Stephen Mansfield - Choosing Donald Trump: God, Anger, Hope, and Why Christian Conservatives Supported Him

I am the only one who can make America great again.

Donald Trump

P olitics is almost always a matter of choosing between holding your nose and holding your nose tighter, but the 2016 election that placed Donald Trump in the White House was a particularly pungent affair. Perhaps the offerings were simply exposed to the elements for too long. Perhaps this explains the spoilage and the rot that set in.

There had been the blistering primary battle between Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders. It lasted for more than a year, required six bludgeoning debates, and when it was over had solved very little. Hillary Clinton was the Democratic Party nominee. No one was surprised.

The Republican primaries took an even greater toll. There were seventeen candidates, twelve debates, and nine forums to endure. The bloodletting threatened to never end. Civility abandoned the field. The word gravitas never came to mind. Candidates insulted each others wives, publicly questioned their opponents eternal salvation, accused each others families of complicity in the Kennedy assassination, and disparaged each other in scatological terms. Hand size was an oft-used metaphor for size of another kind, and more than one candidate felt the need to assure the nation that he measured up to expectations.

When it was all over and the blood was wiped from television screens nationwide, Donald Trump was the Republican Party nominee for president of the United States.

He was the most unusual party nominee in American history. He had never held public office. He made his wealth and his reputation in cutthroat real estate deals and as an owner of gambling casinos. He specialized in breaking the rules. His campaign was one of the least orthodox, least disciplined, and least focused in US political historyand still he won his partys nomination handily.

The immorality of his prior life alone set him apart as an American presidential candidate. He had been married three times and publicly boasted of his marital infidelities. He had often been a guest of adult talk shows where he found it necessary to describe his favorite variations on traditional marital practices. Voters could watch it all on YouTube. During his campaign, he swore, he mocked the handicapped, he insulted nearly every ethnicity in the United States, and he was eager to expose the sins of his political rivals.

None of it did him harm. He seemed coated in invisible Teflon. Even a decade-old recording of him describing sexual conquests real and intended did him no lasting damage. He could not mangle a fact or lob an insult so as to hurt himself in the polls. He was bulletproof. He was untouchable. He became the forty-fifth president of the United States.

Yet none of this was as surprising as the support from religious Americans that Donald Trump commanded. At his side stood some of the most visible faith leaders in the nation. Famous preachers declared him Gods man. Eminent theologians said he was chosen. Others said he was a Lincoln, perhaps not an orthodox believer but guided nevertheless by the better angels of his nature and the hand of a history-ruling God. A few even said he was a Churchillcrass, blasphemous, gifted, and ordained.

Trump gave back in kind. He swore to protect the Christian faith. He spoke of the religion of the political left as a religion alien to the good of the nation. He showed he had been doing his homework. He promised to totally destroy the Johnson Amendment that prevented clergy from supporting political causes and candidates. Few of his rivals even knew what it was. The much-maligned religious right knew, though, and realized in amazement that Donald Trumpof all peoplehad made himself a champion of their cause.