Preet Bharara:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Tim Alberta:

There is an evangelical industrial complex, and it exists not for the nurturing of spiritual journeys, not for the betterment of society by way of introducing Jesus to an unbelieving world. It exists to win elections, it exists to win the culture wars.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Tim Alberta. He’s a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Alberta’s sweeping book is a look at how the reactionary attitudes and coarseness of the modern mag tinge Republican Party has transformed evangelical Christianity. It’s also an examination of Alberta’s own faith. He’s the son of an evangelical pastor. We talk about his father’s unexpected religious and political transformation, why evangelicals stand by former President Trump and the nature of religious faith. That’s coming up, stay tuned. Now let’s get to your questions. So as we begin 2024, as you well know, there are lots of trials on deck, lots of Supreme Court cases that are about to be decided. And over the course of time, I get really great basic questions, fundamental questions, definitional questions from you folks. And I thought as we head into this new year of legal wrangling, criminal trials and the like, I’d answer some of these more fundamental questions about definitions and concepts in the law that many lay people might not be fully familiar with, even though you hear these terms all the time.

This question comes in an email from Val who asks, “Who decides the sentencing guidelines, and what factors are considered? Are guidelines a suggestion or do judges need to strictly follow them?” And that’s a great question and it goes to a lot of curiosity about and confusion over how people get punished, what the proper length of sentences are, how judges make those decisions. So I’m going to speak only for the federal system because that’s the system with which I’m most comfortable and most familiar, obviously from my time as US attorney and as an assistant US attorney. So first of all, let’s take a step back and talk about why there seems to be understandable confusion about how sentences are imposed. Part of that is because there are actually two sources of authority about what punishments should be imposed under the law. The first source is the statute itself that contains the nature of the violation.

So if there’s a homicide statute or a drug statute or a robbery statute or a conspiracy statute, those statutes that are enacted by lawmakers prescribe a particular maximum sentence for every crime. So basic conspiracy has a maximum sentence of five years, certain other kinds of frauds have a maximum sentence of 20 years, and obviously in the federal system, their penalty is up to and including life imprisonment and even the death penalty. So that’s true for every statute. For some statutes, there’s not only a maximum legal sentence imposable, but also a mandatory minimum sentence. So certain kinds of drug crimes or crimes that occur with firearms have mandatory minimum sentences. Otherwise, if there’s no mandatory minimum sentence, the statute provides that the sentence can be from zero to whatever the statutory maximum is. So that’s from statutes. Now, there’s something called the sentencing guidelines or the federal sentencing guidelines.

Those came into being after Congress enacted the Sentencing Reform Act in 1984. And that act did a lot of different things, but with respect to sentences, it aimed to take away what some people thought was an unnecessary discrepancy between sentences in different parts of the country depending on who the judge was. So to try to introduce some uniformity and some standards and some guidance for judges, the sentencing commission was created, the US Sentencing Commission. And so the US Sentencing Commission is the body provided for by Congress that determines what the sentencing guidelines are. So what are the sentencing guidelines? Well, they’re what they sound like. They’re basically a set of principles and guidelines that inform judges as to what proper sentences should be or what the proper range of sentences should be in different circumstances. And basically the US sentencing guidelines take two things into account.

First, the seriousness of the offense, and second, the criminal history of the person who’s being sentenced. So with respect to the first, the seriousness of the offense, the sentencing guidelines provide for every offense imaginable, whether it’s fraud or violence or some other such thing, a base offense level based on what the sentencing commission and its wisdom has determined with respect to the seriousness of the offense. Then once a base offense level is determined, there are lots of other considerations the judges are supposed to take into account in adjusting that base offense level. So, for example, some of those considerations are what was the nature of the role of the defendant in the particular crime? If it was a conspiracy, were there vulnerable victims who were targeted and victimized? The amount of the loss or the profit in a fraud case can affect the offense level as well.

And in some instances, if there was a use of a firearm and the considerations are many, so to calculate the proper range of a potential sentence, you first determine what the seriousness of the offense is, and that’s a numerical value, which some people might find odd when you’re talking about sentencing a human being. And then you take into account the criminal history of the person. So if two people have committed the same offense under the federal system and one person has never been convicted of a crime before and another person has been convicted three times of felonies, they will receive different sentencing guidelines rages based on the calculations in the US sentencing guidelines as written. So the sentencing guidelines were enacted for the purpose of trying to give some uniformity to sentences. So it shouldn’t make a difference if you’re arrested on a drug crime in the Bronx or you’re arrested for drug crime in the state of Washington.

That said, lots of people have been critics of the sentencing guidelines for a lot of different reasons, including that it hasn’t actually fully eliminated some of those discrepancies. There’s also been criticism that the sentencing guidelines took away discretion from judges who were supposed to be deciding cases and controversies based on the individual facts and based on the individual who is being sentenced. So your last question is a good one. Are guidelines a suggestion or do judges need to strictly follow them? Well, when they were enacted, they were basically mandatory, or maybe a better term would be they were considered to be presumptive. You could depart from what the ranges were if you were a judge, but it had to be justified in a particular way. So effectively, the sentencing guidelines when they were enacted after 1984 until 2005 were not suggestions, they needed to be fairly strictly followed.

In 2005, the Supreme Court of the United States decided a case call the United States v. Booker, and that case did a number of things, but relevant to your question, the most important thing that the Booker case did was it took out the requirement that the sentencing guidelines had to be mandatorily followed, and they were guides, but judges could deviate from them in a way that they couldn’t before. So that’s the sentencing regime we have. I’ve written about it extensively in my book Doing Justice. I presume we’ll have lots and lots of questions about an appropriate sentence for the people who are under indictment, including Donald Trump if he gets convicted, and hopefully that provides something of a clarification and a foundation to understand how in the federal system sentences are imposed.

This question comes in an email from Warren who asks, “What’s the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony? Does it have anything to do with state versus federal crimes?” So to answer the second part of your question, that’s not what it has to do with, there are felonies and misdemeanors both in the federal system and felonies and misdemeanors in all the states of the union as well. Basically, the terms misdemeanor and felony are categories of criminal violations with misdemeanors being less serious and felonies being more serious. Now, the interesting thing is, the way we determine whether something is serious or not serious is not by necessarily judges using their common sense about the nature of the crime, the nature of the offense, the facts relating to the offense. Instead, judges effectively defer to lawmakers, consideration, and promulgation of rules that make a determination about how serious the offense is based on one factor, what the maximum penalty for that offense can be.

