The Washington Post asked locals at a Southern Baptist church in Alabama why they voted for President Donald Trump despite the former reality TV star’s conduct. Their answer was short and to the point.
Members of the First Baptist church of Luverne, Alabama, say former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president was a no-go for them, according to a report Saturday from WaPo.
“She hates me,” Terry Drew, a member of the church, said of Clinton, who lost Alabama by almost 700,000 votes.
“She has contempt for people like me, and Clay, and people who love God and believe in the Second Amendment. I think if she had her way, it would be a dangerous country for the likes of me,” he said, referring to people like the church’s pastor, Clay Crum. Trump has demonstrated a willingness to hang tough with Christians, Drew said.
Drew weighed Trump’s character with what he thought was Clinton’s willingness to destroy his way of life. The choice was clear, he told WaPo reporters, who attended one of Crum’s sermons to get a lay of the land. Trump’s “going to stick to me,” while Clinton will look the other way, Drew added.
“I hate it,” he acknowledged. “My wife and I talk about it all the time. We rationalize the immoral things away. We don’t like it, but we look at the alternative and think it could be worse than this.”
Other members of the church shared similar sentiment.
Jan Carter, another parishioner, said supporting Trump was the only moral thing to do. (RELATED: Nearly Half Of Americans Think Abortion Is Morally Wrong)
“You can say righteously I do not support him because of his moral character, but you are washing your hands of what is happening in this country,” she said, adding that America is slipping toward “a civil war on our shores.”
Crum, for his part, said supporting Trump is not easy, especially when the president does not demonstrate a keen understanding of Biblical law.
“There are times when Christians have to stand up,” he said.
Trump is an immoral person doing what Crum considers moral: nominating conservative judges and pushing anti-abortion policies. The president’s victory over Clinton convinced Crum and other members of something else, too. “It encouraged them that we do still have some political power in this country,” said Crum.
Recent polls suggest that Crum’s sentiment is prevalent in other states that tilted heavily toward Trump.
More than 6o percent of South Carolina Republicans said Trump was moral in a Winthrop University poll conducted in April. Only 51 percent of evangelicals said that term was “somewhat” inaccurate in describing the president.
“The fact that fewer than half of evangelicals overall would describe Trump as ‘godly’ or ‘moral’ suggests that his strength with these groups comes not from modeling pious behavior, but from them viewing him as a bulwark against a culture that they feel is increasingly hostile to them,” Winthrop Poll director Scott Huffmon said in the poll.
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