Evangelical support for Donald Trump in the face of his many well-documented personal failings can no longer come as a surprise. Despite—or, in at least some cases, one suspects, because of—his numerous criminal indictments and thirty-four felony convictions in New York, exit polls found that around 82 percent of white Evangelicals voted for the Trump/Vance ticket. This was in line with the roughly 80 percent who backed Trump in 2016 and 2020.
A few commentators still cling to the argument that this support is not enthusiastic and that many Evangelicals “hold their noses” when they cast their ballots for Trump. Still, when given the option of supporting bona fide Evangelical Mike Pence in the 2024 Republican primary, they preferred Trump. And empirical research has cast doubt on the idea of the reluctant Evangelical Trump voter. Political scientist Paul A. Djupe surveyed voters in 2016 and found that “evangelical feelings toward their standard bearer are statistically no different than others.... Evangelicals who voted for Trump felt the same warmth toward him as did other Trump voters.”
How did Evangelicals come to support Trump? Voting behavior is complex, and no monocausal explanation can suffice, but one significant factor is the ethical reasoning Evangelicals have employed. In recent decades, few American Evangelicals have developed a sophisticated, biblically grounded political theology, and the intense political engagement that emerged in the 1970s has rarely been constructed upon careful, historically informed analysis. Instead, Evangelicals have been vulnerable to pragmatic, often simplistic arguments made by partisans eager to win their support.
Still, until recently, one of Evangelicals’ deeply rooted principles had been the importance of candidates’ personal integrity. It was central to their critique of Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky affair. This view reflected a deontological approach to ethics that understands certain actions as intrinsically right or wrong, irrespective of their consequences. Most conservative Protestant theologians subscribed to this traditional system of normative ethics based upon eternally valid principles.
Accordingly, in 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution entitled “On Moral Character of Public Officials.” It bemoaned the fact that “many Americans are willing to excuse or overlook immoral or illegal conduct by unrepentant public officials so long as economic prosperity prevails.” Furthermore, it held that “tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.” Finally, the resolution affirmed that “[m]oral character matters to God” and urged Southern Baptists “to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character.”
Some might argue that the Southern Baptists were just indulging a partisan impulse to criticize a Democratic president, and they may be correct. But there were examples of Republican politicians being held to the same standard. For instance, the infamous 2009 case of South Carolina Republican governor Mark Sanford suggested that there were political consequences for marital infidelity. After his secret tryst with a South American journalist was exposed, many conservatives strongly denounced him and Republicans in the state house began to pursue impeachment proceedings.
But something had definitively changed by 2016, and Trump both benefited from and helped cement this shift. As late as 2011, a sizable majority of Evangelicals still affirmed that the personal ethics of candidates mattered, but in 2016, a staggering 72 percent of Evangelicals surveyed endorsed a tidy separation between candidates’ public and private lives. Like good utilitarians, Evangelicals were setting aside considerations of character and personal morality in Trump’s case. For many Evangelicals, Trump’s political promises overshadowed his sleazy business ethics and pervasive and unconcealed dishonesty. This entailed a shift from the deontological approach to something scholars term consequentialism. The consequentialist holds that good ends, however they might be defined, can justify the use of unethical means. Of course, Christians of all sorts have historically been wary of this sort of argument since it allows for violations of morality in the name of what’s taken to be a good cause.
Southern Baptist Pastor Robert Jeffress made the consequentialist case for Trump explicitly and enthusiastically in a 2016 NPR interview. “When I’m looking for a leader who’s going to fight ISIS and keep this nation secure,” Jeffress asserted, “I don’t want some meek and mild leader or somebody who’s going to turn the other cheek. I’ve said I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.” Apparently, traditional Christian virtues must be discarded to serve the interests of national security. Similarly, then-president of Liberty University, Jerry Falwell Jr., appeared to argue in a 2018 interview that Christian ethics don’t apply to the exercise of presidential power. Responding to Falwell’s comments, one former Republican Congressman, Reid Ribble, rightly concluded: “This says more about the state of evangelicalism than the Presidency. Being ‘good’ is fundamental to leadership. So if I agree with the policy, it doesn’t matter how it is achieved? The end justifies the means? Wow.”
Signs of the Evangelical shift toward ethical consequentialism appeared earlier, during George W. Bush’s war on terror. Evangelicals registered higher levels of support than the general public for the controversial “enhanced interrogation” techniques CIA agents used to obtain information from some 9/11 detainees. They also rejected the longstanding conviction that waterboarding and similar methods constituted torture. A Washington Post/ABC News poll at the time found that nearly seventy percent of white Evangelicals viewed these methods as ethically justified if they yielded useful intelligence.
Whenever the shift occurred, Trump appears to have helped confirm it. Or perhaps Evangelicals readily connected with the New York real-estate mogul partly because he spoke their utilitarian language. Donald Trump is the consummate consequentialist. As Bonnie Kristian has observed, his cozy, even fawning relationship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un reflected this transactional approach. “I like him. He likes me,” Trump remarked of the pitiless megalomaniac. If their “love” troubled observers, that was just too bad—it could achieve good ends: “Let it be whatever it is to get the job done,” Trump remarked in one interview.
Some Evangelicals draw parallels between Trump and the Old Testament’s portrayal of Persian King Cyrus to justify their pragmatic approach. The pagan king is depicted as an unwitting instrument used by God to protect and bless his chosen people, Israel. This sort of “vessel theology” frees Evangelicals from having to defend Trump’s immoral behavior.
The broader social acceptance of this consequentialism was evident recently during the Senate hearings to confirm Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense. In his testimony, Hegseth frequently referenced his newfound Evangelical faith. He did so while simultaneously lamenting that American soldiers had been required to follow higher ethical standards and rules of engagement than those of ISIS terrorists. Few commentators pointed out the incongruity. Perhaps we are all consequentialists now.
Decades ago, Archbishop Fulton Sheen assailed the consequentialist reasoning he saw at the core of the decision to use the atomic bomb. To him, it signaled the beginning of the end of moral constraints on human behavior. “The dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima blotted out boundaries,” Sheen concluded. “There was no longer a boundary between the military and the civilian, between the helper and the helped, between the wounded and the nurse and the doctor... [W]e broke down boundaries and limits and from that time on the world has said we want no one limiting me.” Trump’s Evangelical supporters have similarly refused to let traditional ethics limit their political ambitions. The path they’ve chosen is truly a perilous one.
