Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 20 seconds.
The evangelicals know that Trump has been whoring around for years, but his speeches at prayer breakfasts, his judicial appointments, and occasional coddling of his pastoral advisory board give the Christians a comforting warm glow. It makes them feel solid, substantial, and virtuous. It makes them think of their rights and power in their struggle against a privileged and sinful elite. And if somewhere not too far in the wings of the campaign there were dalliances with porn stars and playmates, then, “Well, you can’t blame him, a man like that has women pawing all over him.”
It only shows that Trump had it both ways, and that seems (to the evangelical) a mark of the chosen and superior. It is what the fundamentalist does in secret when he shakes loose and comes up to town to the convention and pays the hotel an anonymous ten bucks to watch a porn flick in the room. Or if he wasn’t doing it classy, he slips to an adult bookstore and for five dollars gets the whole works down at a seedy section of town.
But either way, classy or trashy, the Christian knows what it means, and deep down in their unfulfilled hearts, they want their children to have Trump’s success—his prosperity and his playmates, and don’t hold it against their President for having both openly and without shame.
Now, what they would hold against Trump is pro-choice. It would hurt even Trump. That would be very different and would rob the evangelical of something he values, the nice warm glow of morality—the perfect white heterosexual couple standing unsmiling with their procreation in front of the church with their big black Bibles in hand.
Meanwhile, even though Christians know about Trump and the black lace negligees and alabaster bodies, it just doesn’t matter. They won’t see them splashed all over their guilty pleasure tabloid National Enquirer but they can vicariously (and in secret, of course) enjoy nude pictures of them on the Internet. They can gossip about all the Fake News and listen in their churches with their tribe as preachers like Graham, Jeffress, Falwell, and White proclaim, “Trump is anointed by God, God put him in this position, he has a divine mission”. And all the while repress their own “sinful” lusts and desires as they have done all their lives as they bask in their self-righteousness.
I suppose it should make me mad that they condemn and ostracize their fellow church members who do in public what they do in secret—all the while giving Trump a free pass for a lifetime of debauchery and lies. But Christian hypocrisy is a strange thing.
They may have done America a favor. They have elected a self-proclaimed reprobate who decided on a lark to campaign and didn’t believe for a minute he would be elected President, and therefore did not see the need or have the time to cover up his many wrong, illegal actions.
One of the unexpected benefits of the Trump presidency is the way it has forced our country to confront wrongs and evils too often shrugged off. The #MeToo campaign, the NFL protest about racial disparity, and the emotional student uprising against guns this past week after the school shooting at Parkland are just a few examples.
The unprecedented visibility of President Trump has projected his lifelong cruelties and brutalities onto the world’s most visible stage for all to see—and from that sight, millions of Americans have decently recoiled. The notable exception being Evangelical Christians.
Ironically, this Christian hypocrisy may be the very thing that guarantees Trump will go down in history as America’s worst President and it could very well put their hero in prison for the rest of his life. This same hypocrisy was the very thing that freed me from a lifetime imprisonment of false beliefs, shame, and judgment.
If not for evangelical hypocrisy, the porn star, the playmate, and the President may still be playing their little games in private like good Christians, and the words of this post would never have been written.
