#101 Tim Alberta: My Father, My Faith, and Donald Trump

NICK FIRCHAU: Back on July 29th, 2019, Tim Alberta experienced what he calls the worst day of his life. Of course, he didn't know when that particular Monday began that it would turn out to be such a pivotal day. And by all accounts, it started out fine.

Alberta is a long time political journalist, and on that day he was in Washington, D.C., promoting a book he'd written called American Carnage, about the rise of Donald Trump and his hold over the Republican Party. The book was a runaway success, rave reviews, New York Times bestseller, and Alberta was promoting the book in D. C., including an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network.

Prior to the interview, Alberta silenced his phone and tucked it away in his pocket. But after the interview wrapped up, he looked down to find that he'd missed multiple calls from his wife and his oldest brother. His father, Richard, a long time evangelical pastor back in Alberta's hometown of Brighton, Michigan, had suffered a major heart attack and died soon after. He was 71 years old.

RICHARD ALBERTA: God never needs to be told to smarten up. Amen? God knows where his children are. God knows where they've been. God knows where they're going. And he knows what he's doing in their lives. Let's pray together. We are grateful, Father, for these promises from Scripture. We are grateful for Jesus.

NICK FIRCHAU: That’s the voice of Richard Alberta, and that sermon was delivered at the Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian Church not long before his death. Shortly thereafter Tim Alberta, the guest on this episode of Paternal, began a project that would help him better understand his relationship with his late father, his faith, and why so many aspects of contemporary evangelicalism seem unrecognizable in the era of Donald Trump.

Tim Alberta is a proud Evangelical Christian and what he calls a PK, a pastor’s kid, and he still lives in Michigan today with his wife and three young sons. He’s a staff writer for The Atlantic and the former chief political correspondent for Politico, and Esquire has dubbed him “one of the best political reporters we have.”

His latest book, The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, has been a bestseller since it debuted in late 2023, President Barack Obama named it among his favorite books of the year, and it was praised by NPR, the Guardian and the New York Times, among others. Alberta spent more than three years visiting hundreds of Christian churches across the country to better understand the shift that has happened over the past three election cycles among Evangelicals, why so many have placed their country over God, and why they’ve embraced Trump.

And to try to answer one question: Where do all these changes leave him, and his three children?

“Contemporary evangelicalism repulses him,” Washington Post critic Becca Rothfeld wrote of Alberta in her review of the book. “Not because he has betrayed his faith, but because he believes so many of his fellow Christians have.”

So there’s a lot to get to in this episode and Alberta is going to talk quite a bit about the changes he’s seen in the church and what its members see in Donald Trump, and the future of America. But I want to start with a conversation about Alberta’s father Richard, who despite spending a quarter century as a pastor and a man of God, grew up in a home filled not with religious faith, but with adultery, substance abuse, and violence.

Here’s Tim Alberta, on Paternal.

TIM ALBERTA: My grandfather, uh, his name was, uh, Francesco Alberta, Frank Alberta. Uh, he was an immigrant from Sicily. He came here when I believe he was five. He wound up carving out a really, really successful career as a restaurateur. He loved to cook Italian cuisine and he wound up opening this little restaurant in New Jersey where my dad was raised and, uh, this restaurant, Frank Alberto's became sort of a hangout.

It became a hangout for mobsters, became a hangout for ballplayers and local politicians. And my dad and all of his brothers worked there. They, you know, they bust tables and they bartended and everything in between. And even just the stories from the restaurant were pretty eye opening. I mean, it was a place that revolved around alcohol and womanizing and violence, and frankly, a lot of those same things were present in his home.

My dad's parents had an incredibly tumultuous marriage. His father was constantly running around with women. His mother was medicating to the point of being, I want to be respectful to my grandmother with how I say this, but I think, you know, medicating to the point of not always really being there emotionally for her children.

And it actually got to the point where she attempted suicide, uh, on, on two different occasions. One of which my, my dad found her and made her vomit up all of her meds and saved her life, which is a story that I've never told before. And I only share it now just to give sort of a. A window into how, how tough of a childhood he had.

