Many analysts on the left and right have been puzzled by the fact that Republican voters who profess to support family values are passionately devoted to President Trump, a twice-divorced, thrice married man with a long history of brazen infidelity and multiple accusations of serious sexual misconduct. How could voters who profess to care about morality love a President who infamously boasted that “when you’re a star, they let you do it...Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Matthew Schmitz, senior editor at First Things, the leading intellectual journal of the religious right, thinks he has an answer to this conundrum. Trump, Schmitz argues in a New York Times op-ed that was posted on Sunday, embodies the “purple” family “found among working-class whites, blacks and Hispanics.” As against the “red” family values that prize fidelity in marriage or the “blue” family values that uphold companionship, “purple” family values are, we’re told, messier. “In these families, bonds between mothers and children are prized above those between couples,” Schmitz argues. “Unstable relationships are the norm, and fathers quickly end up out of the picture.”

Trump’s chaotic personal life, by this account, mirrors the complexity of purple families:

Baffling as it may be to elites, Mr. Trump embodies a real if imperfect model of family values. People familiar with the purple family model tend to view his alienation from his children’s mother as normal and his closeness to his children as exceptional and admirable. I saw this among my acquaintances in Nebraska. Even those from red families were more likely than my acquaintances in New York to know someone who has had a child out of wedlock or is subject to a restraining order.

The tiny kernel of truth in Schmitz’s argument is that in an age where blended families are increasingly the norm, Trump’s three marriages might seem familiar to many Americans, including religious believers.

But Schmitz’s argument goes beyond the pervasiveness of out of wedlock birth, divorce and re-marriage and encompasses abuse (“subject to restraining order”). While indulgence towards alternative lifestyles might be on the rise, it’s absurd to argue that domestic abuse is a family value. This applies to Trump’s own misconduct. Bragging about being able to grab women by the genitalia is not a quirky cultural difference, but an abuse of power.