I never cared about pieties around personal behavior and we have known forever that evangelicals are mostly gigantic hypocrites when it comes to personal behavior. Like many of us, I wondered how these people could stomach Donald Trump, since at least I kind of sort of took them at face value that they believed in this stuff. I saw a presentation by the Pew religious pollster in 2018 and he explained that they saw Trump as an Old Testament king whose personal behavior might be bad but he was leading them to the promised land.
Well, maybe, but it sure now seems that for a lot of evangelicals, just admitting that you like to swear and grab your date’s dick in public and joke about your out-of-marriage sex in front of ministers is the real impact of Trump.
The “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.
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!”
Sure Nancy.
I don’t entirely know what to make of all of this, in the sense that I kind of appreciate them losing the hypocrisy and that talking about sex more publicly maybe could limit the crazy and horrifying sex scandals that constantly come out of right-wing figures. But nah, it’s just that evangelicals are having fun with fascism and the vulgarity of Trump and since that is so much more than any religious belief they have, they are just going to embrace it too. God wants us to fuck so long we are killing libs!