As it did with Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, the Media Research Center went on the attack over another book written by someone with ties to the conservative movement that had less-than-flattering things to say about the the state of the movement today. This time, the target is Politico’s Tim Alberta, who once wrote for conservative websites but has a new book out critiquing the evangelical Christian influence on right-wing politics. Alex Christy complained in a Dec. 6 post:
The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta took his book tour to the Tuesday edition of CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip where he warned that Evangelical Christians who support Donald Trump are not that different than Vladimir Putin.
Phillip began by reading a quote from Cal Thomas, “You kind of touched on this in your book. You talk about Cal Thomas, who plays a pretty important role in the rise of modern evangelicalism. And he said this to you about evangelical Christians. He says, ‘you can’t have a legitimate conversation with these people who are all in on Trump, because if you find any flaw in him, even flaws that are demonstrable, they either excuse it or attack you.’”
It should be noted Thomas does not have a problem with Evangelicals supporting Trump, he has a problem with people thinking Christianity and supporting Trump are the same thing. Alberta goes beyond that. For instance, Alberta condemns Evangelicals for not embracing gun control and allegedly not caring about poor people while voting for Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin which is, ironically, doing the same thing he accuses conservative Evangelicals of doing: confusing his own policy preferences for Christianity.
Christy offered no evidence that Alberta was “substituting his “confusing his own policy preferences for Christianity.” He continued to complain:
When it came time to provide an example of what this might look like, Alberta reached for the Putin card, “And these are folks who, if you look at January 6th, some of the religious imagery around the siege of the Capitol, if you look at the language he deploys when he’s in front of explicitly evangelical audiences talking about giving back power to Christianity, wanting to sort of take on Christianity’s enemies in the culture, I mean, this is loaded language. And you don’t have to look far to see just overseas in Ukraine, Russia’s invasion was loaded with this sort of religious, identitarian rhetoric, and Trump, in some ways, is borrowing from that same playbook. So, it’s very worrisome.”
Only Tim Alberta could think voting for the candidate who will enact conservative policies about abortion or transgenderism is analogous to invading another country.
Given that the only substantial response Christy’s employer gave to Tucker Carlson’s interview with Putin was a podcast by Tim Graham prebutting criticism of it as coming from “elites,” there’s indisputably a right-wing affinity toward Putin-style authoritarianism.
A Dec. 13 column by Graham invoked Alberta’s conservative past to lash out at him for criticizing conservatives now:
In a previous epoch, Tim Alberta was a reporter for National Review, one of too many NR cubs who later joined the liberal-media zoo. Alberta is now at The Atlantic,one of America’s most intense producers of frothing leftist drivel.
It seems like every leftist network has welcomed Alberta to trash conservative Christians through his latest book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. It’s touted as Alberta’s “deeply personal examination of the divisions that threaten to destroy the American evangelical movement. Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing—and least understood—people living in America today.”
Wait. No one in these interviews asks about the polarizing cultural extreme on the libertine left. That extreme is the leftist media’s address, at the corner of GLAAD Street and Planned Parenthood Avenue.
When Alberta told a story during interviews about being harassed at his father’s funeral by a church elder for not being right-wing enough, Graham whined about the anecdote:
Funerals shouldn’t be a setting for political combat, which is why they love this funhouse portrait of conservative Christians. But Alberta wrote this book to argue that Trump-supporting Christians are apostates and enemies of democracy. PBS and NPR and the rest “dehumanize” conservatives routinely.
Alberta was bitterly angry at his pastor father for voting for Trump in 2016. So what kind of Christian is a Hillary Clinton backer? Why is his pro-abortion “division” of evangelicalism not “threatening to destroy” it?
Graham then tried to justify right-wing homophobia as a reasonable response to the mere existence of people who aren’t heterosexual:
Alberta and his media helpers can’t seem to find the cultural context of our times. The arrival of “same-sex marriage,” naturally followed by twerking drag-queen performances for children, and graphically sexual books in school libraries, and “gender-affirming care” for minors aren’t reasons for Christians to feel something is slipping away?
Is nothing “extremist” about that? Do Alberta’s model Christians offer any remedy or resistance to these trends? No one asked.
Graham rehashed some of this in his podcast the same day. He whined about another Alberta media appearance in his Dec. 27 podcast:
Tim Alberta appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press. It was the latest of many softball book-tour interviews recounting this story of the evangelical Trumpers who ruined his father’s funeral by suggesting he was a bad Christian by opposing Trump. Meanwhile, Alberta has claimed that when Trump appeals to conservative Christians, he sounds a lot like Vladimir Putin justifying the invasion of Ukraine. He’s like a younger Chris Matthews, where Republicans can be easily compared to dictators and terrorists, and no one fears the “fact checkers.”
It was Clay Waters’ turn to complain about Alberta’s funeral anecdote in a Jan. 10 post:
Journalist Tim Alberta is author of The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism, a book touted as the author’s “deeply personal examination of the divisions that threaten to destroy the American evangelical movement.” He’s been making the rounds of friendly liberal media outlets lamenting fear-based evangelical Christian loyalty to Donald Trump, and his Friday stop at PBS’s Firing Line With Margaret Hoover may have been his most over the top excoriation of all.
Hoover: ….Your father was a minister of an evangelical church, which you grew up worshiping in. In 2019 at your father’s wake, members from his congregation, family friends, people who had held you as a baby, came up to you and chastised you for your negative reporting about Donald Trump. This brought you face to face with exactly how poisoned the evangelical church had become in the age of Donald Trump. Tell us what happened.
Alberta once again relayed his admittedly infuriating story of being accosted at his father’s funeral by people who wanted to argue with him about how he covered Donald Trump.
Waters further grumbled that “Alberta seems rather fearful himself of a second Trump presidency, and displayed his fear in histrionic fashion, though he surprisingly (and, presumably, grudgingly) acknowledged Alberta showed a sense of balance: “Alberta did make a “plague on both their houses”-type gesture on X Tuesday, criticizing the partisan cheering for Biden during his visit to the Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina.”