It's uncanny how conservative evangelicals keep picking skeevy perverts as their leaders. Trump got bigly support from the evangelical movement, who were not in the least bit concerned with his videotaped bragging of sexual assaults, nor by the testimony from all the women who came forward to confirm it happened. And they continued to back Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley even after it became clear the man used the tools of his public office to cover up an affair with a staffer.
It's almost as if all the moralizing about how the gays and the Muslims and the atheists and the liberals and the people who do not love their guns as much as Jesus loves guns are destroying America is just a cheap veneer over a core that doesn't have much to do with actual morality.
But others said it had become clear that for conservative Christians, the cultural and political issues that define modern conservative politics mattered at least as much as moral piety. That was why, they suggested, Mr. Bentley was able to cling to his job for nearly 13 months after his reputation as a paragon of probity came under fire.
“The idea that moral hypocrisy hurts you among evangelical voters is not true, if you’re sound on all of the fundamentals,” said Wayne Flynt, an ordained Baptist minister and one of Alabama’s pre-eminent historians. “Being sound on the fundamentals depends on what the evangelical community has decided the fundamentals have become. At this time, what is fundamental is hating liberals, hating Obama, hating abortion and hating same-sex marriage.”
Yes, yes: How dare anyone judge the movement based on the people and policies they support, rather than their angry letters to the editor or self-righteous television blowhardism? Oh, and here's another paragon of the movement—Roy Moore, who's been booted twice now as an Alabama judge for blatantly ignoring United States law in favor of doing what he, personally, says God demands the law actually be.
He's a big cheese in far-right evangelical circles because he wants to impose religious law before the scary invisible Muslims do, and if your own idea of what God wants differs from his own sub-sub-sub-sect’s version you can just sod right the hell off.
“I would hope they’d be more cautious,” said Roy S. Moore, who was suspended as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for his resistance to same-sex marriage. “Sometimes, politicians take advantages of that attention to morality and they will profess things they don’t actually stand for.”
Yes, they will. And it takes a sucker to believe them, and a sucker twice over to keep defending them even after it's clear they didn't think any of their pretty words applied to them or those around them, personally. It takes a special kind of sucker to wake up each night in a cold sweat over the possible imposition of religious law and still spend your afternoons demanding we impose precisely that.
But here we are. And here we’ve been for 30 years. It’s all a big grift that has very little to do with “faith” or “morality” or anything else but collecting money from the rubes. But the rubes refuse, every damn time, to catch on.
