Mr. Renn argues that being a Christian, especially in high-status domains, is now seen as a social negative.

Mr. Renn’s description of the contours of “negative world” range widely, and include the spread of sports gambling, legalized drug use and even tattoos. But the framework might not have electrified evangelical America if not for the perception on the right of a new secular orthodoxy around sex, gender and race. When you ask someone who embraces the term to discuss their own experiences in “negative world,” the answer is almost always connected with this cluster of issues.

He sought out a church in Chicago and settled in, following a trajectory described by the 20th-century sociologist E. Digby Baltzell: The typical American is born a Baptist or Methodist, becomes a Presbyterian once he is educated, and then, after ascending to the heights of economic success, “joins a fashionable Episcopal church in order to satisfy his wife’s social ambitions.”

The failure of evangelical culture to develop elites who are deemed worthy of the Supreme Court or top think tanks is another major area of interest.

Salesman documents the work of a group of door-to-door Bible salesmen in New England and Florida. Deeper down, the film is a dissection of the degenerative and devastating effects of capitalism on small towns and individuals, but more than any political statement the film is about normal people in all their ugliness and truthfulness.

During a visit to Moscow in 2015, Franklin Graham—the son of the late Southern Baptist leader Billy Graham—told Kirill that many Americans wished that someone like Putin could be their president.

According to Sarah Riccardi-Swartz, a scholar of Orthodoxy who teaches at Northeastern University, in Boston, the new converts tend to be right-wing and Russophile, and some speak freely of their admiration for Putin’s “kingly” role. In the U.S., converts are concentrated in the South and Midwest, and some have become ardent online evangelists for the idea that “Dixie,” with its beleaguered patriarchal traditions, is a natural home for Russian Orthodoxy. Some of them adorn their websites with a mash-up of Confederate nostalgia and icons of Russian saints.

There is a reason that the abolitionist Frederick Douglass said that between the Christianity of this land (America) and the Christianity of Christ, he recognized the “widest possible difference.”

Du Mez told me it’s important to recognize that this “rugged warrior Jesus” is not the only Jesus many evangelicals encounter in their faith community. There is also the “Jesus is my friend” popular in many devotionals, for example. These representations might appear to be contradictory, she told me, but in practice they can be mutually reinforcing. Jesus is a friend, protector, savior—but according to one’s own understanding of what needs to be protected and saved, and not necessarily according to core biblical teachings.

The poet Christian Wiman, who returned to his faith after having wandered from it, wrote in My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer that “Christ is always being remade in the image of man, which means that his reality is always being deformed to fit human needs, or what humans perceive to be their needs.”

If you want to understand the Christian extremism that represents the single greatest threat to democracy and human rights in America today, it’s important to understand how authoritarian Christians read the Bible.