morph.

Which Nikki Haley have you observed on the campaign trail?

- The one that I've seen on the campaign trail I think is the one who's trying to be everything to just about everyone.

So she's not going to say what she really thinks about Trump.

So it's a strange campaign to watch in many ways because her natural political abilities are such that she's able to draw big crowds and give good speeches and perform really well in these debates just by virtue of what a good political athlete she is.

But I think the question for her heading into this campaign, is, if you're going to run, wouldn't you rather just run, win or lose, let the chips fall where they may, being the most authentic version of yourself?

And I think at some level, the problem for Nikki Haley is that the Republican Party as it's constituted today is not a party that is a great match for the authentic version of Nikki Haley.

So it's honestly like watching a tragedy play out in slow motion, her campaign.

- You referenced Donald Trump's rhetoric about retribution.

His campaign rhetoric has gotten darker and more authoritarian.

He's recently joked that he would behave like a dictator on day one.

You've said that many are still underestimating what a second Trump term could mean.

How seriously should people take Donald Trump's promises?

- What concerns me is that Donald Trump in his second term would be surrounded by a lot of folks who truly view politics as a proxy for good and evil.

There is kind of an apocalyptic zero sum zeal that infects a lot of these folks who are close to Trump now and who would be surrounding him in a second term.

When we look through the history books and we see this fusing of authoritarianism and religious fanaticism, and more specifically, I would say, religious justification for violence, for conflict.

When you see the merging of those two things, that's when you see history's greatest crimes, the great crimes against humanity: ethnic cleansing, genocide, holocaust.

This is a real threat.

And the idea that it could never happen here, that Trump-ism could not evolve into this sort of civil religion where violence and mass conflict becomes justified in the name of fighting evil with good.

I mean, it's the sort of thing that would have sounded totally insane eight years ago.

I don't think it's insane anymore.

- It sounds like you're preparing yourself for the probability that Trump will reclaim the Republican nomination.

If that's the case, where does that leave evangelicals and the Church?

- Where I hope it leaves evangelicals is wandering into a place of political homelessness.

And what I mean by that is just this idea that our identity as followers of Jesus is in any way, shape or form attached to our identity as partisan Republicans is so profoundly wrong and does such a disservice to the Gospel of Jesus Christ that I hope that there is an awakening here in the evangelical world, that we do not put our faith in mortal men.

We do not put our faith in princes, in kings.

If you claim to follow Jesus, if that is your identity, then it doesn't matter who wins the next election.

As my dad used to say from the pulpit, "God does not bite his fingernails."

And if you're a follower of Jesus, you really shouldn't be biting your fingernails either.

- Tim Alberta, thank you for joining me.

- It's my pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

- [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Corporate funding is provided by [bright music] [bright music continues] [upbeat tune] [gentle music] - [Narrator] You're watching PBS.