Why Evangelicals Will Stand By Roy Moore

Once again the political area is posing a moral test for Evangelical Christians, the same group that bears responsibility for putting Donald Trump, a self-professed sexual predator.  This time, the test revolves around GOP senatorial candidate Roy Moore in Alabama.  Moore who has made a career out of Bible thumping and spreading hatred against gays, non-Christians and minorities now faces accusations by four (4) women that he engaged in sexual molestation.  One accuser was 14 years old at the time while Moore was in his 30's.  The Alabama of 30+ years ago when I lived in Mobile would not have stood for such a candidate.  But that was before the rise of the Christofascists who now control the Republican Party in Alabama. A piece in the Washington Post looks at why the evangelicals who continue to support Trump will support the repulsive Roy Moore.  Here are excerpts:

Roy Moore won the Republican nomination for the Senate seat in Alabama this year on the strength of his long-standing advocacy for hard-right conservative and evangelical values.

Twice elected chief justice of Alabama’s Supreme Court, he left that role both times on behalf of his religious beliefs. In 2003, he was removed from office for refusing to take a monument of the Ten Commandments out of a state building. In 2016, he was suspended for refusing to uphold the Supreme Court’s decision on same-sex marriages.

On Thursday afternoon, The Washington Post published a story detailing allegations from four women who say they were pursued by Moore when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s. One, Leigh Corfman, described how Moore had initiated sexual contact with her when she was 14 and he 18 years older.

Republicans on Capitol Hill — many of whom supported Strange in the primary, it’s important to note — quickly called for Moore to drop out of the Senate race, a move that seems unlikely. 

Recent history, though, suggests that he might not lose substantial evangelical support. That recent history is Donald Trump. . . . . The result for Trump? He won more support from evangelical voters than any Republican since the question of religious identification began being asked.

 

Nearly half of Trump’s support — 46 percent — identified as white evangelical Protestant. . . . More than any other religious group, evangelicals said that someone who acts immorally in their personal lives can still serve morally in office.

 

Moore’s political background is predicated on engaging in the sort of fights that evangelical voters would like to see fought.  Moore is aware of this.

The allegations against Moore are decades old and, for those interested in dismissing them, dismissible as pitting his word against the women’s. It seems unlikely, then, that evangelical voters would, at this point, reject his candidacy, especially with Moore denying the charges as fervently as he is.

If Donald Trump — a one-time New York Democrat on his third wife with little connection to religious faith before his political run — can keep the support of the evangelical community, it seems unlikely that a conservative Alabama judge who lost his job in defense of the Ten Commandments is at much risk of seeing that support evaporate.

As I have noted many times before, given evangelical support of Trump, Moore and other morally bankrupt politicians,  when I meet anyone who announces themselves as an evangelical or fundamentalist Christian, the first thing that crosses my mind is that they must be (i) liars and hypocrites, (ii) modern day Pharisees, and (iii) morally bankrupt and not decent and moral individuals.