Increasingly, watching the Evangelical community rally around serial sexual assaulter, thrice-married, morally bankrupt Evergropenfuhrer Donald Trump is like watching the final twist in a movie where you can see it coming, but you still remain transfixed by the pivot.
As Jennifer Rubin - who is still considered a "conservative" blogger, but is really the only remaining Rockefeller Republican - notes that Evangelicals support discrimination towards LGBT peoples while claiming that they themselves are the real victims of persecution. What Conservative Evangelicals - and hence Trump supporters, since it's a single overlapping circle - are actually experiencing is a culture changing around them in ways they cannot control.
Generationally, young people are very tolerant of this new cosmopolitanism surrounding both race and sexual orientation/gender. The older, whiter, more rural Americans who call themselves Evangelicals are not. Their preferred status within American society has been eroding for years.
What distinguishes these people from other conservatives is the nature of their faith. While there was a conservative argument against marriage equality - why change an ancient institution - that argument has largely been laid to rest. Plenty of Republicans have shrugged and moved on. Turns out letting Adam and Steve get married was not a big deal after all, except to Adam and Steve.
But if you're an evangelical, you have religious authority that hasn't changed. The Constitution was expanded, the Bible was not re-written. In the past, I've describe the Republican Party as a sustained tantrum against the 21st century. Instead, it is perhaps more accurate to describe Conservative Evangelicals that way. Paul Ryan doesn't give a shit about marriage equality and even Orrin Hatch is fine with transgender soldiers.
Orrin Hatch and Paul Ryan are not the great mass of Republican voters, though. That's why Donald Trump ran circles around Jeb! and the Zodiac Killer. Not because he shared their faith, but because he shared their grievance - or at least pretended to.
It is fashionable for the unreflective, teenaged atheist to spout off about the Crusades or the Inquisition in denouncing faith. Frankly, both of those are political acts, clothed in the language of religion. What we are seeing among Conservative Evangelicals is really nothing more than politics in biblical terms.
It is corrosive; it is damaging and it is un-American.
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