And actually, in fact, he learned many years later that when his mother was pregnant with him, this is my father, that she actually went to an abortionist and was preparing to terminate his pregnancy because of the latest episode with her husband, uh, you know, cheating on her. And at the last moment walked out, which is something that he always would later on in life chalk up to divine intercession. And that was the environment in which he was raised. And to say that it was an unbelieving, non-religious household would be an understatement

As much as he was successful in making a clean break away from that lifestyle when he became a Christian, I think it always was like this shadow that he could see behind him and that he worried that that shadow could eventually catch up to his own children, and he was very worried about that.

NICK FIRCHAU: Now, you heard Alberta discuss when his father broke away from his family’s lifestyle and became a Christian, that moment didn’t come until much later in his life. Richard Alberta was a proud atheist as a young man, instead of scripture he studied finance, pre-law and political science. He and his wife Donna lived in New York City, they both had promising careers, they had money, they socialized with friends in Manhattan.

But Richard was unhappy, he felt empty, anxious, he wasn’t sleeping, and he was unsure of what to do with his life. So he asked his niece, a born again Christian, if he could attend church with her in New York’s Hudson Valley. Here’s Richard Alberta from a 2017 sermon, discussing what happened next.

RICHARD ALBERTA: They were going to serve communion, the Lord's Supper. I was 29 years old, I'd never taken communion. But honestly, it's gonna sound silly, but I thought I'll just take this communion. That'll be my way of saying, ‘I'm doing this! The communion thing! Does that impress you God? I'm not sure why I'm doing it, but I'm doing it. And I went home I was a changed man. I'm not saying there were never any more puddles in the road or hillsides to climb. I'm just saying I went home with a peace upon me I'd never known.

NICK FIRCHAU: Your dad came to his faith later in life, as an adult. I guess the way you could describe it is that he had a religious awakening, and it was so meaningful that he was eventually called to enter the ministry. Can you explain your interpretation of what he experienced?

TIM ALBERTA: I guess what's always struck me is how unlikely it was. When he says that he was an atheist, he was an atheist. He'd read, he had researched, he had reflected and, and really meditated on it at great length and decided like, yeah, if there is a God, then, then, then he certainly doesn't know who I am, doesn't care about who I am, but he was pretty well convinced that there was no God.

So I guess I say that because what comes next seems altogether fantastical in that context. Not just the idea that he would walk into a church in the Hudson Valley and hear the message of Jesus and that day decide to pray right then and there to accept Jesus and to take communion, but then a short time later to feel convicted and to feel a calling to enter the ministry and to leave his whole career behind and to go pursue this penniless vocation that he really knew nothing about at that point, it just doesn't add up.

Unless there's something truly magnificent that occurred when he felt that calling to go into ministry. He went to the church in New York, up in the Hudson Valley, where he had been saved, and he met with the pastor there in his little office, and he prayed. They prayed about this question of, is this real? Is this calling that you're feeling to become a pastor? Is it real?

And my dad, as he would tell the story, says that like, as they were praying with their eyes closed and their heads bowed, and you know, these two guys holding hands in this office praying, he says that it felt like suddenly that like the windows of the room had been thrown open and that there was just wind like swirling around him and that he says that he felt the presence of the holy spirit in the room. And what's so interesting is that again, if you knew my dad, this was someone who was a very serious, sober intellectual type.

So for him to say that it can be one of two things. It can either be complete and utter nonsense, and he's using it as a sort of, um, a justification to explain why someone who's making six figures, uh, as a banker in New York would suddenly sell everything and go live on food stamps for the next, you know, fifteen years. Or, his story is real.

And if it's true, then obviously it is nothing short of miraculous and life changing and something that would cause anyone who'd ever come into contact with him to sort of stop and listen and to reevaluate their own belief system.

NICK FIRCHAU: Eventually your dad moved his family to Brighton, Michigan, a place that I think you characterize as upper middle class and conservative, mostly white, he was the senior pastor at Cornerstone Church, an Evangelical Presbyterian Church. I heard you say in a different interview that you recently found a picture you drew when you were seven years old and it’s a picture of your dad preaching in the church - what do you remember of watching him lead that congregation, what struck you about how he connected with his community, and I assume you had great reverence for him in that role?

