Is this God?

This Christmas season has some members of the American evangelical community questioning their faith. Or, to be more accurate, questioning where their faith is headed, given that American evangelicalism is now permanently associated with support for an Alabama child molester.

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 S. 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 Mr. Moore is giving their faith a bad name. The angst has grown so deep, Mr. Galli said, that he knows of “many card-carrying evangelicals” who are ready to disavow the label.

It is a legitimate question. In this world there is a difference between religious people and religious people, and one that never quite gets teased out because it is considered deeply rude to point it out, even as the vast majority of humans nod their heads and know precisely what the pointer-outer is saying.

There are people for whom their religion is a guidepost, a means to their own desired personal ends of becoming a more moral, or more generous, or more forgiving, or more compassionate person.

And then there are others, and we have all met them, who instead consider religion to be a license permitting them to go against all of those things. People who declare that the saved are saved, either in advance of their misdeeds or after them, and so that if someone like Roy Moore molests children it is insignificant compared to the other supposed good and noble things he will do, things like helping to ban abortion or to restrict the rights of Muslims, and so the child molestation can be overlooked. People who similarly dismiss Trump's status as a stingy, self-centered, sexual harassing racist because he may be those things, but a Republican in office stands a better chance of elevating the role of their own churches in American discourse, and so that is that.

Evangelicals, more than any other American religious group, have become publicly associated with the cheaper, latter version. And it is nobody's fault but their own—the fault of the evangelical leaders who have defended Trump’s every immoral outburst and lavished religiously-premised defenses of Moore, and it is the subject of a growing war for the movement's soul.