EITHER/OR:

Something else happened on April 15--Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the presumptive next president of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a man I respect a great deal--spoke from the midst of a ruined economy, soaring death rates, and presidential blundering and said . . . four more years. He declared not only that he'd support Donald Trump in 2020, but that he'll almost certainly support Republican presidential candidates the rest of his life. Mohler focused on the classic culture war issues--marriage, sexuality, constitutional interpretation, and abortion. He expressed the belief that the "partisan divide had become so great" and Democrats had "swerved so far to the left" on those key issues that he can't imagine ever voting for a Democratic president. He also claimed that Trump has been "more consistent in pro-life decisions" and consistent in the quality of his judicial nominations than "any president of the United States of any party."

As he made clear in the video, Mohler has not always supported Trump. In 2016, he was consistent with his denomination's clear and unequivocal statement about the importance of moral character in public officials. He has now decisively changed course.

In 1998--during Bill Clinton's second term--the Southern Baptist Convention declared that "tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God's judgment" and therefore urged "all Americans to embrace and act on the conviction that character does count in public office, and to elect those officials and candidates who, although imperfect, demonstrate consistent honesty, moral purity and the highest character."

Mohler so clearly recognized the applicability of those words that he said, "If I were to support, much less endorse Donald Trump for president, I would actually have to go back and apologize to former President Bill Clinton." I do wonder if Mohler will apologize. He absolutely should.

Look, I know that for now I've lost the character argument. It's well-established that a great number of white Evangelicals didn't truly believe the words they wrote, endorsed, and argued in 1998 and for 18 years until the 2016 election. Oh sure, they thought they believed those words. If someone challenged their convictions with a lie detector test, they would have passed with flying colors. 

(By the way, I use the term "white Evangelicals" because that's Trump's core political constituency. That's the base that gave him 81 percent support in 2016. The rest of the Evangelical community leans Democratic.)

When C.S. Lewis said "courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of very virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality," he was speaking an important truth. We may think we possess an array of virtues and beliefs, but we don't really know who we are or what we believe until those virtues and beliefs are put to the test. There is many a man who goes to war thinking himself brave, until the bullets fly. There is many a man who thinks himself faithful to his wife, until the flirtation starts.

There were many men who thought character counted, until a commitment to character contained a real political cost. But that's the obvious point. I've made it countless times before today. White Evangelicals, however, have shrugged it off. "Binary choice," they say. "Lesser of two evils," they say--even though those concepts appeared nowhere in the grand moral announcements of the past.

Many millions of Trump-supporting white Evangelicals no longer care about character (though a surprising number are still remarkably unaware of his flaws). That much is clear. But the story now grows darker still. As they've abandoned political character tests, they're also rejecting any meaningful concern for presidential competence. 

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