TIM ALBERTA: Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, because, you know, for as long as I can remember, you know, Sunday mornings, I'm watching him get up in front of a crowd of people. And, you know, for better or for worse, when I say that, I mean, you know, I think a lot of PKs, pastor kids, I think a lot of them can relate to certain feelings of embarrassment at best or resentment at worst, feeling like, ‘Hey, like I didn't ask for this. I didn't ask to be put on this pedestal as the pastor's family.’

You live this sort of fishbowl existence where everybody is kind of watching you all the time. And so you constantly feel sort of scrutinized and put under the microscope in weird and in unwelcome ways. But the best of it, though, I have to say, I can remember being as young as seven, eight years old when I didn't even know a lot of the substance of what he was saying from the pulpit and what it, what it actually meant. And I can remember sitting there and thinking like, ‘holy cow. He is really good at this.’

I do remember having this appreciation for what he was doing and how much he put into it. He felt this great responsibility to the church, which sometimes frankly, would come into some conflict with his responsibilities to us at home. And, you know, and that was something that I know he struggled with trying to straddle and trying to reconcile at times. But to this day I can scarcely think of five preachers who I've listened to who I think are more effective from the pulpit than my dad was. I mean, he was just, he was excellent as an orator. And that was something that sunk in from a very early age.

RICHARD ALBERTA: Years ago when we were, our kids were littler, Brian was 14 and Tim was 10, and Donna and I needed to go somewhere overnight. About 11 o'clock, the phone rings. ‘Uh, Dad, this is Brian.’ I said, ‘Hi, Brian. Everything's okay?’ He said, ‘Well, I have a question.’ I said, ‘What is that?’ ‘How do you fix a hole in the wall? Is it a big hole? I said, ‘What's the shape of the hole?’ He said, ‘it's shaped like Tim.’

NICK FIRCHAU: Your dad ended up running that church for 26 years but in July 2019 he passed away suddenly, he died of a heart attack while you were in DC on a tour for your first book, American Carnage, which examined the rise of Trump. And what happened after his death sort of kickstarted this much longer, deeper examination into the changes in the church. Can you describe what happened at his funeral, and how you were received back at that church in Michigan, because it was not necessarily the reception you expected at your father’s funeral?

TIM ALBERTA: No, it wasn't.​​​ The short story, the short version of the long story is that because my book had just come out and I was in the news, kind of in the crosshairs of right-wing media for some of my unflattering depictions of Donald Trump, you know, my dad dies and I come back to the church for the funeral in the middle of all of that. And at the viewing, at the visitation the day before the funeral, I'm getting people who are approaching me and then, and kind of confronting me wanting to have it out about Trump, wanting to litigate what it is I've written in the book or what they'd read in the news about my book.

And listen, this was a minority of folks there. The great majority of people who I saw that day were loving and, and kind and gracious and everything you would expect. But it wasn't a small number of people either, who decided that they wanted to use that occasion to air their grievances with me. And it's interesting because there's always kind of this joke in church circles that like, When things get contentious inside of a congregation, there's this idea that, well, you know, if people tithe, if people give to the church financially, then they feel like they are investors. And so therefore, like, they become a little bit more possessive and a little bit more opinionated about the direction of the church.

And I do think that there was some element of that in play. In other words, these people had seen me grow up in the church. They'd known me for, you know, over a quarter of a century. And I think that they felt like, how dare you diminish Donald Trump and, and diminish our votes for him in this way! Which, you know, is, is not an excuse, obviously. It's just one way that I've maybe tried to make sense of that happening.

But obviously, needless to say, it was a very painful experience and a very eye-opening experience, because In that moment, I'm thinking to myself, like, ‘boy, if they can treat me this way at my own dad's funeral, how are they treating the rest of the world?’ And what does it do to the credibility of the church and its ability to reach the outside world if we are this wrapped around the axle on partisan politics and sort of this tribal identity?

It seemed to me that something had to be done about it, and I don't want to make it sound dramatic, like that day I walked out of the church deciding I was going to write this book. But it certainly was the moment that maybe a seed was planted in my mind.

NICK FIRCHAU: We'll have more from journalist and author Tim Alberta in a moment, and we'll discuss why so many members of the evangelical church have embraced Donald Trump in recent years. But if this is the first time you've listened to Paternal, I want to let you know that you can go back and listen to all of our episodes dating back to 2017 in our archives at paternalpodcast.com. That's where you can hear conversations with men like. Author and Atlantic staff writer, Clint Smith, CNN lead anchor, Jake Tapper, author and activist, Bill McKibben and comedian and filmmaker W Kamau Bell.

