But even when they were failing to hold their own side accountable, they still clung to the idea that “character counts.” As recently as 2011, a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that only 30 percent of white evangelicals believed “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” But by the time Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, that number had risen sharply to 72 percent. White evangelicals are now more tolerant of immoral behavior by elected officials than the average American. “This is really a sea change in evangelical ethics,” Robert P. Jones, the head of the institute and the author of
The End of White Christian America,
recently told me.
“The way evangelicals see the world, the culture is not only slipping away—it’s slipping away in all caps, with four exclamation points after that. It’s going to you-know-what in a handbasket,” Brody told me. “Where does that leave evangelicals? It leaves them with a choice. Do they sacrifice a little bit of that ethical guideline they’ve used in the past in exchange for what they believe is saving the culture?”
Of course, it could be argued that the culture suffers when a man of unbridled appetites and unimpressive impulse control is placed in the Oval Office. (In fact, many on the religious right advanced this very argument when Clinton was president.) But Brody says that encroaching secularism, combined with a perceived liberal hostility toward people of faith, has prompted many conservative Christians to support any politician who will protect their traditions. “Donald Trump always talks about bringing back ‘Merry Christmas’ and everybody laughs. But it’s not just about saying ‘Merry Christmas’—it’s about the idea behind it,” Brody said. “They are voting for a person who will be a placeholder for their values. They’re not voting for a person who is going to be Mother Teresa.”
When I called McAllister, she made no effort to walk back her argument. Conservative evangelicals, she said, had learned from cultural elites on the left that in the struggle for power, idealism sometimes had to be sacrificed.
“What are the public-policy implications? That has to be the question,” she told me. “It’s no longer just about personal morality. It’s not that those things don’t matter to us. They do. But you need to think about it like a war. When you’re at the warfront, you just want the best guy next to you. You don’t care what his morality is, it’s just, ‘Can you shoot that guy over there?’”
McAllister paused for a moment, and then chuckled at the bleakness of her metaphor.
'You Need to Think About It Like a War'