Absalom’s revenge

SAVE, perhaps, for the preacher’s warning that God’s works may involve mess and tears, there was no mention of Donald Trump’s groping imbroglio during Sunday service at Free Chapel, a snazzy mega-church in Gainesville, Georgia. But a pamphlet on sale by its senior pastor, Jentezen Franklin, makes the church’s stance clear. Recommending three days of fasting before November 8th, it advises that, since the country is in crisis, this is no time to be squeamish. Mr Franklin is a member of Mr Trump’s evangelical advisory board.

Of all the mental gymnastics required of Trumpsters, none are more excruciating than the rationalisations offered by his evangelical cheerleaders. In the past Jerry Falwell junior, president of Liberty University, enlisted both his illustrious father and Jesus in his praise of Mr Trump—a profane business shark who bragged about his penis on TV, makes humiliating gaffes about Christianity and whose wife posed for Sapphic porn. After the emergence of his old boasts about committing sexual assault, Mr Falwell limply insisted that “We’re all sinners”, hinting that the furore was got up by anti-Trump Republicans. “Nothing can tear me away from your love, Lord,” sang Free Chapel’s rock ensemble: something similar seems to go for the candidate’s evangelical toadies.

Two tropes recur in the arguments these erstwhile moralisers continue to make for the casino-owner. One is that no candidate is perfect: “until Jesus runs for office,” Mr Franklin laments, “it will always be a choice between the lesser of two evils.” The other is that the position at stake is commander-in-chief, not Sunday school teacher. The president’s power to nominate Supreme Court justices, and thus sway the law on marriage, abortion and religious liberty, outweighs everything else. This realist case was epitomised by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, who explained that his support for Mr Trump “was never based upon shared values.” After all, runs the biblical back-up, God often deploys flawed strongmen as his rod. Lustful King David is the most commonly cited precedent.

Some, however, have heard enough. On October 9th Wayne Grudem, an influential theologian who had endorsed the adulterous nominee, said he hoped Mr Trump would quit. And, especially in the younger ranks, some never signed on. Russell Moore, of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention—“A nasty guy with no heart!”, according to Mr Trump—says that, among his acquaintances, every pastor under 40 is revolted by the campaign. The generational divide, he says, partly concerns race. Many younger evangelicals want both to atone for old racial wrongs and expand their faith’s appeal; countenancing Mr Trump’s “racist invective,” thinks Mr Moore, is “morally problematic but also self-defeating”, since “angry old white people” are not the church’s future.

Still, in one analysis, all this is the culmination of a prior trend. Since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, a divorced movie star, white evangelical Protestants have become ever-more affiliated with the Republican Party. But, says Wayne Flynt, author of an illuminating new book on southern religion, while puritanical in the private sphere, in politics evangelical bigwigs “increasingly defined morality in terms of policy instead of character”. Ultimately, he thinks, the alliance that “they thought was their salvation will be their damnation,” since their moral authority now stands diminished. After this bout of relativism, agrees Mr Moore—who opposes Hillary Clinton as well—old-school evangelists who invoke moral character will seem like “political hacks.” To their critics, such hypocrites have forsaken God for Caesar, becoming less churchmen than spokesmen for a grumpy demographic group.

Happily for the Republican Party, the white evangelical vote—typically more than a third of its total—seems unlikely to desert en masse. Partisanship is too fierce and the Democrats too unpalatable. Still, in this election there are ominous signs. Many evangelicals, pollsters recount, were always motivated more by aversion to Mrs Clinton, whom they regard as a liberal-feminist anathema, than by enthusiasm for Mr Trump. A survey by Lifeway Research found that, among Protestant pastors, Mr Trump’s lead was much smaller than previous Republican candidates’; a plurality were undecided. His overall support among evangelicals, while still strong, is lower than his predecessor’s. More may chose to stay at home on polling day, hurting down-ballot Republicans too.

That could yet make a difference in swing states such as Florida and North Carolina. Perhaps, as Mr Flynt notes, evangelical leaders should pay more attention to their own parables. King David’s lusts return to haunt him: a love-child perishes and his son Absalom revolts.