So actually the distinction between a misdemeanor and a felony for those purposes is quite simple. A misdemeanor is something that is punishable by a maximum of one year in prison, and a felony is something that is punishable by more than one year in prison. But generally speaking, the nature of misdemeanors are less serious crimes and felonies. Some examples of a misdemeanor offense, vandalism, trespassing, petty theft, those sorts of things, and you might imagine the many other examples of felonies which are more plentiful in both the state and federal system are things like robbery, burglary, homicide, narcotics distribution, certain kinds of fraud offenses. But the difference, as I said, is with respect to what the maximum punishment can be. Now, to be clear, you can commit a misdemeanor and get sentenced to 11 months in prison and you can commit a felony and get less than 10 months in prison.

Now, the distinction between a misdemeanor and a felony can sometimes play out in more interesting ways in actual practice on the ground. So for example, if you’re in a state that has a larceny statute that says larceny in the amount of a thousand dollars or more is a felony, but larceny to the tune of under a thousand dollars is a misdemeanor, you might find yourself charged in certain jurisdictions with a felony, and then through the process of plea negotiations and plea bargaining, sometimes prosecutors will decide in their discretion for various reasons to plead it out to a misdemeanor even though it began as a felony that happens all over the place. The point of that is just to say that the law demarcates things very precisely and very rigorously, like this idea of a misdemeanor versus a felony and the nature of those two things and the sentences that can be imposed, whether it’s one or the other in real life and in real practice, in the give and take of the defense and the prosecution, there’s a bit more fluidity to all of that.

This question comes in an email from Meredith who asks, “Can you help me understand the difference between an indictment and an information?” Well, that’s a great question, and I think it’s confusing to a lot of people because sometimes you’ll hear that someone has been charged pursuant to an indictment that’s the most normal and traditional unusual thing you will hear about in a criminal case. But every once in a while you’ll hear in the federal system that someone has been charged by way of an information, which is a confusing word because of the other common meanings that the word information has to take a step back and be as basic as possible. Let’s talk about why there’s an indictment process in the first place where that comes from our actual constitution, the Fifth Amendment to be precise. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution provides that prosecutions for a capital or otherwise infamous crime have to be instituted by a presentment or indictment of a grand jury.

So what’s an otherwise infamous crime? Well, the courts have held consistently for a long time now that basically a felony is an otherwise infamous crime. Going back to what I said in answer to an earlier question, the courts have held that if a violation of a criminal statute can carry with it a sentence of imprisonment in a penitentiary of more than a year than the Fifth Amendment right to an indictment is triggered. And you’ll recall that a grand jury in the federal system consists of 23 ordinary people from the community who meet and decide on whether or not they find that the government is proven by the standard of probable cause that a particular person has committed a particular crime. There are circumstances in which prosecutors in the federal system can bypass the indictment requirement, and there are basically two categories of such exceptions.

One is, and you might’ve guessed this based on an answer to a prior question that I gave, if something doesn’t rise to the level of being an infamous crime, in other words, is something punishable by less than one year in a federal penitentiary, then that doesn’t trigger the Fifth Amendment right to indictment, and the government can proceed by what’s called an information, which is basically a document that looks just like an indictment except that the charging party is not the grand jury. The charging party is actually the US attorney for whatever district is relevant. So effectively misdemeanors can be charged without going to the grand jury. Now of course, there may be reasons to proceed with the grand jury, even with respect to a misdemeanor. Maybe you want to use the investigative tools the grand jury has. Maybe you want the imp premature in your particular case of having a grand jury of disinterested people from the community to have made the determination that the probable cause standard has been met.

So that’s one category. If it doesn’t rise to the level of what the Constitution calls an infamous crime, the other is if the defendant voluntarily agrees to waive the right to indictment and proceeds by information. And that happens all the time. And as you may realize, it makes perfect sense that a person, if the waiver is knowing and voluntary is permitted to waive this important constitutional fundamental right of indictment in the same way that a person can waive his or her right to a trial by pleading guilty or waive his or her right against self-incrimination also provided for in the Fifth Amendment by agreeing to speak after being mirandized, this right to indictment can also be waived. Now, what’s the circumstance in which it tends to be waived? Usually it’s in a case where the person is intending to plead guilty.

So for example, someone has been charged with 10 counts of fraud of a particular nature, and at some point the government decides to enter into plea negotiations with the defense lawyer and they decide based on a variety of circumstances and what they believe to be in the interest of justice that maybe the person will plead guilty to five of those counts and then some other count pursuant to some other statute that wasn’t in the original indictment. Rather than force the government in its cooperative posture to go back to the grand jury and represent a new indictment or a superseding indictment as you might otherwise, the defense might agree to relieve the government of its burden and proceed by information. So the government just drafts a new document which is fundamentally a proxy for an indictment with the five counts that were agreed upon.

And then you six count and you take that to the judge. The judge is required to make a determination that the waiver of the right to indictment is knowing and voluntary and was done in consultation with the attorney. So as I mentioned, proceeding by information is most common when there’s a negotiated plea. And the type of negotiated plea scenario in which an information is most likely going to be found is when you have a cooperation agreement. So in my experience at the Southern District of New York, when you’re working with someone who is trying to be a cooperator, someone who’s flipping to the side of the government, you negotiate all manner of things that the person is going to plead guilty to, including as I mentioned before in the podcast crimes that were not initially charged or crimes that possibly the government wasn’t able to prove and wouldn’t be able to prove.

But for the cooperating witness, choosing to tell the government those things, so the person pleads guilty to lots and lots of things and then gets the benefit of a cooperation letter at the end of that person’s testimony. Anyway, don’t get confused if that sounds too much in the weeds. Basically, in response to your question, Meredith, an indictment is something that’s the fundamental traditional way of going about bringing charges in the federal system. And if you hear a reporter or a news report talking about an information that’s most likely in a situation where the parties have agreed to waive the right to indictment, it’s the same basic document. It’s an operative document that provides the basis most usually for a guilty plea, but can also be the basis for a trial.

Tim Alberta has spent the last few years embedded with evangelical groups during a time of intense tumult. He joins us to share his insights on the powerful movement. Tim Alberta, welcome to the show.

Tim Alberta:

Preet, it is a pleasure to be with you, longtime listener, first time caller. Thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, I love that. I love when people say that. So congratulations on your book, which we’re going to talk a bit about in the themes in it. It’s called The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Now, first I want to say because this is an audio format, people can’t see the cover of your book, that it is The Kingdom, the power, and the Glory. You have used the Oxford comma in your title, which I very much appreciate because I’m a lover of the Oxford comma, sometimes known as the series comma, what is the relationship between the Oxford comma and Christ?

