By Marie Solis
If dining alone with any woman who isn’t your wife is a strict no-no, what does that make cheating on her just months after she gave birth to your first child together?
The impression given by Vice President Mike Pence, as well as a slew of President Donald Trump’s other evangelical supporters, is that it’s entirely possible that the latter is just fine. Despite the stringent boundaries of his own marriage, Pence has been conspicuous by his silence on all things Stormy Daniels, other than telling the Associated Press in January that he wouldn’t comment on the “latest baseless allegations against the president.”
Pence’s decision to brush off allegations that the president entered an extramarital sexual relationship with Daniels seems to have informed conservative opinion on the matter, too: Only roughly half of Trump voters say it would be immoral if the president indeed had an affair with the adult film actress, according to a recent HuffPost/YouGov poll. The other 50 percent of participants either said it’s not immoral or that they weren’t sure either way.
White evangelical voters make up a large swath of Trump’s base, supporting the president 80-16 percent in the 2016 election despite an infamous Access Hollywood tape where he bragged about committing sexual assault and the more than a dozen women who accused the then-Republican nominee of sexual misconduct. As Daniels, as well as former Playboy model Karen McDougal, continues to circulate her account of sex with the president—including intimate details about his sexual proclivities— some evangelicals are ready to give Trump another pass.
Earlier this month, Pastor Robert Jeffress, a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, appeared on Fox News to defend the president, calling Trump’s alleged affairs “totally irrelevant” to the evangelical community’s support of him.
“We are all sinners, we all need forgiveness, [and] that forgiveness is available through Christ for anyone who asks,” he said at the time. “And whether the president needs that forgiveness for this particular allegation, whether he’s asked for it, is between him, his family and his god.”
The vice president’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
Trump isn’t the only politician whose alleged trespasses the religious right has forgiven or ignored.
Before Roy Moore was accused of having inappropriate relationships with teen girls as an adult, the Alabama Senate candidate received support from over 50 state pastors, who wrote that Moore represented an opportunity to “send a man to Washington who shares our convictions, will fight for morality and will restore integrity to the halls of Congress.”
Very few of them changed their stance, even after women came forward with their stories of Moore approaching them in malls, signing their yearbooks and attending their graduation ceremonies.
When reporters from local news outlet AL.com circled back with the pastors who signed the original letter, 19 of the 29 churches they were able to get in touch with confirmed that their pastors remained supportive of Moore. At least one pastor, who saw Moore’s wife Kayla post the letter on Facebook, asked that his name be added to the list, according to The Washington Post.
He remained staunchly defensive of Moore: “I’d cut off my right arm if I knew Roy Moore would do this,” Ben McKee, a former reverend in Alabama, told the Post in November. “But I know him better than that.”
Evangelical voters weren’t so generous with former President Bill Clinton, some of whom declared his extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky a “profound moral crisis” at the time. That was the exact quote James Dobson, the founder of conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family, gave in the ’90s, amid the Clinton scandal.
But, come October 2016, just after the current president’s “grab them by the pussy” comments leaked, Dobson was far more lenient.
“Donald Trump is not a perfect man, but he is pro-life,” Dobson said. “To my knowledge, Donald Trump has never abused women physically or had oral sex in the Oval Office with a vulnerable intern.”
Jeffress, the member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, struck a similar chord this month. Evangelicals, he said, have no illusions about Trump’s character—they’ve known all along what kind of man he is. An alleged affair doesn’t change much.
“[We knew we] weren’t voting for an altar boy,” Jeffress said.