Brody and Lamb's book highlights everything wrong with the morphing of American evangelicalism into a post-Jesus cult of personality looking for salvation delivered by politicians--including its hypocrisy and sophistry regarding Trump and morality. The authors quote one evangelical leader saying that evangelicals' relationship with the president is authentic, not transactional. But a few chapters earlier, the same individual described a conference call he led with the Trump campaign's evangelical advisers just after the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged about assaulting women. During that call, "all of us agreed to stand behind the candidate." After all, Trump "had sacrificed his entire life, in my viewpoint, and supported us. How could we not support him?"

We can wink-wink at Trump's misdeeds because he does good things for us. The authors actually write that "when assessing the faith of Donald Trump, the significance of the Neil Gorsuch nomination cannot be underestimated." Really? That is essential to assessing Trump's faith? More than his sexual proclivities and adulteries, which are barely touched upon in the book? In a few spots in the book, the authors blame American culture for Trump's sexual ethics, and in one passage, they even find a way to implicate evangelicals in Trump's sexual behavior. Follow the twisted logic: First, Brody and Lamb quote another biographer who says that "Clint Eastwood, James Bond, and Hugh Hefner" are the figures who dominate Trump's self-image. Then we are told that Trump boasted about being a womanizer roughly around the same time that Pierce Brosnan's first James Bond movie came out. And who do we have to thank for Bond's having a place in Trump's mind? "Americans--including evangelicals--fund these culture-shaping products with their book purchases and ticket sales." So if you've ever seen a Bond movie, you've contributed to the culture that made Trump Trump.