Last week, Buzzfeed’s Katherine Miller observed that the most interesting thing about Donald Trump is what he reveals about other people. This depressing truth has been on display for the better part of a year as Trump has laid bare the cowardice of much of the Republican establishment, the toxic revanchism of a nontrivial number of Republican voters, and the opportunism and corruption of swaths of the conservative media.
But the biggest surprise in this shambling march of shame is what Trump revealed about some of America’s religious leaders.
Trump’s support in the primaries from religious voters was complicated: He did very well among people who self-identified as religious, but not so well among voters who actually attend church regularly. Yet the elites of the social conservative movement were—with the exception of the alt-right—Trump’s most steadfast supporters. They came to him early and have stayed with him, unblinkingly, to the bitter end.
It’s a strange attraction. Trump is twice-divorced and has written in detail about extramarital affairs, sometimes with married women (to say nothing of his boasts about how he treats women generally). He refers to the communion host as “the little cracker” and talks about reading “two Corinthians.” He says his favorite message in Scripture is the part about “an eye for an eye.” He says he has never had cause to ask God for forgiveness.
And yet Trump’s faith tradition has given most evangelical leaders no pause whatsoever. In 2012, when Trump spoke at Liberty University, school president Jerry Falwell Jr. introduced him as “one of the great visionaries of our time.” Trump urged the students to “get even” if they are ever wronged and to never get married without a prenuptial agreement. In January of 2016, Falwell brought him back to Liberty and was even more effusive: “Donald Trump lives a life of loving and helping others,” he said, “as Jesus taught in the great commandment.”
A handful of social conservative leaders resisted Trump—most notably Russell Moore, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention. Moore opposed Trump from the start and has spent the last year warning his fellow evangelicals that they were making a grave mistake. But Moore and his allies were the exception rather than the rule. Most evangelical leaders lined up behind Trump as the race went on.
Franklin Graham, for instance, praised Trump, saying, “[H]e’s shaking up the Republican party and the political process overall. And it needs shaking up!” After he secured the nomination, Trump met with an assembly of more than 1,000 Christian leaders in New York City, where he made sure to advertise his view of the Gospels: “We can’t be, again, politically correct and say ‘we pray for all of our leaders,’ ” he said. “Because all of your leaders are selling Christianity down the tubes, selling evangelicals down the tubes.”
In the aftermath of the big meeting, Trump launched an Evangelical Executive Advisory Board, including, among others, Falwell Jr., Ralph Reed, James Dobson, and Richard Land (the ousted head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission).
Social conservative leaders were among Trump’s most ardent defenders through the summer and fall, even when times got tough. After the Access Hollywood tape of Trump bragging about groping women surfaced, Falwell compared Trump to King David, a man with weaknesses who nonetheless defended his people.
Robert Jeffress, a pastor and member of Trump’s advisory board, was a bit more circumspect. He defended his continuing support of Trump by telling the Daily Beast that “I would not necessarily choose this man to be my child’s Sunday School teacher. But that’s not what this election is about.” (The necessarily is the best part.)
But it wasn’t only evangelical leaders who threw in with Trump. The flagship journal of religion and public life, First Things, flirted with Trump for months before finally going as far toward endorsing him as its nonprofit status would allow. (The top two editors, R. R. Reno and Mark Bauerlein, offered official endorsements outside of the magazine’s pages.)
Eric Metaxas, previously regarded by some as a high-horsepower theologian, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which he argued that (1) not voting for Donald Trump was, in fact, voting for Hillary Clinton; but (2) “a vote for Donald Trump is not necessarily a vote for Donald Trump himself”; and (3) if Trump loses the election, “God will not hold us guiltless.” Evidently concerned that readers didn’t fully grasp this last point, he circled back on Twitter to say, “Evan McMullin is a good man, but in this election he is a fig-leaf, there to assuage the consciences of religious people. God is not fooled.” (He later deleted this tweet.)
Metaxas might have been projecting. After all, it wasn’t God who was getting fooled by Trump.
Unless a President Trump really did come through with a great Supreme Court pick, religious conservatives were arguably the Republican constituency least likely to be well-served by a Trump administration. During the primaries Trump indicated—unequivocally—that he is in favor of both gay marriage and the transgender project. Trump was also remarkably consistent in his view that First Amendment rights ought to be curtailed. So he was an unlikely champion for religious institutions and believers under assault from the effects of Obergefell, the Supreme Court ruling that enshrined same-sex marriage as a fundamental right.
When it comes to abortion, notwithstanding his frequent support of Planned Parenthood, Trump may or may not have had a genuine conversion on the subject. But no reasonable assessment of his priorities would assume that abortion was an issue he would have been willing to expend political capital on as president.
In an election full of oddities, one of the foremost might be this: that the group that had the least in common with Trump, and had perhaps the least to gain from his election, will be the one damaged the most by him. Supporting Trump could very well do to religious conservatism what supporting Bill Clinton through his Monica travails did to feminism: expose it as a fully partisan and transparently hypocritical movement with no claim to moral authority.
Part of the reason Hillary Clinton’s “First! Woman! President!” appeal has been so ineffective—both in 2008 and 2016—is that mainline feminism mortgaged its public standing in 1998 when it stood with Bill Clinton and against the parade of women whom he had abused. People noticed; it mattered.
The difference between the feminists then and the social conservatives now—the only difference, really—is that feminists actually got something from Clinton. As Nina Burleigh memorably put it during impeachment, “I would be happy to give him a b— just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”
For Jerry Falwell Jr., Eric Metaxas, and the rest, there will be no such compensation.
Jonathan V. Last is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
