Around the time President Trump began his campaign, his former attorney Michael Cohen hired John Gauger, the chief information officer of Liberty University, to write computer code that would rig two online polls to artificially inflate Trump’s numbers, the Wall Street Journal reported on January 17.

Cohen promised Gauger $50,000 to up Trump’s results in a 2014 CNBC poll of America’s top business leaders and in a 2015 Drudge Report poll of potential Republican presidential candidates. In addition, Gauger created the Twitter handle @WomenforCohen, a profile purporting to have emerged organically describing Cohen as a “sex symbol.”

When Gauger went to Trump Tower to collect his compensation, Cohen didn’t cut him a check. Instead, he handed over a Walmart bag containing between $12,000 and $13,000 in cash plus a boxing glove that Cohen claimed had been worn by a Brazilian MMA fighter.

How do we know all this? Because Gauger, perhaps weary of waiting for the rest of the money, recounted the whole story to the Wall Street Journal himself.

Cohen’s part in this story will surprise no one at this point. This year, he will report to prison to serve a three-year term for tax fraud and other crimes committed during his stint as Trump’s attorney.

But such behavior from the CIO of the nation’s largest evangelical university? That will raise a few eyebrows. And the university’s response to Gauger’s public disclosure is perplexing for similar reasons:

Liberty University, like many other educational institutions, has permitted its employees for many years to engage in business, consulting and other side work that does not interfere with their employment obligations to the University. Also, like other organizations, Liberty recognizes the strong demand for highly skilled IT professionals creates special challenges in recruiting and retaining talented employees with those skills and experience. The opportunity for Liberty’s IT employees to develop businesses and products is particularly important to attracting and maintaining Liberty’s IT talent. John Gauger is one example among many outstanding LU employees who have made great contributions in their official roles and also enjoyed success as independent entrepreneurs, allowing them to enhance their capabilities and generate more revenue for their families while allowing the University to retain them on our team.

One might file both Gauger’s reaction and Liberty University’s under the mental category, “Why aren’t you embarrassed about this?”

You would expect Gauger to be embarrassed because he was paid to falsify data in order to deceive the public for political reasons. You would think that Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. would be mortified to say that Trump is a “good moral person” and, just a few weeks ago, that he cannot imagine Trump doing anything to harm the country. You might assume Liberty as an institution would rein in its leader, who still vocally supports a man who brags about committing sexual assault and stands credibly accused of suborning perjury. You might be stunned that the university publicly backed Gauger, who actively worked to deceive the public to get his candidate elected, a candidate who was later recorded talking about grabbing women by the pussy.

But your waiting and consternation appear to be in vain.

Maybe we should know not to expect better. Once Gauger hung his dirty laundry out for the public to see, a discerning observer could have predicted Liberty’s response. After all, President Trump gave the commencement speech at the University in 2017, which was after the Access Hollywood tape came out.

In that address Trump could say,

It’s been over a year since I’ve spoken on your beautiful campus and so much has changed. Right here, the class of 2017, dressed in cap and gown, graduating to a totally brilliant future. And here I am standing before you as the president of the United States. So I’m guessing there are some people who are here today who thought that either one of those things, either one, would really require major help from God. Do we agree? And we got it.

This lack of embarrassment about very public moral failings and this willingness to laud (and baptize the actions of) those who commit them is new in evangelicalism. Twenty years ago, conservative Protestantism was awash in purity rings and WWJD bracelets. Today, by some accounts, it’s awash in rage and abhorrent speech. Orthodox evangelicals might express bewilderment at just how this development played out, but it’s increasingly clear that the rumors are true. Evangelicalism today, or at least the brand regnant at Liberty University and similar institutions, has taken on a character that seems to be different from historic American evangelicalism in important ways.

What is Liberty University’s theology, then? Two closely related points will, to invoke the old parable, give us a sense of this elephant’s size and shape.

First, it seems that in Liberty theology immoral acts are tolerated as long as they are a means to a (perceived) good end. Traditional Protestant theologies have assumed that the elect would shun evil no matter what. They didn’t need to create the right political or individual outcomes themselves. They only needed to obey God and trust in His providence.

For those who subscribe to Liberty’s theology, the converse is true. One is righteous if one is batting for the right cultural and political team. Some old-school evangelicals like Carl F. H. Henry or some contemporary ones like Francis Chan might be left slack jawed by this development. They may see it as a loss of faith. But that doesn’t make it any less real.

The second defining feature of Liberty theology is its ultimate goal. The (supposedly) good end sought by advocates of Liberty theology is not so much the proclamation of the gospel and the lordship of Jesus Christ, but the maintenance of a certain culture. Some readers might feel this is unfair, others that it’s too obvious to warrant mention. Here I’m simply arguing that it’s true.

This theological commitment can be most readily understood by examining talk about religious freedom. As great a good as religious freedom can be, for any practicing religious person it cannot logically be the greatest good. For Christians, the greatest good is communicated in the proclamation of the gospel. Religious freedom only allows one to preach without government interference.

In other words, the First Amendment has never told anyone about Jesus. It has only created the conditions so that Christians can do that without great personal risk.

Some Protestants who subscribe to Liberty theology seem to have forgotten this crucial piece of Christian theology. They speak and act in ways evangelicals of old would have found repugnant and scandalous. And they do so, apparently, because it gives them an advantage in national politics. Rather than waiting for Christ to bring the kingdom, they seem intent on building it themselves, even if that means employing less-than-Christlike means.

Some might argue that Liberty theology isn’t a new phenomenon at all, even if it has taken on new forms since Trump’s rise. They might point back to the Moral Majority or Scopes-era Fundamentalism or even Niebuhrian liberalism to make their point.

German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer may well have agreed. He spent a year in United States during the 1930–31 academic year and returned during the summer of 1939. The individualism, the greed, and the fetishization of the separation of church and state in America all struck him as theologically bankrupt.

Only where the gospel is proclaimed, Bonhoeffer wrote in his essay on America entitled “Protestantism without Reformation,” “is there freedom of the church. But where the gratitude for institutional freedom must be paid for through the sacrifice of the freedom of proclamation, there the church is in chains, even if it believes itself to be free.”

To the degree that evangelicalism has adopted Liberty theology, I would argue that Bonhoeffer’s critique about freedom of the church still applies. Freedom of religion in the sense that should be most important to Christians is being traded away. If that’s so, the next task for evangelicals must be to see just how deep the rot goes.