W. KAMAU BELL: If I want to go straight dad comic, I could do that. I just don't want to do that. I just think there's more, there's more to talk about than just being a dad. Now, it would help me get a sitcom if I just went straight dad comic. So there's nothing wrong with it. And I think I could write good dad jokes, but for me, there's just more things to talk about.

NICK FIRCHAU: Check out the show's archives wherever you're listening right now to hear that episode and many more. Or you can find it on paternalpodcast.com which is also where you can sign up for our newsletter, which offers a sneak peek into future episodes of the show.

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I'm Nick Firchau, and this is Paternal. Not long after the death of his father in 2019, Tim Alberta began work on what would become his latest book, The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory, American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. Over the course of more than three years, Alberta spoke with hundreds of pastors and churchgoers in the United States, trying to better understand some of the most dramatic changes among Evangelicals, and why the church suddenly looked so different from the one he knew as a boy, with his father at the pulpit.

Alberta spoke with some of the most influential figures on the Christian right - including the Dallas megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress as well as Ralph Reed, the executive director of the Christian Coalition. He attended a political rally for failed US Senate candidate Herschel Walker in Georgia, as well as a rally called “Freedom Night in America,” a megachurch event in Phoenix orchestrated by right-wing activist and radio talk show host Charlie Kirk.

CHARLIE KIRK: Here the question I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you. This is the easiest question. Who's gonna win the future? Is it the side that gets offended when you use the wrong gender? Or is it the side that's willing to get fired after 30 years at a job because they don't want to take a vaccine? Which side is going to win?

NICK FIRCHAU: But he also spoke with pastors in much smaller towns who have seen the numbers in their congregations drop or even plummet in recent years as many Evangelicals have begun to expect their pastors to inject more politics into their Sunday mornings - be it about abortion, COVID vaccines, George Floyd or Donald Trump. For years Tim Alberta’s father Richard largely left political issues out of his sermons. During election season he would tell his congregation that “god doesn’t bite his fingernails” because no political party, no candidate, no election should change the faith of Christians or change what they’ve been called to be in this world.

But that’s certainly not true for a number of pastors who now actively discuss politics on Sunday morning and use the church as a place to advocate and lobby for political causes and candidates. And one of the reasons faith and politics have become so openly entwined in recent years, as Alberta writes in latest book, is because of the connection between what a large number of Evangelicals actually believe America should be, and the fear that America is changing into something they can’t recognize.

Let’s talk about that first part, about what America is supposed to be. The man who replaced Richard Alberta at the Cornerstone Evangelical Presbyterian Church is a younger man named Chris Winan, who among other topics, discussed the topic of idolatry, the worship of a cult image or "idol" as though it were a deity.

According to Winan, a large number of Evangelicals believe that God is in covenant with America, meaning that there was a biblical conception of America, and that given the country’s abundant success since it was founded in 1776, the United States must be divinely blessed, and therefore, must be protected at all costs.

“America has become an idol to some of these people,” Winan told Alberta. “You have to fight for America as if salvation itself hangs in the balance. At that point you understand yourself as an American first, and most fundamentally. And that is a terrible misunderstanding of what we’re called to be.”

TIM ALBERTA: I can still remember having that conversation with him. I'm sure you've had similar experiences where you're talking with someone and you've got all of this sort of pent up frustration slash exasperation slash anxiety about something and then somebody delivers like in 30 seconds or less like a perfect explanation and suddenly you're just the light bulb goes off and you're like, yes, that's what it is.

I think a lot of this is a generational thing. You know, Chris is a little bit older than me but we're we're able, he and I, uh, younger guys, we have the distance from this now to sort of see what the Moral Majority era got wrong. And I think at the center of what they got wrong was this wild love affair with the American identity this post-World War II, “Leave it to Beaver” idealized America that was God's cure for a broken, secular world. And I think a lot of people fell into that trap, and I think that it has cascaded now in the decades since. We're preaching the gospel and the redemptive message of Christ, and it's not that it was like displaced by the intense love of country and this, this, this national identity, but that Christian identity sort of began to merge with that national identity. And you felt like you weren't just a Christian, you were an American Christian.

