Even with the recent allegations of infidelity—with adult-film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, whose respective lawsuits have become tangled in the Russia investigation—white evangelical Protestants are showing no signs of a sunset on their support. By a margin of 3 to 1, or 69 percent versus 23 percent, white evangelical Protestants who identify with or lean toward the Republican Party say they would prefer Trump over another candidate to be the GOP nominee for president in 2020.

Favorability of Donald Trump Among White Evangelical Protestants

Sources: PRRI surveys, 2015-2018

A PRRI poll conducted in the fall of 2017 suggested how unshakeable the white evangelical-Trump connection has become: Among the 72 percent of white evangelical Protestants who approved of Trump’s job performance at the time, approximately four in 10 agreed with the following statement: “There’s almost nothing President Trump could do to lose my approval.”

Several prominent evangelical leaders have explicitly said as much. When asked on Fox News last month about Trump’s alleged affair with Daniels, Robert Jeffress, one of Trump’s earliest campaign supporters, downplayed the news. “Evangelicals still believe in the commandment, ‘Thou shalt not have sex with a porn star.’ … However, whether the president violated that commandment or not is totally irrelevant for our support of him,” explained Jeffress, who is the pastor of a Dallas megachurch. “Evangelicals knew they weren’t voting for an altar boy when they voted for Donald Trump.”

Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council and a longtime operative on the Christian right, was even more straightforward in an interview with Politico earlier this year. Rather than attempt to deny or defend the Daniels allegations, he simply said: “We kind of gave him—‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here.’”

Some evangelical leaders are wrestling with the bloc’s alliance with Trump, which they worry could threaten the religious future of the faith. This concern was the catalyst for a gathering of evangelical leaders earlier this week at the flagship evangelical school Wheaton College in Illinois. In an interview with Religion News Service, Katelyn Beaty, an editor at large at the leading evangelical magazine Christianity Today, said explicitly that the reason for the meeting, which she attended, was “the 2016 election and the role that white evangelicals played in electing Trump.” But she emphasized that it was less about Trump himself—or the evangelical leaders who advise him—and more about what the strong evangelical association with Trump “mean[s] for us and how have we gone wrong and how can we repair what’s clearly broken.”

Doug Birdsall, one of the meeting’s organizers, told The Washington Post “there’s a grotesque caricature of what it means to be an evangelical.”



“When you Google evangelicals, you get Trump,” he lamented. “When people say, ‘What does it mean to be an evangelical?’ people don’t say ‘evangelism’ or ‘the Gospel.’”