Most Right-wing Christians Can't Give up Trump

The flaws are a feature

Adultery is not the charge, but it is the crux of the matter in The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump. The former president is formally charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in order to cover-up his betrayal of his wife Melania by having a one-night stand with adult film performer/director Stormy Daniels. The hush-money payment to Daniels was made to save his 2016 presidential campaign from scandal.

Daniels offered the sordid details in two days of testimony at Trump’s trial and did so with such honesty and candor that no one should have any doubt about what Trump did while Melania was home with their four-month-old baby, Barron. It is the kind of behavior that you might expect would cost him some support, especially among evangelicals. But there’s no evidence that it has. There have been no broadsides issued by prominent pastors. No criticisms from politicians, who wear their faith on their sleeves. It’s almost as if “Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery” has been erased from the Ten Commandments.

For people outside the Trump bubble, and conservative Christianity, the spectacle of supposedly Godly people condoning Trump’s sins and immorality, is hard to comprehend. However, this dynamic has been going on for years. Remember his “grab-‘em-by-the-p” talk on the Access Hollywood tape? How about E. Jean Carroll’s successful civil suit in which she charged that Trump raped her? Add the dozens of women who say he crossed the line with them, too, and you’d think conservative Christian support would have collapsed by now. Instead, as Pew Research reported in March, two-thirds of white evangelicals say they view him favorably.

Ironically, right wing Christians find excuses for Trump in the Bible’s Old Testament, and the examples of the sometimes-sinful King David and Persia’s Cyrus the Great, another sinner, who freed the captive Jews of Babylon. Both men are what evangelicals call “broken vessels” who were nevertheless called by God to perform great works. Trump is, for these folks, a modern day. broken vessel who deserves their undying support so he may serve God’s plan to make America a conservative Christian nation. Of course, the David story was about repentance, something Trump said he has never needed to implement. Oh well, minor details.

Most recently, as writer Matt Lewis has noted, Trump’s Christian heartland backers also seem to see Trump as an example of forgivable super masculinity, which makes him the virile leader the country requires. In his article, he quotes an expert on religion who says that for conservative Christians, “Trump is power personified. He is a warrior. And with that comes all of the temptations of being a warrior.”       

I would take it a step further. I would say that Trump also represents a pre-feminist world in which so-called traditional gender roles were more widely and rigidly observed. Men were powerful, and action oriented if less morally reliable. Good women, who were morally superior, played supporting roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers. Bad women, it should be said, were like Stormy Daniels.

Many conservative Christians feel nostalgic about the days before the decline of traditional roles. For them Trump represents what may be the last best chance to save society from a dizzying pace of change that has brought same-sex marriage, workplaces filled with ambitious women, and empty pews in many churches.  Worse, Stormy Daniels and others in her line of work are no longer universally reviled. Indeed, after her testimony, Daniels received considerable praise in the press for her poise, intelligence, and business savvy.  

Having embraced Trump as a modern David or Cyrus and defined his sexual wrongdoing as a sign of strength, its no wonder that conservative Christians cannot give him up. Consider their view of the world before him, and the world they hope to see, and understanding this becomes possible. He may be a bad man, but he’s their bad man and he’s destined to do some vital good.     

Nevermind that pesky “Bible” and its “standards.”