Allegations against Moore roil American evangelical ranks

Associated Press

For many evangelicals, Alabama politician Roy Moore has been a longtime hero. Others have sometimes cringed at his heated rhetoric and bellicose style.

Now, as Mr. Moore’s Republican U.S. Senate campaign is imperiled by allegations of sexual overtures to a 14-year-old girl when he was in his 30s, there’s an outpouring of impassioned and soul-searching discussion in evangelical ranks.

“This is one of those excruciating decision moments for evangelicals,”Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said in a telephone interview. “These allegations, if true, are devastating. If true, this is a very big deal.”

Mr. Mohler said Alabama voters face a potentially wrenching task of trying to determine if the allegations — Mr. Moore has emphatically denied them — are credible.

At the same time, when Alabama state auditor Jim Ziegler said “Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter” and that “[t]here’s just nothing immoral or illegal here — maybe just a little bit unusual” — suggesting that Mr. Moore acted in a divine tradition, if he in fact made sexual advances toward a 14year-old girl — theologians and pastors, among others, expressed revulsion that Mary and Joseph would be used to counter allegations of sexual misbehavior with a minor.

“If this is evangelicalism, I’m on the wrong team,” the evangelical commentator Ed Stetzer wrote in Christianity Today. “But it is not. Christians don’t use Joseph and Mary to explain child molesting accusations.”

According the Pew Research Center, 49 percent of Alabama adults are evangelical Protestants. For some of them, the Moore allegations echo the quandary they faced last year, wrestling over whether to support Donald Trump in the presidential race despite his crude sexual boasts.

The Rev. Robert Franklin, professor of moral leadership at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, said The Washington Post’s report about the Moore allegations represents a test of “moral consistency” for evangelicals.

“Evangelicals are steadily losing their moral authority in the larger public square by intensifying their uncritical loyalty to Donald Trump,” Rev. Franklin wrote in an email. “Since this is Roy Moore and not Donald Trump, I think there may be significant disaffection with him, and increased demands for his removal from the ballot.”

As for Mr. Moore himself, Rev. Franklin suggested there were “classic evangelical remedies” such as confession, prayer, remorse and isolation. “Election to higher office is not one of them,” Rev. Franklin wrote.

Although Mr. Trump won 80 percent of the white evangelical vote in his presidential victory, his candidacy exposed and hardened rifts among conservative Christians about partisan politics, the personal character of government leaders and the Gospel. Surveys by the Public Religion Research Institute found that the percentage of white evangelicals who said they still trusted the leadership of a politician who commits an immoral act rose from 30 percent in 2011 to 72 percent last year.

Still, a solid minority of conservative Christians adopted the NeverTrump hashtag on social media and joined those outside evangelicalism who said “values voters” had lost their values. Women and black evangelicals especially emerged as critics of Mr. Trump’s remarks about women, immigrants, African-Americans and Muslims.

“Okay, seriously, we elected a man president who bragged about using his power and authority to sexually assault women,” tweeted Kyle James Howard, an African-American student at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.“Why are we surprised that members of his party would now be defending a party member’s sexual assault of a minor?”