Family Research Council president Tony Perkins put the Religious Right’s transactional relationship with President Trump into stark terms in an interview with a Politico podcast published yesterday, saying that evangelicals had given Trump “a mulligan” or “a do-over” for past behavior, including an alleged extramarital affair with a porn star to whom Trump’s lawyer reportedly paid $130,000 in hush money shortly before the 2016 election. Perkins even used the word “transactional” to describe the president’s relationship with the Christian Right.
Perkins later made similar comments to CNN, saying “evangelicals understand what a second chance means” and dismissing the alleged affair as 10 years in the past—never mind the much more recent payout. Franklin Graham also told CNN that evangelicals are giving Trump a pass because all of his indiscretions were in the past.
The Religious Right’s embrace of Trump is especially galling coming after eight years of hearing them insist that Barack Obama—who spoke frequently about his Christian faith—was anti-Christian or even lying about his own Christianity. Perkins himself was at the forefront of this messaging offensive.
Before the 2012 election, Perkins said that voters in 2008 “chose the economy over the moral foundation of the country when we selected Barack Obama as president, and it did not work out,” claiming that Obama had set himself up “in defiance to everything that is biblically oriented in terms of the history of our country and the word of God.” He called for Christians who had voted for Obama in 2008 to “repent” by voting against his reelection and declared that Obama had a “disdain for Christianity.”
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Perkins repeatedly linked the atrocities being committed against Christians by groups like ISIS to what he said was Obama’s persecution of Christians in the United States, saying that the Obama administration’s policies were giving the “green light” to Christian persecution abroad and claiming that Obama was acting more harshly toward U.S. Christians than to ISIS.
Perkins even entertained the far-right conspiracy theory that Obama was secretly a Muslim, never saying so directly, but telling callers to his radio show that the conspiracy theory “makes sense” because Obama was “overly deferential to Islam and almost hostile to Christianity.” Perkins told one caller that the president’s actions showed that he was not a Christian, but that “he is extremely sympathetic to the Muslim world.”
At one point, Perkins claimed that clergy who support same-sex marriage aren’t real Christians and don’t deserve the same religious protections as those with “orthodox” beliefs.
Perkins told Politico that Trump is like a playground bully willing to stick up for American Christians after years of pummeling by Obama “and his leftists”:
Evangelical Christians, says Perkins, “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.”
What happened to turning the other cheek? I ask.
“You know, you only have two cheeks,” Perkins says. “Look, Christianity is not all about being a welcome mat which people can just stomp their feet on.”
Perkins’ comments recalled another conservative evangelical Trump booster, Robert Jeffress, saying during the campaign that he would prefer a candidate who didn’t adhere to the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. “Nowhere is government told to forgive those who wrong it, nowhere is government told to turn the other cheek,” Jeffress said in July 2016. “Government is to be a strongman to protect its citizens against evildoers. When I’m looking for somebody who’s going to deal with ISIS and exterminate ISIS, I don’t care about that candidate’s tone or vocabulary, I want the meanest, toughest, son of a you-know-what I can find, and I believe that’s biblical.”