Tim Alberta:

I have received many, many questions on this book tour, and that is a new one.

Preet Bharara:

Well, you’ve done so many, I got to mix it up a little bit for you.

Tim Alberta:

I was going to say, listen, I can usually see them coming from a mile away. This one is new and I like it.

Preet Bharara:

Spend some time on the comma for us, if you will.

Tim Alberta:

If we want to jump right into spiritual warfare, I would personally assign the ampersam as symbolic of satanic forces and the Oxford comma as God’s design for us. No, I mean, that’s all that is. That is all that good and holy. Of course, I’m being heretical and I apologize to any fundamentalist out there listening, but yeah, I’m a big Oxford guy.

Preet Bharara:

Was that a debate with the copy editor or not?

Tim Alberta:

Actually, it was at one point, although I think it was even less the copy editor, more the designer, the jacket designer, I think they wanted either ampersand or a very small-

Preet Bharara:

Ampersand?

Tim Alberta:

Yeah which I think would’ve been funky looking.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve written one book and I have the Oxford comma on the cover, so I’m a brother in arms, so to speak. What’s the style at the Atlantic? No, Oxford comma, right?

Tim Alberta:

I should know this. No, I think our style is the Oxford comma. It is, I’m pretty sure. Oh, boy. I’m going to get in trouble.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t work there. I don’t work there, Tim.

Tim Alberta:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

I’m trying to throw you stuff that’s right in your wheelhouse.

Tim Alberta:

I know, and look at me just fumbling. Janice, our copy editor, our copy chief at The Atlantic, who’s wonderful. I hope she does not hear this because I’m going to get an earful, but I’m pretty sure that we do use an Oxford comma. Matter of fact, I’m about 95% sure that we do use the Oxford.

Preet Bharara:

Well, we have a team of people who are going to check while we’re speaking and they will text me, oh brother, and let me know how you performed and how observant you are as a journalist at your own periodical. So let’s switch to get serious for a moment, important book, important topics, but to set the stage. And you do this at the beginning of your book also, we can’t fully understand your thinking about evangelicals and the movement and how it shifted over time without understanding your father. So your father, Richard Alberta, as you describe, was a self-reported atheist, a financier in New York, and then something happened in about 1977. What transformation did your father go through?

Tim Alberta:

Yeah, it’s pretty dramatic and it’s one of those stories that I think some people will probably roll their eyes at and some people will identify with, and then probably lots of people in the middle will not know how to process it. So my dad was killing it. He and my mom were socialites. They had a big house in New York and dad drove a Cadillac and mom worked for ABC Radio in Manhattan and dad was banking and making lots of money, and they had it all except my dad felt miserable and totally empty inside and didn’t know how to explain that. And neither did anybody else. His friends and family all looked at him sideways, and he had considered himself to be for some years at that point, an atheist. He read Bertrand Russell and others and felt quite secure in that identity as an atheist.

And yet because of this emptiness, he went searching and reading and trying to find the thing that was missing that led him to stumble into a church in the Hudson Valley one day where he heard the gospel of Jesus Christ for the first time. And right then and there that Sunday, he went down to the altar and prayed to receive Jesus, and he took communion and it just completely changed his life. Not only did it change who he was in terms of his lifestyle and his habits, suddenly he’s not going out, he’s not drinking, he’s not smoking, he’s carrying on and he’s getting up at 4:00 in the morning to read his Bible every day, and he’s sitting silently in prayer for hours on end and everybody thinks he’s lost his mind. And then it takes an even more dramatic turn because he feels that God is telling him, calling him to enter the ministry and give up his career and go live in poverty basically.

And now everybody really thinks that they need to stage an intervention like his family and friends, my mother, everybody thinks he’s lost it. And if you’re listening to this, you’re thinking, yeah, maybe he did, right? I happen to believe that he truly did hear that calling from the Lord and that it changed his life. And the reason I’m so convinced of it, Preet, is because my dad describes this moment where he goes to this church in the Hudson Valley where he had previously prayed to receive Jesus, and he meets with the pastor there and tells him what he feels he’s being told to do with his life and they pray. And as they’re praying in this man’s little office where I’ve been to, my dad described it as the windows were thrown open and that there was wind swirling around him in the room and that he felt the Holy Spirit in the room that day.

And the reason I share that story and that I emphasize it is because if you had ever met my dad, he was the least supernatural Christian you would’ve ever met. This is a man who later earned a doctorate, who spoke Greek. He was an intellectual and he was not a snake handler. He did not speak in tongues, he was not someone given to phony supernaturalism. But for him to say that that happened to him, there are two choices. You can think that it’s BS and that he made it up, or you can believe him and I choose to believe him because how else would you explain someone so dramatically altering the trajectory of their life and of their family’s life? And that’s what I was born into.

Preet Bharara:

How did your mom deal with all of this?

Tim Alberta:

It’s a great question. She was not a Christian and she was not raised in a Christian home either. And she at first was really quite mystified and unhappy about the whole thing. And my dad had resolved to not proselytize her to let her find Jesus on her own or maybe not. And actually what happened was a short time before my dad prayed that prayer about entering the ministry, he came home from his banking job one day and my mom told him that somebody had knocked on the door that day. It was a group of Christians from a local church, not the one that he’d gone to, and asked her if they could come in and just have coffee and talk with her about Jesus. And she was so annoyed by the whole thing that she said yes, because she wanted to give these people a piece of her mind. And as it happens, they came in, talked with her, and my mom, I should note, is probably the smartest one in the whole family.

She’s a brilliant person in her own right. And so she spent hours with these people interrogating them about Jesus and actually came to the conclusion that maybe this did make sense after all. So the long story short is that mom became a Christian and was still mortified by the idea of my dad giving up his career and going to seminary, but she started to pray and felt moved similarly by the Lord that this was the right thing to do. So suddenly this couple of young yuppie socialites who had the world at their feet and lots of money in their bank account and a different party to go to every weekend, suddenly they are moving around the country, living on food stamps, preaching in little churches. And I mean, you want to talk about a leap of faith. My mother’s decision to go along with this was always equally fascinating to me, and they in many ways modeled for me and for my brothers, a humility and a level of self-sacrifice that I think can only be explained by a sincerely and deeply held religious conviction.

Preet Bharara:

Is there anything that you understand about your father’s personality or earlier events in his life or upbringing that further explains how he could have undergone such a dramatic transformation as an adult?

Tim Alberta:

Well, it’s interesting. He came from a really broken family, and that’s not something I can relate to because my parents were extraordinary and they were loving and giving and generous, and as I said a moment ago, just a model for us. But I think in my dad’s case, his father was an alcoholic who was running around with every woman in town and his mother attempted suicide on several occasions and actually went to the abortion clinic when she was pregnant with him and walked out at the last minute, which is something that he always puzzled over and ultimately attributed to holy intercession.