And there was a difference when in fact, we are told explicitly in scripture that there is no difference that, that we are all one day going to gather under the banner and there will be none of these Earthly distinctions that we make in terms of these, these fleeting identities we have here, they will all fall away. And again, that's not ambiguous as a matter of doctrine. So I think what Chris is diagnosing there, what I understood in that moment, which is that yes, I think at the core of our problem in many ways is this kind of creeping idolatry and this obsession with, with national identity that has begun to take the church off of the path that it's meant to be on.

NICK FIRCHAU: One of the other themes of the book is fear, and that stems from the idea that the country is changing, socially, demographically, and the percentage of people in America who identify as Christian is going down - it was 78 percent in 2007, it was 63 percent in 2021, if the trend continues Christians will be a minority in America within 10 years. One man you speak with is John Dickson, he’s a professor at Wheaton College in the suburbs of Chicago, and he says that what drives Evangelicals in America is “fear that we’re losing our country, fear that we’re losing our power.”

So tell me about fear, why are these Evangelicals you spoke to so afraid?

TIM ALBERTA: Yeah, you know, it really is the unifying theme of all the reporting I did, and the conversations I had. And fear is a natural human response. I am not at all unsympathetic to where the fear comes from. I mean, if you are a conservative Christian who holds to sort of traditional, social, and cultural teachings and traditions, you look around and there's no question that this country has changed dramatically even just in the last 10 to 15 years. I mean, that's not a mystery, right?

We can see that the world around us is in some ways unrecognizable to the person born in the 1950s or 1960s, and yet I think even though fear is a natural human response to those dramatic changes in our environment, for the Christian, for fear to become our defining outward facing characteristic, it is just profoundly damaging to us.

And the most oft-cited command in all of Scripture is ‘fear not.’ I mean, we are told time and time and time again, as Christians, you should not be afraid. I think also it's recognizing that fear is the antithesis of faith. You cannot be both faithful and afraid. They are irreconcilable. And in fact, I think part of the reason that fear is so powerful and the reason that you come back to it time and time again, when you're in these circumstances, when you're with these folks and moving in these circles, is that fear becomes sort of contagious, but, and also it becomes addictive, right?

I mean, there's a reason that people want to come back time and time again to that same cable news show. It's not making them happy. They're hooked on something there, but it's not optimism. It's not excitement. It's not enthusiasm. It is fear and anger and antagonism. And there are social scientists and psychologists and people a lot smarter and more qualified than me who have spoken on this and written on this. But when you study some of the sort of endorphin loops and some of the incentive structures that are built around our information and media consumption habits, a lot of it does come back to this idea that we like to be scared. We like to be riled up. We like to be provoked and aggravated. And I, my sense is that that same dynamic is true, not just in the media world, but in the spiritual world, and in churches, because I've seen it play out firsthand. I think pastors and religious leaders have found this niche where they are able to prey on the fear of the people in those pews, and build massive followings because of it. It's just incredibly effective.

NICK FIRCHAU: That leads us to Trump, and I think the question a lot of people perhaps unfamiliar with Evangelicals would ask is how could these people embrace Trump as their leader? And not all have, but in the 2016 election, 81 percent of white born-again/evangelical Christians voted for Trump over Hillary Clinton, 85% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2020. He did extremely well with white evangelicals in the Iowa caucus earlier this month - I know it’s a broad question, but how do the ideas of America and fear lead Evangelicals to idolize Trump, despite the fact that he’s not really one of them?

TIM ALBERTA: Well, I think that piece of it at the end is maybe the most important piece. He's not one of them and that gives him this strange superpower where he is able to do things and say things that they themselves would probably not be comfortable doing and saying. And let's be clear, I mean all the polling, all the data eight years ago and all of my reporting on this at the time, which was a part of my first book that I wrote, it shows very clearly that Trump was disliked and distrusted by the vast majority of these folks.

And even when they were eventually able to get to a point where they could vote for him in 2016, it was a transactional relationship. He was the lesser of two evils, you know. They were gonna hold their noses and vote for him and hope that he would deliver on policies. And now, you move forward eight years and there's this cult-like attachment to him, you know, in certain quarters of the evangelical world.

