Laura Turner is a writer in San Francisco.

Over the weekend, as Donald Trump’s sexually aggressive comments on a leaked tape blew up the news cycle and threatened to sink his candidacy, a bulwark of support emerged among male evangelical leaders. Prominent evangelicals like Ralph Reed, Jerry Falwell Jr. and Robert Jeffress have all doubled down their support for the GOP nominee.

In the past, it might have been taken for granted that this meant the evangelical constituency would fall in line.


Not this time. On Sunday, Beth Moore, a popular speaker and Bible study author whose books have been New York Times best-sellers, spoke out about Trump and against these male evangelical leaders, tweeting, “Try to absorb how acceptable the disesteem and objectifying of women has been when some Christian leaders don’t think it’s that big a deal.” Moore, who is very popular in conservative Christian circles, usually refrains from getting involved in politics. But her take reflected an argument breaking out with renewed force among evangelical women—especially younger ones—about whether it’s really possible to support a man who writes off bragging about sexual assault as “locker room talk,” as he did in Sunday night’s debate.

A profound split has emerged among evangelical women. While many are standing firmly behind Trump, a growing number of them are starting to defect from his ranks of supporters. Some of them were shaky on Trump to begin with, and many have begun to speak out against him only after the most recent leaked tape. Hearing Trump brag about sexual assault was the last straw for women who had already started to question whether a thrice-married misogynist was the best candidate for president. “I’m really, really struggling with this election because I think one of the most important things to consider when choosing a president is the ramifications on judicial nominations,” says Jessica Frieberg, a 29-year-old paralegal from Southern California. At the same time, she wonders if she can “really vote for Trump when he, as an individual, behaves in such morally and ethically reprehensible ways.”

While evangelicals have typically supported the Republican presidential nominee by a wide margin in recent decades, Trump’s candidacy was already causing many in the evangelical base to question the long alliance between their faith community and the GOP.

For many young evangelical women, support of Trump was never an option in the first place. Julia, a 21-year-old newspaper editor in the Midwest who asked to be identified by only her first name, comes from a “fairly conservative background” but has never considered voting for Trump. He “is the antithesis of every value I was raised to hold or have since come to hold,” she says—values like “kindness, open-mindedness, humility, truthfulness or any awareness of how the world actually works.” She says her faith drives her to hope “that the president would value those under his or her care, but the only person I have seen Trump value is himself.”

Whitney Jones, a 26-year-old technical writer from Murray, Kansas, graduated from the Southern Baptist Convention-funded Union University and voted Republican in the 2008 and 2012 elections but has “never once considered supporting Trump, though both my parents and grandparents support him.” She’s become a Hillary Clinton supporter in this election and, in what she calls a “big move,” registered as a Democrat a couple of weeks ago. And Katie Loveland, a 33-year-old consultant in Helena, Montana, is involved in a number of offline conversations with evangelical women who “saw through Trump from the beginning.” Many of those women, she says, are trying to hold on to their evangelical label—meaning theologically conservative Christians, as opposed to more liberal mainliners—but “feel that they are being pushed to the brink by this election.”

For a generation (or more), voting evangelical has meant siding with the candidate who promises to overturn Roe v. Wade, and with one Supreme Court seat already in the balance and more certain to open, the issue has acquired even more urgency. Clinton mentioned in Sunday’s debate that she is committed to appointing justices who will uphold Roe as the law of the land. Trump has put forward a list of conservative justices that satisfy the desires of the evangelical electorate, justices who would, given the chance, overturn Roe v. Wade. That list covers a multitude of sins for Trump, whose personal failings are being overlooked by evangelicals who see filling Supreme Court seats as the most important issue of the election.

When it comes to what are traditionally referred to as “women’s issues,” evangelicals are more divided. They are largely against abortion, but the decentralized structure of evangelicalism means that churches get to decide individually about the role women can play in leadership, and many of the country’s most prominent megachurches have women at top levels of leadership and pastoral staff. So while some evangelicals might dismiss Trump’s throwback attitudes about women as “boys will be boys,” many have been up in arms about his attitude toward women precisely because the evangelical church has been alert to the role of women for decades.

