There is a part of me that wanted very badly to empathize with the thesis of Tim Alberta’s new book. Alberta, a staff writer for the Atlantic, makes the case that Evangelical Christianity has been poisoned by its embrace of Donald J. Trump and by its pursuit of earthly power through partisan politics.

Like many practicing Evangelicals, I have been distraught by the apparent tendency of many who identify as part of that camp to offer unqualified support for what is often indefensible in the age of Trump. What began as a “lesser of two evils” and “save the Supreme Court” argument has clearly evolved, for many, into a defense of Trump as a nearly messianic figure. And while reasonable people can disagree about where to draw the lines when considering the candidate vs. his policies and weighing what significance presidential races have in the context of a broader cultural war, I, for one, share Alberta’s concern that Evangelicals have, in many cases, been willing to associate with and explicitly endorse unacceptable behavior. Had that been the key takeaway of the book it would not have offered much that hasn’t been said already in redundant editorials, and it also would have been much less objectionable to me. Unfortunately, Alberta went far further than merely scolding his fellow Christians about the current blurriness between MAGA and Evangelicalism.

It is worth starting with a caveat: The anecdote that has made the rounds in press accounts of this book and that serves as a sort of pretext for Alberta’s emotional case against “Christian MAGA-ism” is a brutal story. A few years ago, Alberta attended his father’s funeral only to be verbally assaulted by church members protesting his brand of political journalism. The story is gut-wrenching to read. If Alberta were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris rolled into one, he’d still deserve a politics-free day at his father’s funeral. This is something decent people know and honor, and, as one who has at times experienced the lack of social and moral decency that people too often display in such contexts, I could relate to his disappointment. Of course, his account is anecdotal, and I am sure someone with his maturity and experience knows that, but it still induced a sense of genuine empathy.

Beyond the personal experiences that form the broader disappointment behind his thesis, Alberta goes to great lengths to show examples of indefensible MAGA sycophantism within the Christian Church. Though I might insist that much of this is nut-picking, the fact remains that, first of all, the phenomenon is more prevalent than I want it to be, and, second, his point is not that everyone within the church is implicated but only that a high percentage of its members are. I have found it unhelpful to debate about exact percentages that are intrinsically unknowable. Do I believe that over 80 percent of Evangelicals, for example, defend extramarital affairs and payoffs to porn stars? I do not. Do I think that the number of Evangelical leaders who have publicly abandoned the ancient belief (c. 1998) in the importance of character in our public officials is unacceptably high? Indeed. So we can agree that such a problem as Alberta describes exists, even if we disagree about how systemic it is.

I doubt we will solve anytime soon the issue that I believe most needs to be addressed: how to engage in dialogue about the bad political choices on offer without abandoning our views and principles. (For what it is worth, for every Bill Bennett who has decided virtue doesn’t matter after all, or every Marco Rubio who has abandoned free trade, there is a Never Trumper who has jettisoned support for the Second Amendment or the pro-life cause; the age of Trump has corrupted people in multiple directions.) Parsing our political decisions when there are no good options is hard when the well is poisoned by extremism, dishonesty, double standards, and cheap moral relativism. That many representing Evangelicalism appear to be rank nominalists doesn’t help, either.

But the fundamental error of Alberta’s book goes beyond the likely hasty generalizations that define it. Underneath his assessment of a current problem (the MAGA–Evangelical pairing) is an Anabaptist theological worldview holding that Christians ought to be disconnected from the civil realm. It turns out that his issue is not merely with the methods and excesses of the MAGA moment but rather with the very idea of Christians seeking a seat at the table in this current age. Christians, we are told, are to be on the outside looking in, accepting what comes, not overdoing our attempt at influence, and wearing such passivity as a badge of honor. As one of Alberta’s interviewees sums it up:

There’s this false assumption of action we’re called to take. The task of the Church is simply to be the Church. All of this high-blown rhetoric about changing the world — we don’t need to change the world. We’re not called to change the world. We’re called to be the world already changed by Christ. That’s how we’re salt; that’s how we’re light.

If active political engagement means lying about elections, name-calling, and other forms of outrageous populist antics, I am on Alberta’s side. But, of course, it does not. Diligent engagement can, and must, honor Christ, obey the law of God, and, at the same time, pray Christ’s own words after Him: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Alberta’s attempts to downplay the increasing cultural persecution of practicing Christians in our society are just as egregious as many Christians’ attempts to exaggerate them. Fearmongering is an unacceptable tactic, and so is denial. But at its root, the disagreement of our day is about both how Christians are to engage the world in which we live and apparently if we are to engage.

I know the answers to both as revealed in the Bible. And I also know this: The more that Christians are told not to engage, the more they’ll engage in ways unlikely to please those who urge them to sit on the sidelines.