President Donald Trump has maintained significant religious support in the 2016 election and throughout his presidency.
Michael Sances, a political science professor at the University of Memphis, said evangelicals support Trump for multiple reasons.
“He’s a Republican, and the Republican Party of today is the party of Christian conservatives,” Sances said. “The policy position he had on abortion and other social issues overcame any doubt Christian conservatives had about his character.”
Around 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the 2016 election, according to a Pew Research Center study. Since then, his support has risen among religious voters.
Evangelicals is an umbrella term for multiple Christian denominations. Some of their core beliefs include the Bible as the ultimate moral and historical authority, the need to evangelize and having sins forgiven through faith in Jesus Christ.
Throughout Trump’s presidency, multiple scandals, including the incident when adult film star Stormy Daniels was paid hush money to deny she had an affair with Trump, have plagued the President. Things like this have not phased his religious supporters. Sances said this is because evangelical supporters mainly focus on policy rather than individual endeavors.
“They prioritize (policy) over the personal failings of the individual,” Sances said. “When people think about abortion policy, they think about the Supreme Court, and he has put two really conservative justices in there.”
Otis Sanford, a journalism professor at the UofM and a political commentator, said evangelicals do not care about Trump as an individual.
“These evangelicals for the most part care more about his conservative policies and his agenda more than him as an individual,” Sanford said. “They like the idea that he is putting conservative judges on all levels of the court.”
Sanford said evangelicals are willing to ignore things Trump has done that do not align with their beliefs.
“They are willing to look the other way on other things that Donald Trump is noted for, which is basically not telling the truth, being a philanderer and all the things that have been documented about this man,” Sanford said. “They are willing to look the other way because they feel they are getting policies that they approve of.”
Sanford said the evangelicals supporting president Trump are being hypocritical.
“They would never accept the kind of behavior from someone like a Barack Obama; they would be up in arms over that,” Sanford said. “They are willing to excuse it in this case and look the other way primarily because of policy.”
Sanford said he thinks Trump’s supporters will remain supportive of him.
“I don’t see anything that would change their course,” Sanford said. “Donald Trump has already done enough to make most people not follow him anymore. Donald Trump said it himself before he got elected, that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes. And for the most part, that seems to be true.”
Isaac O. Weston, a UofM student who is a conservative Christian, said there are some things he agrees and does not agree with Trump on.
“I voted for Trump, and I’ll openly admit it, there has been several things he’s done that I do not agree with,” Weston said. “But I realized when I was voting for him that he would put people on the Supreme Court that would uphold biblical values.”
