Christians who wave away the former president’s sexual immorality may be the most anti-Trump constituency of all.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
For the first time in history, a former (and possibly future) president of the United States is now a convicted felon. A jury found that Donald Trump falsified business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star, with whom he had an affair, in order to keep the story from hurting his 2016 presidential campaign. If only President Trump could have seen the reaction from many white evangelicals to his sexual crimes and misdemeanors, he could have saved some money.
Pundits are probably right that this conviction—like all the revelations of the past almost-decade—will have little effect on the actual election. At this point, people know who they are supporting or opposing—and it’s hard to imagine many who didn’t know all along. The implications, though, are moral, not just legal or political, and on that ground, we should ask whether the most politicized evangelicals should actually love Donald Trump more.
One might reasonably ask how white evangelicals could possibly love Trump more. The most visible evangelical supporters of the former president have been willing, since at least 2016, to wave away criticisms of his character, from the Access Hollywood tapes onward. Many of these voices defended the former president as fit for public leadership, even after a jury found him liable for doing just what he bragged about in those tapes of yesteryear: groping a woman’s genitals against her will. And now this. But all of that is precisely what I mean by asking about love.
The question has been on my mind since I read the galleys of a brilliant book on former president Richard Nixon, coming out this August, by Christianity …