And so I think that for someone who has such rupture in their personal life, who has struggled with parental relationships, who has struggled with a lack of family love and family connectivity, I do think for that person it is much easier to find a home in the church and more specifically, I would say more attractive to pursue a relationship with God and with Christ because of the paternal nature of that relationship, this idea of being born again and entering God’s family as a co-heir to use New Testament language as a co-heir to the throne that we are promised as being children of God.

I do think that that holds an appeal to someone from a background like his, even more so than someone from just an ordinary background like mine. The way that he was searching for something is unique and probably more of a natural fit in finding God than for someone who grew up with great comfort and didn’t necessarily feel like something was missing.

Preet Bharara:

Did he ever express or did you feel that he felt either regret or shame about his prior wealthy life before he was born again?

Tim Alberta:

It’s a great question. And actually the answer is yes. And one of the manifestations of that was by the time I was about five years old, we had moved to Michigan where I grew up and my dad put down roots at this church that was pretty small in a pretty middle class modest community. What happened though is really interesting. The town where I was raised Brighton, Michigan, which is an excerpt of Detroit, it sits at the intersection of two freeways and the town became, there was almost a gold rush. Suddenly it became this incredibly popular bedroom community for people who commuted to jobs in Detroit and Lansing and Ann Arbor. It sits in the middle of all of those big cities. And so when we moved there as kids, there was nothing there. I mean, there was like a McDonald’s and a Kmart.

And over the next 10, 15, 20 years, it really became a boom town with a mall and with all kinds of restaurants and cool coffee shops, and it became a very wealthy community. I mention all that because as the church grew, the character of the church transformed. It became a very wealthy, a very affluent congregation. And one of the challenges that as my dad saw it was to consistently and unapologetically confront his flock over this question of wealth and of material comfort and of our attachments to the things that give us comfort in this life and how Jesus’s teachings, if we are to take them seriously are a stark warning against material possessions, against extravagant wealth. In fact, Jesus says that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to find his way to heaven. And there may be some hyperbole in that illustration, and of course theologians will dispute exactly what Christ meant by that.

But we see the teaching time and time and time again. In fact, if I may go on for just another moment to share this, it’s an illustration my dad used often and I have picked up on it and used it myself because I think it’s really profound. At one point in the gospels, Jesus describes the kingdom of God as a treasure that’s buried in a field. And he says that a man one day found that treasure stumbled onto that treasure. And what the man did was he put it back in the ground, covered it up, and then he went off and he sold all of his possessions. He sold everything that he had, and he took the proceeds from those sales and he came back and he purchased the field.

And the idea, the upshot of that parable is that the field and the treasure buried in it is the only thing we need that all of our other identities, all of our other possessions, all of our attachments in this life are ultimately meaningless if we don’t have that treasure, if we don’t have that kingdom of God. And so that is one of many warnings against wealth. And I do think that as my dad would share that from the pulpit, there was a great deal of regret and even shame in that he had lived this extravagant lifestyle that was ultimately so empty. And as he would say it, “You could have this great wealth but ultimately be very poor.”

Preet Bharara:

I have so many questions about your father and his journey, so I won’t spend the entire episode on it, but just a little bit more. I’m just so curious. Did he maintain any of his friendships from his prior life or associations or hobbies or likes that a person of his means might’ve had? For example, did he play golf? Did he continue to play golf or was it a complete break from the prior life?

Tim Alberta:

It was a 99% break from the prior life. The only luxury I would say that he carried on later in life was a love of cars. So it’s funny, when my dad died, my brothers and I were trying to work out his finances and he had this old used, it was like a 10-year-old used Mustang, a little mustang convertible that he loved to cruise around town in, and we assumed that it was paid off because the guy’s 71 years old and his kids are all off and grown. No, it wasn’t. There was a note on it and he was paying it off monthly because he didn’t have money to have that car. But he just loved cars. He grew up around fancy cars. And so that was a funny thing that my brothers and I all laughed about.

Here’s this pastor who’s living very modestly, and people probably see him driving around in this Mustang convertible thinking, “Hey, what’s up with that?” And of course he’s got a monthly payment on it because he couldn’t afford it. So it’s funny, actually, this is a very personal thing, but I don’t mind sharing it. My dad, when I say that he came from a broken family, it was actually a very violent family. His father was a Sicilian immigrant who wound up opening a restaurant in New Jersey that became a hangout for ballplayers and businessmen and a lot of mafiosos and his own family was connected. He had uncles who were at the university, as they say, which meant the state penitentiary and his family had quite a streak of alcoholism and violence.

And so in fact, when my dad had this conversion experience, and when he went to seminary and then started his ministry career, he told his father and he told his brothers, and he told other family members that he couldn’t be involved with their lifestyle anymore and that he would try to keep a line of communication open to them so that he could talk to them about Jesus. But they basically rejected him and they told him that he was a kook and a clown and they didn’t really want anything to do with him. And Preet, when my dad died, I met several of his brothers for the first time. They came to the funeral and he has three brothers and one sister. Now his sister, my aunt Betty Lynn, actually, she became a believer later in life and we had quite a close relationship with her over the years, but his brothers, we never saw, we never spoke to them, we never heard from them.

They were ghosts in our lives. And what was really interesting, and again, I don’t mind sharing this, and in fact they gave me permission, his brothers, my uncles to share this, when they came to the church for the funeral and they sat in the pews and they heard my brothers and I give our eulogies and other people at the church testifying to the impact that my dad had had on their lives. My uncles sat there having lived decidedly unChrist-like lives with a lot of bad behavior and nefarious activity and whatnot. And they sat there in the pews weeping, and I sensed and I later confirmed this, just having very candid conversations with them after the funeral, I sensed a certain shame on their part because all of these years they had treated him the outcast as the unwanted one. And I think in that moment they perhaps were reflecting on an opportunity missed to see what he saw and to have a piece that he had.

Preet Bharara:

So you mentioned the funeral, and I was going to ask you about that because you write about your eulogy, both movingly and also analytically because you had just written a book and you had made some comments about various people, including somebody who was quite well respected and in some cases even revered in your father’s church, Rush Limbaugh, and you got some advice about staying away from politics in eulogizing and commemorating your father. You did not take that advice. Explain to tell folks what you said and why you said it and what the reaction was.

