Evangelicals soul-searching after Alabama Senate race tarnishes image

Supporters of Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, pray at an election night gathering in Montgomery, Ala., Dec. 12, 2017. The sight of white evangelical voters in Alabama giving their overwhelming support to Moore, despite accusations of racial and religious bigotry, misogyny and assaults on teenage girls, has deeply troubled many conservative Christians. (Audra Melton/The New York Times) less Supporters of Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, pray at an election night gathering in Montgomery, Ala., Dec. 12, 2017. The sight of white evangelical voters in Alabama giving their ... more Photo: AUDRA MELTON, NYT Photo: AUDRA MELTON, NYT Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Evangelicals soul-searching after Alabama Senate race tarnishes image 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

The editor in chief of Christianity Today did not have to wait for the votes to be counted to publish his essay Tuesday bemoaning what the Alabama Senate race had wrought.

Whoever wins, “there is already one loser: Christian faith,” wrote Mark Galli, whose publication, the flagship of American evangelicalism, was founded 61 years ago by the Rev. Billy Graham. “No one will believe a word we say, perhaps for a generation. Christianity’s integrity is severely tarnished.”

The sight of white evangelical voters in Alabama giving their overwhelming support to Roy Moore, the Republican candidate, despite accusations of racial and religious bigotry, misogyny and assaults on teenage girls, has deeply troubled many conservative Christians, who fear that association with the likes of Moore is giving their faith a bad name. The angst has grown so deep, Galli said, that he knows of “many card-carrying evangelicals” who are ready to disavow the label.

The evangelical brand “is definitely tarnished” by politicization from whatever side, Galli said last week. “No question about it.”

He said that his readers seemed to agree with the thrust of his essay. The main criticism he received, he said, was one he agreed with: that he should have made it clearer that he was referring not to all Christians, but to evangelicals in particular.

The bloc that has marched under the banner of the Moral Majority” and “values voters” has now been tagged as the most reliable base of support for both Moore and President Trump, two politicians who are known for fanning racial and religious prejudices and who stand accused of sexual harassment by numerous women — accusations that each man denies. White evangelicals across the country delivered 81 percent of their votes to Trump last year, according to exit poll data, and backed Moore in Alabama by the same percentage Tuesday.

“It grieves me,” said Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, a prominent evangelical school in Illinois. “I don’t want ‘evangelical’ to mean people who supported candidates with significant and credible accusations against them. If evangelical means that, it has serious ramifications for the work of Christians and churches.”

That notion is bewildering to evangelical leaders who see Trump as their champion. They say that Trump has given them more access than any president in recent memory, and has done more to advance their agenda, by appointing judges who are likely to rule against abortion and gay rights; by channeling government funds to private religious schools; by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel; and by calling for the elimination of the Johnson Amendment, which prohibits churches and charitable groups from endorsing political candidates.

“I believe that God answered our prayers in a way we didn’t expect, for a person we didn’t even necessarily like,” said Stephen Strang, author of “God and Donald Trump,” and founder of Charisma Media, a Christian publishing house.

“Christians believe in redemption and forgiveness, so they’re willing to give Donald Trump a chance,” said Strang, a member of the president’s informal council of evangelical advisers. “If he turns out to be a lecher like Bill Clinton, or dishonest in some kind of way, in a way that’s proven, you’ll see the support fade as quick as it came.”

Strang said that those who talk about Trump tarnishing the evangelical brand “are not really believers — they’re not with us, anyway.”

Evangelicals, often known as born-again Christians, belong to many denominations of churches, but they share some basic tenets: Believers must accept Jesus as a personal savior, spread the Gospel, and regard the Bible as the ultimate authority and the sacrifice of Jesus as necessary for the salvation of humanity.

When it comes to politics, however, the evangelical bloc is not rock solid, and the past year and a half has brought the cracks to the surface. There are evangelicals who took to Trump early on, evangelicals who were gradually won over, and evangelicals who were and proudly remain #NeverTrump, as some proclaim online.

There are young evangelicals who are disavowing their elders. There are Latino, Asian, black and American Indian evangelicals who are outraged at white believers for allying with a president they regard as racist and hostile to immigrants. Black hip-hop artist LeCrae made waves when he recently gave an interview announcing that he had divorced himself from white evangelicalism.

Jemar Tisby, president of “The Witness, a black Christian collective,” a faith-based media company that provides commentary on race, religion and culture, said that while Trump was running, “we were saying, this man is promoting bigotry, white supremacists find an ally in him and this is going to be bad for us.”

“And not only did they vote for him,” Tisby continued, “they voted for him in slightly higher numbers than they did for Mitt Romney. It was a sense of betrayal.”

Tisby, who co-hosts the podcast “Pass the Mic,” said that many blacks who hold evangelical beliefs have been reluctant to identify themselves as evangelicals, and that reluctance was growing.

“It’s counterproductive to identify as evangelical,” he said. “What’s happened with evangelicalism is, it has become so conflated with Republican politics, that you can’t tell where Christianity ends and partisanship begins.”

There are signs that evangelicals have begun to drift away from their solid support for Trump. A poll conducted from Nov. 29 to Dec. 4 by the Pew Research Center found that the president’s job approval among white evangelical Protestants had fallen to 61 percent, from 78 percent in February.

The association with Moore troubled some female evangelicals who found his accusers to be credible. Two women said he had sexually molested them when they were teenagers, and others said that he had taken them out on dates or hounded them at work, accusations that Moore denies.

Some female evangelicals said on social media that they stayed home rather than vote for either Moore or his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, whose views on issues like abortion are distant from their own.

Many women have expressed the broader concern that overlooking accusations of sexual misconduct against favored politicians sends a dangerous message that women who come forward can be dismissed in the service of a political agenda.

“We’ve let evil overtake the entire reputation of Evangelicalism,” one prominent evangelical author, Beth Moore, wrote on Twitter the day before the election. “The lust for power is nauseating. Racism, appalling. The arrogance, terrifying. The misogyny so far from Christlikeness, it can’t be Christianity.”

People have had the impulse to jettison the evangelical label before, according to Stetzer of Wheaton College. It came up after the televangelist scandals involving Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart in the 1980s. But the idea received new attention and momentum soon after Trump was elected.

Galli, the magazine editor, said he had recently brainstormed a list of 50 to 100 words, looking for a suitable substitute term. Among them: neo-evangelical, Gospel Christian, Followers of Jesus.

“Purple-cow Christianity,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter. It’s the reality underneath that we affirm.”

Laurie Goodstein is a New York Times writer.