In the third part of his weekly tri-partite diary, Andrew Sullivan discusses the subject of the Evangelical movement’s relationship with Donald Trump in the context of Trump possibly paying one of his paramours to have an abortion:
But what intrigues me is whether this would actually be enough to get the religious right to abandon their cult-leader. The pro-Trump evangelicals have already staked out a position: Nothing in Trump’s personal character or history matters compared with his advancement more generally of a Christianist agenda in the federal government and especially the judiciary. And if that’s truly the standard, if evangelical Christians have absolutely no interest in the fact that Trump is a serial liar, adulterer, and philanderer, then surely an abortion in his wake wouldn’t matter either.
I think of it as a litmus test for their tribalism. Some small part of me would love to believe that this indeed would be a deal-breaker, that even though Trump has boasted he could shoot someone dead on Fifth Avenue and face no political repercussions from his base, maybe the killing of an unborn child could shake what’s left of American evangelicalism out of its trance.
And then I snap out of it. They’d weigh one abortion against the millions of others sustained by the Roe regime, and give Trump yet another Mulligan. Once you’ve turned Christianity into a mere instrument for wielding political power over others, the logic becomes entirely utilitarian. There is, in many ways, no going back now. It is simply a matter of how great the moral cost of the entire, grisly transaction will be.
Which leads to the question, what will be sufficient to make an Evangelical group, convinced that it’s a victim of America, finally give up on their hold on power? Will it take an outrage of momentous quality?
Or a leader who’ll talk some sense into them?
Or is it all too much to hope for, and we’ll just have to wait for inevitable demographics to extinguish the current corrupt crop of them? I say corrupt because that’s the horse they’re riding here, both metaphorically, as Trump is not only not an Evangelical, but almost violently not, and literally, as Trump and his Administration appears, simply based on the behavior of many in his Cabinet and himself, to be literally corrupt.
If their horse is this corrupt, it’s a monstrous blot on their belief system, as well as on their souls, if such exist.
