156: Tim Alberta on Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism

The Al Franken Podcast

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4.6 • 7.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2024

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The author of the profoundly disturbing book "The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory" explains how evangelicals have been turned into a political tool for the Republican Party. Alberta grew up in the evangelical wing of the Presbyterian Church and watched as they turned their back on him after he criticized Donald Trump. How did the evangelical church turn so far towards right wing politics? What exactly is an evangelical? How can those voters ever be won back?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, we got a great one today, and this time, this time I finally mean it.
0:11.8	We've got Tim Alberta, staff writer for the Atlantic Monthly, and we talk about his new New York Times bestseller, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, American evangelicalism
0:23.2	in an age of extremism. A great book, but an even better podcast. Now, I did not know much
0:30.7	about evangelicals before I got this book, and it knocked my socks off, but the podcast, Tim is an evangelical himself.
0:40.4	His dad was a Presbyterian minister and an evangelical church in the suburbs of Detroit.
0:47.0	And to be frank, I did not know what an evangelical was.
0:51.5	I thought it was something about having a personal relationship with Jesus,
0:55.4	which it is, but I wanted to bring Peter in here. Peter, my executive producer, an engineer.
1:03.8	Basically, it's just Peter and me who would do this podcast, right, Peter? That's it.
1:08.4	So, first of all, how great is Tim Alberta? So good. I've been really looking
1:13.1	forward to this interview for a long time, and he really delivered. Okay, now you grew up in
1:19.3	South Carolina, and your family went to an evangelical church. Southern Baptist. Southern
1:26.8	Baptist. And Southern Baptists were created in like
1:31.5	1840s or 1850s, I think. Don't Google or look up why the Southern Baptist Church was founded.
1:41.5	Okay. And if you Google that, you'll find out that they were just kind of in support of slavery, right?
1:49.3	Yeah, yeah.
1:51.1	Yeah.
1:52.1	Well, you know, you have nothing to be embarrassed about.
1:56.7	You left the church, didn't you?
2:00.1	I did.
2:00.9	Yeah, I left the church when I was about 14 years old.
2:05.7	Okay.
	...

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