Tim Alberta:

Yeah, so I had just published my first book, which was about Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party, and it was making a lot of news because I had a lot of interesting details. And of course, I was also in the crosshairs of right-wing media because the book was very critical of Trump. And so Russian Limbaugh is talking about me and Breitbart and other sources are coming after me. And so my dad dies less than two weeks after the book comes out, I travel back to Michigan and I go to the church a couple of days later for the viewing and for the visitation. And I’m still in a state of shock, of course at this point because my dad just died and I had just seen him a couple of weeks earlier.

He and my mom had actually driven out to Washington for the book party, which was a hoot because my dad was not exactly the Washington book party kind, and it was a great time together, and that wound up being the last time I saw him. So here I am a couple of weeks later just feeling like I’m in a bad dream, and as I’m standing in the sanctuary of the church for the visitation, I’ve got all these people coming up to me, getting in my face, confronting me about politics, confronting me about what Rush Limbaugh said on his show about me and what my book said about Trump, and asking whether I’m still a Christian and how I can be saying these things about Trump.

Preet Bharara:

And as you write more emphasis on criticizing your statements than offering condolences as your father lay in a box.

Tim Alberta:

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, yeah, dad’s in a casket.

Preet Bharara:

That’s how you put it, actually.

Tim Alberta:

Yeah, dad’s in a box. You almost wonder in this moment, of course, is this actually happening? Is this real? And Preet, let me be clear, there were lots of people there that day who were crying with me and who were mourning with me and who were doing all the things that you would expect in that moment. So it wasn’t a majority, it wasn’t even a large minority, but it was enough of these people who independent of one another, felt that it was appropriate in that setting with my dad laid out 50 feet away or whatever to come up and want to have it out and litigate their political differences with me. And so it really pissed me off. Obviously, it put me in a pretty bad state of mind. And so that night I told my wife that I was revising my eulogy that I was going to give the next day to respond to this.

And she was like, no, don’t do that. It’s a bad idea. And I should just note that my wife is an Indian immigrant. She was raised Hindu and came to Christ later in life herself in large part because of my father. They had an amazing relationship. He really loved her as a daughter. And so she was very hurt and very wounded and shocked by all of this as well. But she was just cautioning me like, don’t take the bait, don’t give these people what they want, but I guess my Sicilian blood got the better of me. And so the next day in my eulogy, I let it rip a little bit and just said, “What are we doing here?” Rush Limbaugh at my dad’s visitation? You really want to talk politics, argue politics? I said, basically, listen, Christians are called to be discipled, not by Rush Limbaugh, not by talk radio, but by scripture and by your pastor, and challenged people in his congregation, and that didn’t go over terribly well.

Preet Bharara:

Do you regret that? Does your Sicilian side regret that?

Tim Alberta:

My Sicilian side does not regret it.

Preet Bharara:

Well, look, let me put it this way. I think you’ve intimated this, that some part of that experience of talking about politics and the proper role of politics in the church and in the Evangelical Christian Church was a bit of a spur for you to write this book. So in that respect, A, is that true? And B, maybe you feel the opposite of regret.

Tim Alberta:

Yeah, look, it is true. And in many ways that was the catalyst that entire episode because after the eulogy, we went to the cemetery and we buried my father and then came home to my parents’ house. And right when I sat down in the living room at my parents’ house still processing all these events, one of these nice church ladies who was preparing a meal, she came over and handed me an envelope with my name on it and said, “Hey, somebody left this for you at the church,” and I’m thinking that it’s just going to be a condolence card from someone. And I open it up and instead it’s a full page screed, handwritten from a longtime elder at the church, a friend of our family, somebody who’d known me since I was a little kid, telling me that I am a part of the deep state, that I’m undermining God’s ordained leader of this country, Donald Trump, that I should be ashamed of myself.

And all of these traumas taken together, I think they were the catalyst for me to write the book. So I suppose I don’t regret it in that sense, but I write about in chapter one how the guy who took over for my dad, Chris Winans, the pastor of the church now, who’s an amazing godly man who I respect a great deal, he had to deal with a terrible situation. And I think that my eulogy contributed to that situation. So I do regret it just in that sense that it made for an even deeper fracture there at my home church.

Preet Bharara:

I have to do some realtime fact checking, Tim, are you in fact a member of the deep state?

Tim Alberta:

I can neither confirm nor deny that I’m a member of the deep state.

Preet Bharara:

Well, you do use the Oxford comma, so that’s a point against you.

Tim Alberta:

The first rule of the deep state is that you do not talk about the deep state.

Preet Bharara:

You don’t talk about the Oxford comma.

Tim Alberta:

You don’t talk about the Oxford comma.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Tim Alberta after this. Can we go back to a couple of basics then? I want to explore some of the themes and observations you make in the book more broadly beyond your father and your family. What is the definition of, or perhaps better question is, what is your definition of an evangelical Christian or evangelical Christianity?

Tim Alberta:

Boy, it’s a great question.

Preet Bharara:

People throw that phrase around all the time in newspapers and on television, and I don’t know that everyone works from a common understanding of the term.

Tim Alberta:

No, they don’t, and you’re right to ask the question. I explained very early in the book that this is part of the problem is that evangelical was once pretty clearly understood to be a spiritual term. It has its roots in the Greek and the idea evangels, the idea was that this is taken derived from the word for gospel or for good news. And so evangelical is someone who believes that the Bible is the inspired word of God and that they have a charge to go and share that gospel, to preach that good news to the world, to evangelize, right? That’s the verb. So that was the traditionally understood theological doctrinal definition. But of course, the moral majority era, the 1970s onward, what we saw was the weaponizing of evangelicalism and the weaponizing of the Christian Protestant church more broadly in ways that changed, sociologically changed the definition and the interpretation and the perception of what it meant to be an evangelical.

So whereas 50 years ago, there was a pretty decent common understanding, pretty shared understanding of what the term meant. Today, it has basically devolved into a, well, okay, you’re a conservative white Republican, right? It’s been hollowed out of its religious substance and is basically a tribal marker of partisan political identification.

Preet Bharara:

How did that happen?

Tim Alberta:

Well, I write at great length early in the book in chapter three about Jerry Falwell Sr. and Liberty University and the Moral Majority, because I think that that is the best vehicle that we have to help understand this transformation over a period of 50 or 60 years. The most concise way of telling the story, Preet, I love this because I think you can see the light bulb go off in people’s eyes when you tell the story, is that in 1976, Jerry Falwell Sr. he had not yet formed the moral majority, but he had this megachurch in Lynchburg, Virginia that he was using to telecast sermons to millions of households across the country and was raising tons of money and building an empire in the process. And then he had this small Baptist college called Lynchburg Baptist College, which in 1976, he rebrands to Liberty University and changes the colors to red, white, and blue, and really embraces this, what we would’ve called, or what we call now, the Christian nationalism thing, was really the seeds were being planted at that time at Liberty University.

