Allegations against Roy Moore roil U.S. evangelical ranks

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

Now, as 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.”

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

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,” 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 Moore himself, Franklin suggested there were “classic evangelical remedies” such as confession, prayer and remorse and isolation.

“Election to higher office is not one of them,” Franklin wrote.

Although 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 Never Trump 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 Trump’s remarks about women, immigrants, African-Americans and Muslims. Many of these same critics of Trump’s behavior and rhetoric condemned Moore in recent days and bemoaned the fact that some evangelicals were standing by him.

“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?”

One of the Southern Baptist Convention’s leading public policy experts, the Rev. Russell Moore, expressed dismay after the allegations against Judge Moore — no relation — surfaced on Thursday.

“Whether in the hills of Hollywood or the halls of power, it doesn’t matter,” the Rev. Moore tweeted. “This is true: sexual assault and child molestation are evil, unjust, satanic.”

Roy Moore embraced controversy as he built his evangelical following. He was twice removed from his post as Alabama’s chief justice, once for disobeying a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the lobby of the state judicial building, and later for urging probate judges to defy the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage.

Prayer and repentance were among the themes Sunday at Moore’s home church in Gallant, Alabama. Moore himself wasn’t present at First Baptist Church. The church’s pastor, the Rev. Tom Brown, prayed during the service for “the entire Moore family” and urged congregants to trust in God and believe that adversity could lead to a positive outcome.

“He’s always been a man of character, of integrity, of honor, and there’s nothing in those 25 years that I’ve seen that would challenge that,” Brown said. “That’s all I can go by.”