And I think that you nail it with your question. It sort of binds together these two ideas of America as the idealized nation, and America as something that must be protected and preserved, at least the sort of idealized version of America, and then this fear: ‘Well, if we lose one more election, it's gone. Forever.’

This, this fear that the barbarians are outside of the gates, and, uh, it's just a matter of time until they break in and bury us for good. This fear that Christians are going to be persecuted in this country. This fear of an impending American armageddon is what has now mobilized the masses to support someone who they know, in most cases, does not believe any of the things they believe spiritually, and who does not embody any of the characteristics that they aspire to as Christians.

And yet, having become convinced that the barbarians are at the gates, they have kind of made peace with the idea that they need a barbarian to protect them. And once you get to that place, They hear him describing human beings made in the image of God as vermin and they shrug their shoulders and they say ‘well, you know, I wouldn't talk that way But this country's in trouble and we need somebody who's tough enough to to go put out the fires.’

And it creates this permission structure, Nick, where you are suddenly willing to turn a blind eye to or tacitly endorse, enable, justify that which you would never in any other circumstance justify. And that's, that's where most of these folks are now.

PASTOR: Lord, I thank you that America didn't need a preacher in the Oval Office. It did not need a professional politician in the Oval Office. But it needed a fighter and a champion for freedom and Lord, that's exactly what we have. I thank you, Lord, that he doesn't claim to be perfect, but he is passionate.

Show him who you are. Show him your love. Show him the love of the people. And Lord, do something so great in him and in this nation. That the pundits on TV and the news anchors will be amazed at how great America is because God is great in America again. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

NICK FIRCHAU: One of the most compelling chapters of the book covers Jerry Falwell and the rise of Liberty University, and I don’t think we can get into that the depth I would like to for this conversation but for sake of this show I wanted to mention a conversation you had with a man who is part of a younger generation of Evangelicals, a man named Nick Olson, who is a professor at Liberty University, one of the most influential christian universities in the country. And he is the son of a man who went to Liberty in the early days and experienced the rise of the school and the Moral Majority of the 80s. And he’s struggling with where the evangelical church is now, but he’s also struggling with an idea that comes up a lot on this show, which is what we inherit from our parents, what we inherit from our fathers, and what we want to keep.

And I’ll quote him here, “When Jesus said that a man should leave his father and mother, it wasn’t just about getting married and starting a new family. It was an instruction, I think, to challenge the things you’re taught in your upbringing, with the things you’re taught in your upbringing. That’s the hardest part of this. These things we inherit, when it comes to faith and family, we don’t want to question them.”

What was your reaction when he said that, what’s your take on that idea, that it’s hard to question the faith of our fathers?

TIM ALBERTA: I think what Nick is identifying there is, is, whether you are a religious person or not, I think it's something that we all struggle with. To your point, even if your dad was your role model, and your hero, which in my case he was, and yet you're still seeing things and hearing things every day where you're like, ‘Huh, I don't know about that. Maybe, maybe that's not right, or will I be that way when I grow up or will I say or do those things in front of my kids?’

Now I do think, to Nick's point, it's particularly hard in the faith realm. So I think that it's a challenge for all fathers and sons. But I think that if you have inherited a faith tradition from your father, then it really becomes fraught. Because it's not the faith itself that you are questioning, it's all of the kind of extracurriculars and all of the attachments, all of the extras that are sort of hanging on to the faith. That you begin asking, you know, well, ‘hold on a second. Is that really part of the Christian walk? Or is that sort of a cultural thing that's like a barnacle that's attached itself to the Christian walk?’

Those of us who are, as I call them in the book, the children of the moral majority, who have inherited this thing that really doesn't quite fit. We want the beauty and the purity of Christ without the sort of ugliness and the compromises of all of the worldly stuff that has attached to Christianity, to American Christianity. That process of, whether you want to call it deconstructing, whether you want to call it purifying, self interrogating, whatever it may be, I think that that process is really, really healthy. But it's also really, really, really hard.

NICK FIRCHAU: So where do you stand on this as a father, you have three sons, they are going to inherit what you give him, they will learn what you and your wife teach them - what are your thoughts on faith when it comes to your kids, and how important is it to you to connect the dots back to your father and the kind of faith he practiced, and perhaps not the kind of faith we’re seeing among some Evangelicals today?