And he’s getting ready, of course, in a couple of years to launch the moral majority. And those three cogs form this evangelical machine that winds up mobilizing many millions of conservative Christians and just conservative non-Christians actually to around the country to vote around moral issues, social values, things of that nature. What’s so interesting is that in 1976, Jimmy Carter of all people, a Sunday school teacher, a self-described evangelical member of the Southern Baptist Convention, Jimmy Carter is the democratic nominee for president, and he gives an interview, if you recall, to Playboy magazine in which-

Preet Bharara:

Oh, I remember this. I remember this.

Tim Alberta:

And Carter admits in this interview to having struggled with lust in his heart. And Jerry Falwell Sr., like any good demagogue, he needed a straw man, he needed a foil. And Jimmy Carter’s interview with Playboy presented the perfect opportunity. So Falwell Sr. he seizes on that interview with Playboy and holds it up as basically a symbol of America’s moral decay. That here is this man who is seeking the highest office in the land who would have the temerity to speak to Playboy magazine, and he would stoop solo as to engage with pornography in this way. Fast-forward 50 years to the summer of 2016, and Donald Trump is attempting to seal the deal with evangelical voters, and he has this big meeting in New York at the Marriott Marquee with hundreds of evangelical leaders, and who gets on stage to vouch for him, Jerry Falwell Jr. And he gives this impassioned defense of Donald Trump’s character and morality, and he even compares him to King David and talks about how God uses flawed vessels all the time in the Bible. And this is no different.

The two of them go back to Trump Tower after that event for a big celebration, and they pose for a picture with their thumbs up and behind them on the wall is a framed cover of Playboy magazine with Donald Trump on it 50 years later. And if that story arc over the course of 50 years doesn’t pretty much perfectly encapsulate the hypocrisy and the moral relativism and ultimately the decline of the evangelical movement, then I don’t know.

Preet Bharara:

What did you think about naming that chapter, Playboy and Pool Boy?

Tim Alberta:

Ooh, no, I didn’t. But I’m jealous that you just came up with that so quickly.

Preet Bharara:

You should have consulted me. You should have consulted me, Tim.

Tim Alberta:

Had I but known.

Preet Bharara:

So with that backdrop, I have a number of questions that a lot of people have raised, and you attempt to answer about the infatuation on the part of evangelical Christians with Donald Trump, who you describe in very colorful terms as being the opposite of a beacon of religiosity. And you just described him that way as well. What is it? And one answer you’ve given, I’m going to jump ahead. One answer, you’ve given that I hadn’t really thought of it this way, and I find it very interesting, and you say, in some sense it takes someone like Donald Trump who’s not Christian to be the fighter for this group of folks, quote “And because he’s not a Christian, he’s not beholden to Christian values, and therefore it makes them almost this mercenary who’s willing to fight on behalf of this beleaguered population who feels under siege and they have turned to someone like Donald Trump to do the dirty work for them.” End quote. I have a million questions just from that language. What does it mean to be a mercenary? What do you mean by this idea? And what’s the dirty work?

Tim Alberta:

Okay, so indulge me for a moment because I don’t want anyone’s eyes to gloss over, but I think history here is super important, and I don’t mean American history, I mean like world history. So if you go back to first century Roman times the birth of the church, right? Jesus is crucified, he’s executed by the state, and then he is seen by scores of people resurrected. Three days later, the tomb is empty, and suddenly you have this movement, this nascent movement of Jews who for centuries have been practicing a very strict set of rules and rituals. They worship on Saturdays, they don’t eat pork, they don’t engage with certain ethnic enemies. Suddenly overnight they’re changed. They worship on Sundays, they eat anything, they engage all these people who were their ethnic enemies, they call brothers and they worship together and they eat together. So something dramatic has changed.

And in that first century, Roman context, Preet, what you see is relentless persecution of these people, relentless persecution of the early church. And how does the church respond to it? The Apostle Paul, the disciple Peter, in their writings, how do they respond to it? They respond by praying for the people who are persecuting them. They respond by forgiving them all the way to their deaths. They’re being fed to lions, they’re being slaughtered. They’re being rounded up and treated horribly and killed for their faith, and they respond by singing hymns and by praying and by talking about Jesus’s lessons of turning the other cheek and loving our enemy all the way until our death. The reason that that’s so important to recognize is that that was the Christian approach to the hostile culture around them during the first century, second century, third century. But then in the fourth century, something changes.

You have Constantine, and ever since the Constantinian age where he purports to become a follower of Jesus, and he wields Christianity as a weapon to advance his political and military and national causes. Ever since the Constantinian age for the last 1700 or so years, this has been the temptation of Christians. Whenever they are facing times of insecurity, of anxiety, whenever they are afraid and they feel threatened, there is this natural inclination, this natural temptation to turn to the power of the state, to turn to political rulers, military leaders, to turn to strong men who can protect them. So this is nothing new. And I think what we’re seeing now in the American context in this modern age is that same thing on steroids. You have American Christians who have been coddled, who have been complacent, who have been treated to the absolute best of circumstances throughout this nation’s history, particularly white Protestant Christians, right?

These are people who have had every advantage, every comfort, they have never felt threatened culturally or socially in any way. And at the first sign of the country changing around them, they are panicked, right? They are afraid. They are deeply insecure about this country’s changing face, both demographically, culturally, politically. This is becoming a country that is strange to them and unfamiliar to them and hostile to them in a certain way. And they are reacting to it by doing what people have done for centuries, which is seeking out a strong man who might protect them from their enemies.

And the problem of course, is that what it does is it not only fractures the tenets of a multicultural pluralistic society like ours, a liberal democracy like the United States, but it also diminishes the strength of the Christian witness because basically it renders your theology to be so small and so fragile that we need big bad Donald Trump to come along and fight for us because clearly God is biting his fingernails over the next presidential election. And I think it’s that vacuum of fear and insecurity that Trump has tapped into and exploited, and it explains the enduring strength of his hold on these people.

Preet Bharara:

Is there something that Trump could do or a position he could take or not take that would cause him to lose support among evangelical Christians? So for example, if he said tomorrow Roe was decided the way it was decided and Dobbs overturned it, but now I’m actually pro-choice, just to use a dramatic example, is his hold on that community of voters locked for good?

