Donald Trump's meeting this week with conservative evangelicals received some hostile reviews, not least from evangelicals themselves.
"This meeting marks the end of the Christian right," wrote Michael Farris, a veteran of the original Moral Majority. The piece probably won Farris more favorable attention than he received during his whole campaign for lieutenant governor of Virginia in 1993.
"[T]here's an explicit commandment in 1 Corinthians — or one Corinthians, as Donald Trump would say — that when someone holds themselves out as a Christian and yet is filled with greed, licentiousness, adultery, you name it, and hasn't repented that you shouldn't even break bread with this person," Erick Erickson toldNPR.
Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., son and namesake of the late Moral Majority founder, was targeted for ridicule for taking a picture with Trump with a framed cover of Playboy featuring the businessman appearing in the background.
Some of the split is generational. Some of it reflects the tensions between spreading the Gospel and pushing a particular political agenda. Richard Land, the longtime head of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, is on Trump's evangelical advisory board. His successor Russell Moore has been one of Trump's biggest evangelical critics.
That hasn't stopped the occasional commentator from blaming conservative Christians for Trump's rise. "Social conservatives aren't victims," complained the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin. "They're enablers."
But the truth is, it's complicated between Trump and evangelicals. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee did much better than expected with evangelical voters during the primaries, which fatally damaged Ted Cruz's chances. The more these evangelicals attended church, however, the worse Trump did.
Organized social conservatism almost uniformly backed Cruz over Trump. This includes old-school religious right leaders like James Dobson who have joined Trump's evangelical advisory board. There was more support from such pro-life and pro-family figures for Marco Rubio than Trump during the competitive phase of the primaries.
This writer appeared on a panel attended by a group of religious conservatives who were openly dismayed by Trump's rise. So were the co-panelists, with one practically revoking the evangelical cards of pro-Trump conservative Christians.
"[T]he definition of 'evangelical' is someone who is church-going," said Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. "So if you're a non-church-going evangelicals, you're not an evangelical."
Falwell and Robert Jeffries were prominent because as high-profile evangelical Trump supporters, they were the exception rather than the rule. Trump finished fourth in Liberty University's precinct, in single digits behind Ben Carson. Falwell never had his father's political influence, which itself peaked when Ronald Reagan was president.
So why the dance with Trump now despite his past social liberalism (which has given way to a social conservatism that is wobbly and inarticulate at best), adultery, divorces and vulgarity? Because social conservatives suffer a paucity of options — and their choices started getting worse before Trump took his fateful ride down the escalator.
Evangelicals have long given the Republican Party more in votes than they've gotten in action. But the Democratic Party increasingly pairs near-uniform social liberalism, including taxpayer funding of abortion, with a very crimped understanding of religious liberty.
Democrats have backed away from the framework of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act now that conservative evangelicals are seeking its protections. From Christian wedding vendors to Hobby Lobby, this has real-world implications for evangelicals in business.
There's no guarantee that Trump will do the right thing on judges or social issues. But evangelicals stand a better chance on these fronts with him or any Republican than under Hillary Clinton.
Didn't socially liberal Republican columnists like Rubin offer similar reassurances to evangelicals when pro-choice Rudy Giuliani was a front-runner for the GOP nomination?
Whose administration is more likely to protect the tax-exempt status of a church opposed to same-sex marriage, Trump's or Clinton's?
The Donald is no sure thing for gun owners either. But looking at the spectacle in the House of Representatives right now, who among them would rather bet on the Democrats for even four years?
Socially conservative Christians are in the same boat.
Trump's strongest appeal is to evangelicals who mourn the loss of Christian cultural preeminence in America. But many conservative Christians are also afraid that they are becoming a hated minority.
To both groups, Trump promises, "We're going to protect Christianity." In this context, Trump's lack of biblical literacy or even his sins are beside the point.
Many of these voters are no longer looking for the strongest Christian. They are looking for a friendly Roman.
While character counts, the Christian Right has failed most spectacularly in trying to re-moralize the culture by electing devout politicians. Religious liberty and the right to life remain live issues in spite of those failures.
That doesn't sit easily, since the church is more diverse than conservative American whites (see its Global South growth) and has a greater commission than winning the White House for Republicans. Put not your trust in princes.
At the same time, abortion and religious liberty aren't trivial issues, especially to people of faith. A Clinton administration poses a threat on both fronts that only a Republican administration might avert.
Ridicule their dilemma if you want, but it is real.\
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