Evangelical leaders squander their moral authority
Let’s see whether we understand this.
A lawyer for Donald Trump sets up a private Delaware company weeks before the 2016 election to arrange a $130,000 payoff to a porn star named Stormy Daniels, buying her silence about an alleged Trump tryst in 2006.
The Wall Street Journal breaks this perfidy recently, and leading evangelical leaders promptly ... denounce his immoral behavior? No, silly us. They give Trump a spiritual pass:
“You get a mulligan,” said Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council.
“The president is a much different person today (than in 2006),” said the Rev. Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham.
“He’s changed,” said Jerry Falwell Jr.
Message: That 7th Commandment is overrated. It’s hard to imagine these religious leaders being so forgiving if the sinner in question was a Democrat. In fact, this sort of hypocrisy only serves to sap their moral authority.
This isn’t to say members of their flock — the nation’s estimated 60 million evangelical Christians — are acting irrationally by supporting Trump. About 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, who identifies as Presbyterian. And while that support has slipped a bit, they remain a strong constituency for the president.
As Molly Worthen, a history professor at the University of North CarolinaChapel Hill, has written, born-again Christians “have a long record of being highly pragmatic, rather than purist, in (using) the tools of the federal government to protect their own authority and advance a moral agenda.”
Between Trump and Hillary Clinton, if evangelicals saw the former as the better vessel — albeit a morally flawed one — for overturning Roe v. Wade or safeguarding religious freedom, why not support him? After all, the Lord works in mysterious ways.
What’s more puzzling is that leaders of the religious right feel it’s somehow necessary to shoehorn the president’s character into some kind of born-again template, a mold he has never fit.
By the accounts of more than a dozen women, Trump is a serial sexual predator. To this day, he bears false witness an average of several times a day and uses vulgarities to denigrate entire nations of people.
Yet Graham and Falwell say they believe that Trump has morally changed over the years. “He’s not the same person now that he was back then,” Falwell told CNN. “That’s why evangelicals are so quick to forgive Donald Trump when he asked for forgiveness for things that happened 10, 15 years ago.”
Except he never really did. On more than one occasion, the president has all but rejected a fundamental religious tenet: seeking Christ’s forgiveness. “I am not sure I (ever) have,” he said in 2015.
To be credible, evangelical leaders should dispense with the do-overs and simply acknowledge that Trump is what he is: a means to a political end.