That said, in some respects what’s striking is how many women haven’t budged, despite Trump’s clear violation of evangelical sexual ethics, both in word and deed—considering his divorces and pursuit of married women. An acquaintance of mine, an evangelical woman in her early 30s, wrote a Facebook post in which she said she was disturbed by what Trump had said but was committed to voting for him because “the Supreme Court is the most important issue of this election.” She wrote that she knew it wasn’t popular among evangelicals to vote for him—itself a surprising thing to say about a GOP candidate, and debatable, depending on the evangelical circles you run in—but encouraged her friends to think about their children and cast a vote for the candidate most likely to help outlaw abortion.

Older female evangelicals seem to be less reticent about their support for Trump. Catherine Mazanowicz, 59, is an executive assistant in Chicago and has been for Trump since the primaries. “I am supporting Trump because I do not want to see Hillary Clinton in power,” Mazanowicz says. She says the audio leak doesn’t bother her because it “is 11 years old [and] elections should be based on issues.”

She repeats a line I’ve heard frequently from evangelicals, which is that she’s not looking for a perfect candidate for president but for an “effective leader.” Sandra Davis, a 66-year-old retired housewife with a Master of Divinity degree, lives in Newport Beach, California, and was disappointed by Trump’s remarks about how he treated women. It made her “wonder what God is doing in his life. But I decide to separate that behavior from his ability to lead the country,” Davis says. “I do not think that it is necessary for the president to be a Christian. … However, there are values that I hold to which are formed by my Christian faith that cause me to support one candidate over another.” Davis values religious liberty, and fears that a Clinton presidency would be “very dangerous” to freedom in the pulpit. She wants a president who will “protect the unborn,” a value that stems from her Christian faith and that she has heard Trump espouse. And she believes that “the system we live under is the greatest one in the world,” a sentiment I’ve heard many times from evangelicals who value the individualism of democracy and capitalism in the same way their faith values the individualism of conversion.

It has been getting harder to generalize about “evangelicals” over the past few elections, in part because of what appears to be a widening generational divide among self-identified Protestant voters. The issues that once led them to vote in lockstep are now splitting along age lines. Younger evangelicals are increasingly attracted to issues their older counterparts were apathetic about, like mass incarceration and “creation care,” a term for evangelical involvement in environmental issues. And when it comes to support for gay marriage—a position unthinkable not long ago, when Christian conservatives were seen as a great political rampart in the effort to keep marriage between a man and a woman—millennial evangelicals support gay marriage at a rate of about 43 percent, as compared with 19 percent of the oldest evangelical generation.

“There has been a building sense, especially among younger evangelicals, that their faith had become too closely tied to a political party,” says Michael Wear, co-founder of Public Faith and author of an upcoming book recounting lessons of hope from his time directing faith outreach for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign. (Wear, considered a moderate in evangelical politics, isn’t publicly supporting either candidate.) “I think a lot of evangelicals, especially younger ones, they get quite a lot of emotional and social affirmation from being able to be so strongly against Trump.”

If support for a secular, libertine Republican is proving surprisingly hard to budge, there may be a reason beyond just the issues. Though it’s not often discussed in these terms, there’s also an evangelical disposition to want to endorse a candidate wholeheartedly. Evangelicalism is all about certainty of conviction, from the moment of conversion to the confidence that their understanding of biblical interpretation is the apex of historical Christianity. They, more than other groups, have a need to represent a united, not conflicted, front. So a candidate like Trump, who is right on the one big thing that matters, can count on a constituency to find and parrot the good things about him as a candidate, no matter what.

So what remains to unite the evangelical vote? The refrain I keep hearing in my reporting from both sides is that, unless Jesus Christ is on the ballot, we are not going to have a perfect candidate for president. Wear also says he’s observed the phenomenon of evangelicals excusing Trump’s errors in judgment because they think that our current political situation might just be too complicated for Jesus. This line of thinking, Wear says, goes, “If only Jesus knew when he said ‘love your enemies’ that there was going to be this difficult political thing we’d have to apply it to, there surely would have been an addendum.”

Sandra Davis, the retired housewife from Newport Beach, is still feeling conflicted, and for a very Christian reason. “On some level I have a lot of compassion for Hillary. My dislike of her is high, yet when people were yelling ‘Send her to jail’ at the Republican convention, I felt bad for her. … I pray for her that if she loses she will have something meaningful in her life where she can make a difference. Most days I even mean it.”