TIM ALBERTA: It's a great question

NICK FIRCHAU: I know it's a broad question.

TIM ALBERTA: No, it's, it's, it's tricky, right? Because when you say my dad's brand of faith or even my brand of faith, I want them to have a faith that is uncorrupted by the world around them. That's a really big ask.

Look, we live in a world as I document in the book, and as I said a minute ago, I totally, uh, sympathize with a lot of Christians who fear that, you know, we are entering a post-Christian society. The secular world around us is modeling behavior that is, uh, sort of antithetical to the ethics and the teachings and the traditions of Christianity. And that is all the more reason why those of us who are Christians must insist on a higher standard. Right?

This idea that, well, the culture's gone mad, look what they're doing, so therefore we have to fight fire with fire, that is the exact wrong answer. And so what I've tried to model for my boys is, uh, some of what my dad taught me about being faithful, about not allowing fear to distract and, uh, and diminish our Christian walk, but I think I'm also probably doing things a little bit differently in trying to help them understand.

And look, you are never going to find the answers to the big questions in some candidate or in some election. Jesus was political, but he wasn't partisan. And if you hold, like, up and down the line to some partisan political platform, then you're probably not being faithful to Jesus, because it's impossible to be politically consistent and spiritually consistent, right? You can be spiritually and theologically consistent, but by doing so, you're going to be all over the map politically.

I think one of the really important lessons that I want to leave with my boys, who are still young, but they're gonna, you know, they won't be young for long and I hope that I'm around for a long time where we can have these conversations as they're growing into young men. Even as they are engaging as citizens of this country and trying to help their community, trying to help their neighbors, trying to be, you know, good citizens that ultimately their citizenship is elsewhere. That ultimately they do belong to a kingdom that is not of this world, and that if they believe that in their heart of hearts, then that is going to free them.

It is going to free them to pursue a radical love and compassion and mercy toward the people in this world around them who they might otherwise perceive to be their opponents or their adversaries or, God forbid, their enemies They will be freed to love those people with such a reckless and inexplicable Biblical love, that they will shine in a world that is dark. And I hope that they are able to do that without getting caught up around who's winning the next election or ‘are they coming for us’ or ‘are we under siege in this country?’

Because at the end of the day, this life is meant to prepare us for the next life and I can never be the model that they need. I can try to do my best the same way that my dad did his best, but they're going to look back at me one day and they're going to see where I fell short. They're going to see that I wasn't perfect. They're going to see that I got my priorities out of whack. And ultimately, they're going to have the same blueprint that I had. Not Dad, but Jesus. And if they can follow Jesus, and if they can try to be faithful to Him, then they're going to do okay, the same way that I hope I've been able to do okay.

NICK FIRCHAU: You know, I have to say, Tim, for all the things that we've discussed today, that's the most animated that you've gotten in this conversation when you talk about your kids.

TIM ALBERTA: Yeah.

NICK FIRCHAU: Just something I noticed.

TIM ALBERTA: You know, well, it's funny. I think maybe the reason I get animated is because I've spent so much time in recent years asking myself, ‘how do these people justify doing what they're doing, knowing that their kids are watching them?’

It is the million dollar question to me. Like, how is it that, forget about the history books, forget about legacy, capital L. No, no, no, just your own kids and your own grandkids. Like, they're going to be looking back on you and scrutinizing what you did in these moments. And some of these people just don't seem to care.

And that, to me, is stunning, because outside of God's view of me, the view of me that I worry about and care about the most is how my boys view me. Can I claim to have really lived a life of integrity that they can look up to? And it's just breathtaking to me how many people seem to not care about that question.

NICK FIRCHAU: That’s journalist, author, husband and father, Tim Alberta. If you’d like to learn more about his work for the Atlantic or his first book American Carnage, we’ll put a link in the notes for this episode. His latest book, The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory, is available now, wherever you buy books.

Paternal is written, edited and produced by me, Nick Firchau. You can email me with your thoughts about the show at nick@paternalpodcast.com or I’m on Twitter at nickfirchau.

Paternal guest illustrations are created by Sarat Moharana, web design by Laine Carlsness, and the Paternal logo is designed by Trevor Port.