But when I read this report from early March in HuffPo, particularly this passage, I had to draw a conclusion:
“Evangelicals still believe in the commandment: Thou shalt not have sex with a porn star,” Robert Jeffress told Fox News on Thursday. “However, whether this president violated that commandment or not is totally irrelevant to our support of him.” …
“Evangelicals knew they weren’t voting for an altar boy when they voted for Donald Trump,” he said. “We supported him because of his policies and his strong leadership.”
Conclusion: No, you support him because you’ve abandoned God. (OK, so that’s cheeky coming from an agnostic.)
Look, the reason we embrace our various ethical, philosophical, and religious systems is because they should increase our survival and reproductive potential. There may be a circuitous route to that conclusion for any given system, but it should be there; conversely, those that do not have long-term survival benefits will self-extinguish. Including a trope that even pre-dates the Web (yeah, we did this back in the old BBS days of the 1980s), consider the Nazi philosophy. It brutally pursued goals that it perceived as beneficial to itself – and in its best known incarnation, lasted hardly 12 years and was thoroughly extinguished and discredited. In fact, this effort led to international efforts to build and agree upon an ethical framework, in order to understand and repudiate those who would ally with Nazis and other such barbarians.
The point of such systems should be that they are applicable to all situations we’re likely to encounter. When extremists on the left or the right advocate for exceptions to our generally accepted framework of laws, they are implicitly stating that our set of laws, our shared and agreed upon philosophy, is not applicable to all situations, and by further implication, they are incomplete and thus our system is inferior to what it might be.
It’s possible, even probable, that our extremist du jour will argue that their favorite exception should, in actuality, be part of that philosophy, but that argument is, by definition, in fact a contradiction of one of the guiding principles of the framework, and generally not a contradiction which can be intellectually argued around. A fine example was the advocacy and use of torture by the Bush Administration during the Iraq War. A few of those victims, innocent or guilty, died under torture; the United States’ honor sustained a disastrous blot; and the CIA declared that no useful information was gained from the exercise, former Vice-President Cheney’s protestations notwithstanding. The uproar over the discovery of the use of torture was motivated by the anger over having some of our strongest moral principles contravened; those who argued torture was a valid response revealed themselves as morally corrupt. The results were predictably useless or replicable through more honorable means.
When the Evangelical movement’s leaders declare that Trump is their preferred candidate, and they acknowledge that he’s no altar boy, they have presented a situation with one of two interpretations for non-Evangelicals.
First, they have acknowledged that their philosophical system is incomplete and inferior. Maybe they’re personally good people, but their willingness to vote for someone who has little congruency with their religious system, who is an adulterer with no regrets, who lies and hollowly boasts and swaggers belligerently, suggests their philosophical system, their religion, the values they live their lives by, does not create good leadership skills outside of the religious context[1].
Or, secondly, they’re a bunch of fucking hypocrites, unable to put forth a viable candidate of their own into the fray, and too hungry for power to wait for the next election.
If the Evangelicals want to know why a large portion of the United States does not consider them to be an admirable sect with respect to their adulation of President Trump, I think that’s why. We look at folks like Jeffress, and we don’t see a moral religious leader, but just another power-junkie, hungry for the prestige and adulation which goes with being in the inner circle of the powerful.
And that’s not only repulsive, but dangerous to the souls of the Evangelicals, as well as the standing of the United States as Reagan’s City on the Hill.
1In recent years, Presidents Carter (D) and Bush-43 (R) were considered Presidents from the Evangelical movement. Neither is thought to be an outstanding or even mediocre President, but, instead, ineffective. Carter has certainly rehabilitated his personal reputation with his many good works, but that doesn’t really improve his Presidential standing, which is a probably too-high 26th in this survey of historians. Bush-43 is rated at 30th in the same survey, which is far too high for obvious reasons, but probably a comparative reaction to Trump’s debacle, who incidentally is rated DFL.