Tim Alberta:

Preet, I think about this all the time. I don’t want to be flippant with my response because I do think that at the margins, sure he could lose people. In fact, I think that some of his comments around abortion after the 2022 midterms where he threw pro-lifers under the bus, and then more recently when he criticized the heartbeat bill in Florida, that DeSantis signed into law effectively banning abortion at six weeks. I think marginally, he lost some supporters there.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, marginally any candidate can lose some voters at the margins for anything including the weather or a slight rise in unemployment, any number of factors.

Tim Alberta:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

The answer to my question, I guess you’re saying is by and large, he has an absolute lock no matter what?

Tim Alberta:

No matter what.

Preet Bharara:

I find that interesting.

Tim Alberta:

Listen, when he said that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, we all laughed and rolled our eyes, but that has actually proven true and with specific to this community, and here’s the thing that I would emphasize, Preet, when you’re dealing with people whose lives revolve around notions of supernatural transformation, then they can, I think, conjure up a justification for that which otherwise has no justification. And so if Donald Trump came out tomorrow and said that he was pro-choice, or if Donald Trump came out tomorrow and admitted in a news conference that he’d been sleeping with some other corn star throughout his presidency, I have to think that for a large share of these people, not all of them, but for a large share of these people, they would either say, yeah, but look at what he’s accomplishing for us. Clearly, God’s hand is still on him and he’s a sinner just like us, so who are we to judge?

Or they would say, no, this is not true. He’s saying this because it’s three-dimensional chess, and he’s actually saying this to play his opponents, and he’s actually thinking of several moves ahead. In other words, I think that they would find a way to get around it because they have found a way to get around so much else. I mean, even just at a baseline level, this idea of talking about your opponents, your enemies as vermin, if you’re a follower of Jesus, you believe that life, that humanity is made in the image of God, that it is precious and has inherent immeasurable value, then how can you condone someone speaking this way about migrants, about immigrants from other countries poisoning the blood of our society, calling people vermin? I mean, this is pretty basic stuff, and yet what we see is time and time again, a willingness to justify it.

Preet Bharara:

You taxonomize in some sense the spectrum of Trump supporters, and I’ve often thought about this, and it was interesting to see you put this in writing in this particular way. You write about people who, to one degree or another are either full-throated, supporters and apologists for Trump or others who are more pragmatic in their support for Trump given his policies. And you write quote, “At one end, were the Christians who maintain their dignity while voting for Trump. People who are clear-eyed in understanding that backing a candidate pragmatically and prudentially need not lead to unconditionally promoting, empowering and apologizing for that candidate.” And I get that.

I’m not that voter, I don’t agree with him, but if you’re a person in a particular business and the only thing you care about is your tax rate, and you say, I’m voting for Trump because of what he’s going to do on taxes, and you don’t try to justify all this other stuff that you’re talking about and the incitement to violence and anything else, I guess you can maintain some plausibility or dignity. But then you write at the opposite end where the Christians who had jettisoned their credibility, people who embraced the charge of being reactionary, hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a Playboy turned president. What explains the difference between those two categories of Trump supporters?

Tim Alberta:

I think the simple answer is just probably integrity and intellectual honesty, consistency. I grew up in a household where Bill Clinton’s impeachment and Bill Clinton’s sex scandal with Monica Lewinsky was a formative moment for me because my family wasn’t really political. We didn’t talk about politics at all. Actually, the only time politics really ever came up around the dinner table with me and my brothers, my dad would talk about it as a test of character. That politics really was all about ethics and integrity and character, and it was a proving ground for those things, right? So that was the water that I swam in.

But then to see not just my dad, but so many others come to a place where they felt compelled to vote for Donald Trump in 2016, and then even more so felt compelled to excuse or apologize for and ultimately enable certain behaviors and certain rhetoric when he became president was incredibly disillusioning for me because you want to think that there’s a standard and you want to think that that standard is not situational, that it’s not relative to who’s in office and what letter comes after their name on the ballot. That we apply this standard because it’s born out of principles and not just political principles, but spiritual principles and beliefs that are unshakeable.

And I think that was the disappointing and really discouraging thing for me was even as I could understand the pragmatic prudential decision to vote for someone, and I really respected those who were able to then detach themselves from Trump after voting for him and say, no, I can’t abide this, I can’t excuse this, I can’t go along with this. There were many, many others who I think to varying degrees felt almost guilty about their vote for Trump and self-conscious about their vote for Trump, and therefore felt the need to justify it continually. And that’s a weird psychological space to be in, but that’s what I saw with a lot of people I know.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think that that inconsistency will be seen again once a group of folks chastised and criticized and ridiculed Clinton for something in his personal life of a sexual nature, then defended it when it came to Donald Trump? Will they go back to attacking it again if it happens with respect to a Democrat in the future?

Tim Alberta:

Oh, boy. Maybe, although I think it’s-

Preet Bharara:

You would say, reasonable people would say, okay, now there’s the precedent of Trump and all the things that he said. If Joe Biden tomorrow wore a tan suit, I think they would attack him again like they did Barack Obama.

Tim Alberta:

You would have to be sorely lacking in the self-awareness department to reintroduce any of these moral litmus tests. This idea that character is a prerequisite for political leadership. I mean, yeah, you would be making a fool of yourself to do that in the future, but I don’t necessarily put it past certain folks who, let’s be real, I think I used this phrase somewhere in the book that there is an evangelical industrial complex, and it exists not for the nurturing of spiritual journeys, not for the betterment of society by way of introducing Jesus to an unbelieving world.

It exists to win elections, it exists to win the culture wars. It exists to dominate the world around us and to impose value set on society and to do it by any means necessary. And so if it requires zigging and then zagging and then zigging again on questions of morality or ethics or precedence or whatever, then that’s what’ll happen because it’s a zero-sum game. You’re either on the side of good or on the side of evil. And when you think about the world in those binary terms, then your capacity for justifying the behavior and the rhetoric of someone like Donald Trump becomes bottomless.

Preet Bharara:

You describe in the book how you had a meeting with your father’s successor as pastor, and you asked him a question that you said you had been spending a lot of time thinking about, and the question was, “What’s wrong with American evangelicals?” And the new pastor said, in answer to your question, “America, too many of them worship America.” What did you take him to mean by that? And what’s wrong with loving America?

Tim Alberta:

Yeah, I mean, look, I love America. I’m glad I was born here.

Preet Bharara:

I’m glad I came here.

Tim Alberta:

Yeah, there’s a lot of wonderful things about this country. What he’s getting at is a warning that we see repeated throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament. This is a consistent admonishment throughout scripture that we are tempted to be like the nations. We are tempted to idolize the nations. We are tempted to find our identity in the tribes of this world, in the cultures, the traditions, the idols of this world. And if you think about America as a source of idolatry, then you can obviously get to a place where you’re looking out at your flock, examining the ways in which they are behaving, the ways in which they are engaging with the world around them, and you conclude that much of it is driven by an over realized sense of American identity.

