One of the enduring puzzles of current politics is why evangelicals continue to support Von Schitzinpants after all the revelations about his sexual habits, his crudity, his cruelty, his inability to properly cite a verse, much less a book, of the Bible, his embodiment of all of the seven deadly sins — pride, lust, gluttony, sloth, wrath, envy, and greed. Various students of the Christian right and the White Christian Nationalists have offered up a number of explanations, but here comes a valuable one from Samuel Perry, a sociologist of religion, courtesy of Politico reporter Dylon Jones: it’s about sex.
Evangelicals Hate Stormy Daniels But Love Trump. Here’s Why.
Trump’s sexual misdeeds may break religious doctrine, Perry says, but they also affirm his masculinity — at least in the evangelical view. They demonstrate that Trump is a virile, red-blooded man, afflicted by God — like all “real men” — with lust. Not just lust for sex, Perry says, but for power. And much like Biblical warriors who themselves struggled with sexual temptation, Trump can wield that power to lead the faithful to glory.
Now, to be clear, Trump has probably never in his life “struggled” with the temptation of lust; his only struggle on that front has been over how to get away with it. In Jones’s interview, he quotes Perry making the comparison to Samson:
Samson is just a full-time ass kicker. He’s this rampaging wild man who is like the John Wick of killing Philistines. That’s his favorite thing to do. His other favorite thing to do is to visit prostitutes, and his downfall ends up being this prostitute, Delilah. But that is often glossed over within the evangelical space — he’s still talked about as a hero, because God used him to fight the enemies of his people, and to do it fearlessly and even happily. So there was plenty of precedent in evangelical readings of the Old Testament to celebrate flawed but effective leaders who fail sexually. Maybe they aren’t representative of the best sexual morals, but God used them, and we still celebrate them as heroes.
Samson is another example, though, of something else. Samson is also thought of as this uber-masculine hero: He’s big, and he’s strong, and the representations of Samson are of this hyper-masculine guy. And part of that is his huge and enormous sexual appetites. The guy was the embodiment of physical superiority, and that includes his sexual superiority as well.
Samson, by the way, was not a particularly effective leader. The Philistines bamboozled him, captured him, and blinded him, and his way of getting revenge was to bring down their temple on their heads — and on his at the same time. Jewish tradition doesn’t hold him in very high regard. A better example for this purpose, whom Perry also mentions, is King David, who was an effective (and brutal) war leader and builder of the kingdom, and who also had sexual lusts that got him into trouble more than once. Trump is a lot more like Samson than David, but the point either way is that Biblical heroes (in the Hebrew Bible, at least) have sexual flaws that don’t keep them from being heroes.
But it’s even more than that:
So in Trump, you’ve got this guy who, yes, he has failed sexually. He has a history of being a womanizer. The Stormy Daniels thing is something that reflects poorly on him. And yet, it also reflects positively on his masculinity. Because this guy, he’s a man’s man. This guy is an initiator, he goes after what he wants. He’s going after women, and he now has a supermodel wife who looks like the embodiment of a kind of “trophy wife.” So Trump is representative of a kind of masculinity that is so masculine that his sexual appetites cannot be contained.
Perry continues:
I think this is a response to a perceived loss of masculinity, of the idea that Christian men are no longer viewed as strong warrior-soldiers, that they are people who are passive and nice guys. . . . Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels makes him relatable. Because the battle with lust is something that every Christian man is supposed to deal with.
Again, Trump never “battled” with lust; he went straight to surrender. His evangelical support base has chosen not to see him that way, in part because they envy his history of lust. These “red-blooded” Christian men wish they could bang a porn star. Trump is giving them that vicariously. (Which is one of the reasons he was so furious at having to listen while Daniels described the encounter in the unflattering way she did. It was not how it should have been imagined.) And yes, Trump did deny it, but his base can deal with that — they lie about sex a lot, so they expect it.
Side note: The Access Hollywood tape could have been fatal to Trump because the evangelicals needed time to get over the shock of its crudity and accept it. Didn’t take them all that long, though.
But there are a couple of things that did not come out in the reported interview (though I’m sure that Perry, a good scholar, knows all about them).
First is that Christianity has always been uneasy about pleasure in general and sexual pleasure in particular. Early Christian theologians assigned lifelong virgins a higher place in heaven than married couples who had kept their vows. Sex was only allowed, reluctantly, for reproduction, and if possible, the man was not supposed to enjoy it. Martin Luther shifted this view somewhat, but he could not completely escape the early Christian heritage, nor could many of the Protestants that followed him. The Puritans who colonized New England were, well, puritanical in their views of sex, and the evangelicals are their spiritual descendants. (I’m simplifying a very complex topic here; don’t argue the fine points, please.)
This is the motivation behind a lot of the anti-gay evangelical and fundamentalist thinking; gay sex is sex for pleasure, for intimacy, for lots of other things — but it is not for reproduction. Its existence, and its growing social approval, forces theses evangelicals to admit that they too can openly and honestly enjoy lust by having sex without the intent to reproduce, thus exposing their hypocrisy. (This is also the motivation behind the movement to ban contraceptives. It’s part of the anti-abortion campaign as well, but there are other complexities there.)
Trump breaks the rules of sex as he breaks all the other rules. This generates a kind of sneaking admiration among his evangelical base. (Think of the old joke about Baptists not recognizing each other in a bar.)
But there is another side of Christianity at play here as well, and this one is more serious. Evangelical Protestants are often consumed by millennialism, the doctrine that the world will end with a thousand years of rule by Jesus, followed by the Last Judgment. Premillennialism says Jesus will return in an apocalyptic battle before (pre) the thousand years; postmillennialism holds he will return after (post) a thousand years of Christian rule on Earth. Right now, premillennialism is nost popular, but it’s easy to see how both camps see in Trump a shortcut to the millennium of their choice.
For premillennialists, Trump’s “hyper-masculinity” means he will be willing to use force against the enemies of God and bring about the final battle (up to and definitely including nuclear holocaust) that must precede the return of Jesus. Postmillennialists are counting on using him to establish the theocracy that will result in the thousand-year reign that Jesus wants to see before he comes back.
Perry, one last time:
Could you really nail somebody down and say, hey, Trump never goes to church. Look at the way he talks, look at the way he reacts to people. Has he ever confessed sins? Anything? They would probably say no. But he fights for our values. And honestly, that makes him Christian enough.
Trump, of course, is none of these things. His “hyper-masculinity” is a sham, his sexual exploits, to the extent they really happened, were largely forced or coerced and were clearly unsatisfactory to the women involved, and he has no intention of fighting for any of the Christian agendas past the point where they are of benefit to him personally.
There may be some things in all this that can be used to weaken his hold on the evangelicals; the floor is open for suggestions. One thing that is not going to work, however, is pointing out just how un-Christian — or, better, un-Christ-like — his behavior is. That is exactly what makes him attractive to them.
