Why conservative Christians are tolerating vulgarity and lust

Yet a raunchy, outsider, boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class, accelerated by the rise of Donald Trump, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions and a shifting media landscape increasingly dominated by the looser standards of online culture.

When Trump was elected president in 2016, winning the votes of about eight in 10 white evangelicals, many observers saw it as an essentially transactional relationship.

Trump, a twice-divorced reality television star from New York City, had promised to appoint conservative judges and to defend Christian interests. But he rarely showed up in church, and he defended a recording of him bragging about grabbing women’s genitals as “locker-room banter”. He pitched himself as a protector, not a pious fellow traveller.

But it’s hard to remain fiercely loyal to a figure like Trump without being changed by him. