Jonathan Merritt

Opinion contributor

In the wake of President Trump’s waffling on white supremacy, his supporters and advisers have abandoned him in droves.

After a wave of prominent CEOs defected from the president’s Manufacturing Council and Strategy & Policy Forum, Trump decided to disband both. On Friday morning, the entire President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities resigned. As their joint letter to Trump declared, “Ignoring your harmful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions.” The first letter of each paragraph spelled “resist.”

Amid the mass exodus, one group is somehow standing by its man: evangelical Christians. Pastors and activists on Trump’s informal faith advisory council have stated their unwavering support of a man whose statements and behavior consistently clash with the convictions they claim to hold. One has to wonder what, if anything, it will take for these evangelicals to finally dump Trump.

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Evangelicals are one of the most socially conservative groups in America, which has made for unlikely allies for Trump since the beginning. They’ve historically opposed pornography and gambling, but Trump once performed a cameo in a soft-core porn film and appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine, and one of his erstwhile casinos even housed a strip club.

Evangelicals have often advocated for abstinence education in public schools and the “sanctity of marriage,” but the thrice-married Trump has repeatedly bragged about his loose sexual exploits. The group has widely lamented the secularization of society, but Trump doesn’t regularly attend church.

Consider Trump’s stance on gay marriage. While evangelicals have long fought against rights for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, the president has repeatedly stated his unwillingness to overturn the legalization of same-sex marriage. When Trump invited Peter Thiel, the openly gay founder of PayPal, to speak at the Republication National Convention, nary a peep was heard from evangelicals. One can only imagine how conservative Christians would have criticized the Democratic Party’s lack of “traditional values” if Thiel had spoken at the Democratic convention in support of Hillary Clinton.

When rumors emerged that Trump would nominate Richard Grenell, a gay man who once served as U.S. spokesman to the United Nations, to be ambassador to NATO, members of Trump’s faith advisory council stated they would support the president’s decision. Just a few years earlier, Mitt Romney selected Grenell as a foreign policy adviser and religious leaders revolted.

Mark DeMoss, who leads one of the nation’s largest Christian public relations companies, served as a senior adviser to Romney in 2008 and 2012. When Grenell was appointed, DeMoss said, “A number of evangelicals, including some on President Trump’s faith advisory council, registered their objections with me to Romney’s tapping of Grenell.” Pressure grew until Grenell resigned.

When tensions with North Korea escalated, the president insinuated he might launch a nuclear attack on the communist country. Though such a strike would fail to pass the criteria for the historic Christian concept of a “just war,” Trump’s evangelical cadre shrugged it off. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas and member of the executive committee of the White House Faith Initiative, even stated that God had given Trump the authority to take out Kim Jong Un.

Then demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., happened, and the president enraged the nation by vacillating between kind-of-sort-of condemning and openly defending white supremacist protesters. How did his evangelical advisers respond? By reiterating their support.

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Jeffress told me via email that he believes Trump’s response to the Charlottesville protests has been “very balanced … and I support him completely.” Though he said he hasn’t seen the president do anything worthy of condemnation, if he had a concern, he would speak to Trump privately. When asked about the feelings among the faith advisory council members, Jeffress said, “The vast majority of this council is just as enthusiastic about President Trump as we were on Election Day.”

Why would they stick around? Part of the answer is the lure of White House access at a time when the cultural cache of Christianity is low and religious freedom is at issue in the halls of power, particularly in the courts soon to be stocked with Trump appointees.

Following the president’s now-infamous presser at Trump Tower, Christians on social media attempted to pressure faith advisory council members to respond and resign. Council member Johnnie Moore responded on Twitter, “No, I am not pulling out as an evangelical adviser to the White House. It’s not our job to take advice but to give it. I will keep giving it.”

One must wonder at what point the president must not be advised but rather criticized. Conservative Christians have never been meager when criticizing their opponents on the left, so why are they so sheepish when it comes to calling Trump to the carpet? As Martin Luther King once said, “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.” Evangelical leaders have determined to ever be Trump’s guide, and never his critic. In this, they are becoming a tool of the state, rather than its conscience.

Four decades ago, evangelical leaders warned that America was entering a period of moral decline. Moral Majority leaders claimed to take up the mantle as the nation’s conscience. Under the Trump administration, however, the moral decline about which evangelicals spoke has been realized, and they have ironically enabled it. It’s difficult to imagine anything that Trump could conceivably do at this point that would trigger an evangelical exodus.

At the end of last week, Brooklyn pastor A.R. Bernard became the only religious leader to quit President’s Trump’s faith advisory council. Bernard said he saw the council as “an opportunity to effect change,” but over time his conscience would no longer allow him. “There was a line,” Bernard said, and Trump’s Charlottesville comments crossed it. One has to wonder whether other evangelical leaders have drawn their own lines. In multiple interviews with religious advisors to Trump, I asked what the president could do or say that would cause them to quit. No one could think of a comment or behavior that would trigger their resignation.

Whenever Christianity has aligned with the partisan powers that be, the movement has suffered. DeMoss, who has been involved in Christian leadership and political engagement for more than three decades, said evangelical support for Trump will likely devastate the movement itself. As he told me, “Generally, I think we’ve squandered moral authority for perhaps a generation.”

By aligning with Trump, evangelicals have called into question whether they actually hold all the values they claim to prize. This is doubtlessly tarnishing their reputation with the broader society that they hope to influence.

If Trump’s bad behavior persists and conservative Christians refuse to jump ship politically, they could end up jumping the shark culturally.

Jonathan Merritt is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and senior columnist for Religion News Service. Follow him on Twitter: @JonathanMerritt

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