The Bible is clear on these matters. “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths,” the Apostle Paul wrote in the New Testament book of Ephesians. And elsewhere: “Flee from sexual immorality” and “abstain from all appearance of evil.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/us/e ... trump.htmlThe “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America” 2024 pinup calendar features old-school images of sexiness — bikinis, a red sports car, a bubble bath.
The models are influencers and aspiring politicians familiar to the very online pro-Trump right. In one image, a BlazeTV host in a short skirt lights a copy of The New York Times on fire with a cigar. Another model, the former N.R.A. spokeswoman Dana Loesch, hoists two rifles.
Published by a “woke-free beer” company hastily launched last year as an alternative to Bud Light, the calendar was clearly meant to provoke liberals. But when photos of it began circulating online in December, progressives did not pay much attention. Instead, it sparked a heated squabble on the right over whether “conservative dads” who happen to be Christians should reject the calendar on moral grounds, or embrace it as an irreverent win for the good guys.
Allie Beth Stuckey, an evangelical commentator and podcaster, condemned the calendar as “soft porn” marketed to married men, and saw it as proof of growing polarization between Christian and secular conservatism. Other prominent Christian conservatives joined her in expressing their disgust.
But the calendar itself suggested that Christian and secular conservatism are not exactly as distinct as Ms. Stuckey and others might wish. The calendar’s cover model, Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer and activist against transgender women’s participation in women’s sports, frequently speaks at church events and evangelical conferences, and frames her cause as a “spiritual battle.”
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As a core faction in the Republican coalition, conservative evangelicals have long influenced the party’s policy priorities, including opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. And the influence extended to conservative culture, where evangelical norms against vulgarity were rarely challenged in public.
In some ways, they remain intact. Most pastors don’t cuss from the pulpit, or at all. Mainstream conservative churches still teach their young people to save sex for marriage and avoid pornography.
Yet a raunchy, outsider, boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class, accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions and a shifting media landscape increasingly dominated by the looser standards of online culture.
When Mr. Trump was elected president in 2016, winning the votes of about eight in 10 white evangelicals, many observers saw it as an essentially transactional relationship. Mr. Trump, a twice-divorced reality television star from New York City, had promised to appoint conservative judges and to defend Christian interests. But he rarely showed up in church, and he defended a recording of him bragging about grabbing women’s genitals as “locker-room banter.” He pitched himself as a protector, not a pious fellow traveler.
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But it’s hard to remain fiercely loyal to a figure like Mr. Trump without being changed by him. Eight years after Mr. Trump first secured the Republican nomination for president, it’s clear that the aesthetics, the language and the borders of public morality in evangelical America are shifting.
“As with so many things with Trump, it’s a longer history, but he has also changed the game,” said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian who has studied evangelicalism and masculinity. She cited gleefully combative talk radio of the 1990s as a touchstone in the coarsening of evangelical mores.
The shift is perhaps most visible in politics. Representative Lauren Boebert, who has called for an end to the separation of church and state, was caught on a theater security camera in September vaping and groping her date. (She later blamed her “public and difficult divorce” for her behavior, and said the behavior “fell short of my values.”) Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has embraced the label of “Christian nationalist,” drops vulgarities in hearings, on the House floor and in conversations with reporters.
Last summer, Nancy Mace, a Republican representative from South Carolina, joked about premarital sex and cohabitation, once obvious taboos, from the lectern at a Christian prayer breakfast in Washington. Praising the event’s host, Senator Tim Scott, she opened her talk by saying she had made a special effort to arrive early.
“When I woke up this morning at 7, I was getting picked up at 7:45, Patrick, my fiancé, tried to pull me by my waist over this morning in bed,” she told the audience, which included her pastor and Mr. Scott, an outspoken evangelical. “And I was like, ‘No, baby, we don’t got time for that this morning.’”
She added: “He can wait, I’ll see him later tonight.”
Ms. Mace later brushed off backlash to the remarks, writing on X that “I go to church because I’m a sinner not a saint!”
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But for some conservative Christians, the stakes of the moment are now high enough that a certain amount of vulgarity is not just tolerated, but also required as a form of truth-telling worthy of the prophets. At a conference in Nashville in 2020 hosted by a right-wing Christian network, an Arizona pastor named Jeff Durbin described institutional evangelicals as captive to secular ideals, comparing them to “a slut who lies down in the middle of a burning city, spreading her legs to the rioters and looters.”
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Most transgressions come not from the pulpit or the podium, but the keyboard. There was Jerry Falwell Jr., then the president of evangelical Liberty University, tweeting that pastors like David Platt, a prominent Virginia evangelical leader, need to “grow a pair.” He later deleted the tweet. (Mr. Falwell resigned from Liberty in 2020 in the wake of a sex scandal).
The influential Idaho pastor and author Doug Wilson, whose profile has risen in the Trump era, casually uses vulgarities like “gaytards” online, and has used an obscenity on his blog in reference to a Lutheran pastor.
Some Christian conservatives argue that the degrading of expectations around crude language and sexual exhibitionism started on the cultural left and cannot be blamed on Mr. Trump.
“I consider Trump a product of the changes in the world,” said Aaron Renn, a conservative writer who has written about Mr. Trump’s appeal but admonished Christians to “reject vice.”
After flirting with running for president for decades, Mr. Trump finally ran seriously in 2016 because “he sensed the world is different today, the old standards that meant someone” like Mr. Trump “would no longer be considered a viable candidate are no longer operative in society at large,” Mr. Renn said.
Others see the cause as partly technological. Evangelicalism is a decentralized movement, and has always embraced new technology as a way to reach more people. But the old institutions and personalities that defined the culture are fading: Church attendance has declined at the same time that several lions of the movement have died, retired or been felled by scandal. Influencers and outsiders have filled the vacuum.