In other words, if you follow Jesus and if you believe in his teachings that you are called to be a citizen in a kingdom that is not of this world, that ultimately it’s a choice that you can choose to pursue your earthly identity and the glory and the fame and the wealth and the prestige wrapped up in that, or that you can humble yourself and that you can strip away everything and pursue the kingdom of God, but that you can’t do both, right? That it really is an either/or proposition. If you believe that, and that is just standard reformed theology that I’m sharing here. If you believe that, then you can’t escape the conclusion that there is an idolatry problem in the American church and that it is an idolatry problem driven by a sense that our American identity and our Christian identity are actually one and the same. That this is a nation that is divinely blessed.

It is a nation that is in covenant with God, that the American story is the story of God providing this nation with so much and that we in turn need to fight for God by fighting for this nation. Because if America falls, then God is defeated. I mean, that is the way that so many American evangelicals think about the intersection of faith and culture, faith and country, God and politics, and the reason it’s so dangerous. I would just add this, Preet, because I think it’s so important that I use this as the epigraph of the book. We are introduced in the gospels to Jesus being tempted in the wilderness by Satan. And Satan takes Jesus up to a high mountain, and in a moment of time, he shows him all the kingdoms of the world. And Satan says to him, “I will give you the power over all of these kingdoms and the glory that comes with it if you’ll just bow a knee to me.” And Jesus rebukes him and says, no, it is written.

“You shall worship the Lord thy God and Him only should you worship.” And in that story, I think it’s important to recognize that traditionally in Christian doctrine, we are taught that our struggle constantly is against the temptation to do exactly what Satan tempted Jesus to do in the wilderness, which was to try to dominate this world, was to try to pursue the power and the glory and the kingdoms of this world. And in fact, Jesus could have been king. They wanted to make him king. Everybody thought that the Messiah was going to slay the Romans and that he was going to build this new establishment here on earth and that he was going to rule with an iron fist.

And in fact, this lowly preacher from the ghettos of Nazareth comes along with a completely different program and says, no, this is not what I’m here to do. I turned down the opportunity to do that in the wilderness because that’s not the kingdom we are called to. So the struggle here for the American evangelical, unlike the Chinese evangelical, unlike the Sudanese Evangelical, because these are people who don’t have our comforts, they don’t have our dominant status in society. They haven’t become accustomed to trafficking in the power and the glory the way that we have. There’s not this crisis in the evangelical church overseas, but it is a crisis here because we are so uniquely prone to giving into that temptation that Jesus rejected 2000 years ago.

Preet Bharara:

I want to end by going back to the story of your father. As I’ve mentioned already, it is endlessly fascinating to me. I’m trying to figure out what to learn from that experience. I take it that your father was happy and happier in the second part of his life. Am I right?

Tim Alberta:

Oh, yes, much happier.

Preet Bharara:

And he had more meaning in his life, and from what I can tell, offered lots of other people meaning in their lives too. So it was for him and for his community that he came back to a good thing. And so I’m trying to understand what lesson can be learned. There are a lot of people, maybe many people who are listening to me and you in this podcast who have a lot of things. They have material things. They’re not fulfilled, they’re not satisfied. They don’t have the meaning that they want. And I’m much more familiar with stories.

And these are stories that can maybe inspire people to take action on their own. When people are not happy and don’t feel they’re on the right path through a process, I guess, of seeking and discovery and trial and error, maybe they can find spirituality or religion or some other calling. The problem for me in understanding how we can learn from your dad’s experiences, it was an instant epiphany. Am I getting that wrong? Is there something that people can take from the example of your father if they’re in the same predicament that he was in?

Tim Alberta:

Well, Preet, it’s interesting. I’m sitting in my home office here and I’m looking at this painting, and it was my dad’s favorite painting, and I stole a copy of it from my home office after he died, and it’s called The Light of the World, and it’s a famous old painting, at least in Christian settings, Christian circles. And it depicts Jesus standing outside of a door on a dark haunting night, and he’s wearing this majestic cape, but it’s over top of these dirty, grubby, disgusting clothes. And he’s wearing a handsome, beautiful crown, but it’s sitting on top of the coronet of thorns pushing down into his skin that he wore on the cross, and he’s knocking on a door, but the door has no handle. The door has to be opened from the inside. And Jesus talks in the New Testament about how he stands at the door and knocks and waits for it to be opened, that he does not intrude on our lives, that he does not barge into our lives that you must seek in order to find.

And I think what I would share is that when you grow up as a pastor’s kid, especially the kid of a pastor of a big church who had an incredible story, who is just immeasurably gifted from the pulpit and a brilliant person, you ride the coattails of that faith for a long time. And I did as a kid. And it really wasn’t until college when I started to think that I knew everything and that maybe I knew better that I began to search and seek for myself and really began to interrogate my beliefs and interrogate Jesus. And what I found was that there is nothing, I’m a storyteller, right? I’m a journalist. I love stories. There is no story that has ever been more intellectually satisfying or academically convincing to me than the story of God becoming so distraught over the broken state of humanity that he needed to become flesh, and that in order to have a sacrifice worthy of atoning for the brokenness of humanity, that it had to be God himself being sacrificed.

And so God in fact took on flesh, became both fully man and fully God, the God man, as he’s referred to by the ancient church fathers, that Jesus and only Jesus being fully God and fully man could serve as in the ancient Eastern cultures they needed the perfect lamb, they needed the spotless lamb in order to sacrifice and use that blood to atone. And it could only be Jesus as the spotless lamb of God taking our sin and our brokenness on himself to the cross in order that we might be redeemed and we might be reconciled in relationship with our creator. Now, not everyone listening will believe that.

In fact, I’m sure some people listening might scoff at that, and that’s okay. But what I have to put on the heart of anyone listening is that if you earnestly and sincerely and humbly seek, and if you allow that door to be opened, I do believe to my core that your life will be changed because of it. I do believe that everything you thought you knew might in fact change and that you’ll recognize that there is in fact a purpose for your life that goes so much deeper than money or fame or success or material possessions. And if a pastor’s kid can preach just a little bit, that would be my sermon to those listening.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I am not going to be able to end on a better note than that. So on that note, Tim Alberta, thank you so much for joining us. Everyone, the book, terrific, important, read The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Tim, thanks so much.

Tim Alberta:

Preet, it was my pleasure. Thank you for having me.