The leader of the conservative evangelical organization Family Research Council said that evangelicals were happy to give President Donald Trump a “do-over” after a previously unpublished 2011 interview with adult film actress Stormy Daniels revealed that she may have been paid to remain silent about an extramarital affair with Trump in 2006.
Speaking to Politico’s Edward-Isaac Dovere about the Daniels incident, Tony Perkins said evangelicals “kind of gave him — ‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here,’” using a golfing term that refers to a free stroke given to a player after a poor shot.
Perkins argued that the good Trump could do for evangelicals made up for his un-biblical behavior and warranted a free pass. He told Dovere that evangelicals “were tired of being kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists. And I think they are finally glad that there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.”
Perkins’s remarks reflect a wider trend among white evangelicals (81 percent of whom voted for Trump in the 2016 election): Many choose to disregard Trump’s decidedly debauched, decades-old public persona to focus on his anti-LBGTQ and anti-abortion stances. Many, including Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, have chosen to mark a clear division between Trump’s past and his present, describing him as a “baby Christian.” (It’s unclear when or if Trump has become a born-again Christian, but in June 2016, shortly after the Republican National Convention, Dobson said he had heard that Trump had “recently” converted.) Certainly, this does fit in with a wider evangelical ethos of redemption, which typically disregards a person’s pre-conversion actions.
There’s another element to evangelical support of Trump, one that Perkins’s word choice in this interview makes clear. Trump’s pugnacious language may seem to jar with ordinary Christian rhetoric, but it’s actually very much in keeping with the imagery of “muscular Christianity,” the quintessentially Anglo-American conflation of machismo and religiosity that has defined American evangelicalism since the country’s foundation.
Understanding the degree to which attitudes about gender and race have informed white evangelical narratives is key to understanding Trump’s success with them. The idea of Trump as a successful “bully” or a “God Emperor” has long been central to alt-right memes about Trumpian power. Within this mindset, Trump’s stereotypically “male” behavior — from extramarital affairs to rhetorically “punching” bullies — is not just forgivable but desirable. Trump’s machismo is in fact part of what makes him such a valuable cultural beacon to his supporters within the religious right.
Often, discussion of “identity politics” centers on critiques — sometimes fair, sometimes not — of the left. But what Perkins’s interview shows us is that “identity politics” is a two-way street.
After all, it’s what got Trump elected.
