Breda O’Brien: People of faith need to uncouple from Trump

An American columnist wrote this: “There we have a snapshot of . . . this president’s remarkably solid support . . . [He is seen as] not a reckless predator of women but a victim of an elitist-moralist plot; not a breaker of solemn oaths but a breaker of moral chains; not a cornered con man but a hero to all who feel hunted.”

The writer, William Safire, was not speaking about Donald Trump today but about the public's attitude to Bill Clinton's sex scandals in 1998.

Clinton got a free pass from many, including feminist Gloria Steinem, who wrote a New York Times op-ed piece stating that no matter how crude his approach, at least Clinton backed off when the women said no. This was widely satirised as the One Free Pass rule.

Clinton got hell from conservatives, who bewailed his decadence and his deplorable example.

Yet many of those very same conservatives, including some prominent figures on the religious right in the United States, believed Trump's attitude to women could be glossed over.

Crisis

That was not all that they were willing to gloss over. Russell Moore is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, and is no Trump fan.

In a podcast for the journal First Things, Moore slammed evangelicals for what else they were willing to overlook.

He said: "The crisis before us now is that of a national religious right establishment that has waved away some of the most repugnant aspects of immorality – from calls for torture and war crimes to the embrace of an 'alt-right' movement of white identity ethno-nationalists and anti-Semites to the kind of sexual degradation of women we could previously avoid by not choosing to listen to Howard Stern on the radio or to subscribe to Hustler magazine."

Moore criticises the unhealthy connection between evangelicals and the Republican Party.

He recalled that, in his youth, discovering that a religious right voting guide “just happened to be the same as the talking points of the Republican national committee” almost caused him to lose his faith.

In Clinton’s case, his feminist supporters were willing to excuse the president’s actions because he was sound on the things that mattered, such as supporting the right to abortion.

It is depressing to see a kind of bizarre mirror image of this attitude among religious Trump supporters.

Four out of five white evangelicals voted for Trump. Three out of five white Catholics voted for Trump, while Hispanic Catholics voted in far greater numbers for Clinton.

Even in staunchly Mormon Utah, where three out of five people are members of the Church of Latter-day Saints (LDS), Trump triumphed.

He garnered half the vote, even though LDS voters had been vocal in their disapproval of him.

A great deal of Trump's success could be attributed to voters not being able to stomach the prospect of four years of Hillary Clinton because she has been dogged by scandal right back to the 1970s and the Whitewater controversy.

Others could not vote for Clinton because of her attitude to abortion, including her statement that “the unborn person does not have constitutional rights”.  She argued for the right to abortion even in the third trimester.

Anti-abortion views

But Trump’s alleged anti-abortion views were of very recent origin, and if you believe in a consistent ethic you cannot square boasting about sexual assault, mocking a person with a disability, treating the entire Muslim community with contempt, denying climate change and being in favour of the death penalty with alleged anti-abortion views.

Trump would not have been elected without the support of religious people. They are not a homogenous bloc. Even the term evangelical covers a broad spectrum of beliefs.

But if we just take those who would identify with the religious right, they never maximised their power.

They allowed the Republican Party to take them for granted, and as a result, the party never really gave them anything of substance.

The religious right was so desperate this time that they voted for Trump in droves; but, just like the Republicans, what exactly is he going to do for them?

Any faithful Catholic could not be described as a member of the religious right.

It is hard to reconcile Trump's views with Pope Francis, who speaks constantly about care for our common home, the subtitle of his encyclical on the environment, and who has constantly asked for compassionate treatment of migrants and minorities.

Therefore, any faithful Catholic could not endorse someone who so cynically exploited people’s fears.

Admittedly, voters were between a rock and a hard place, because for many of these faithful Christians, Clinton was also utterly unacceptable.

No matter how glad they are to see the liberal consensus challenged, people of faith need to consciously uncouple from Trump.

Having shown that they have the power to swing an election, next time out could religious people look to supporting candidates in the primaries who do more than throw them crumbs from a privileged table?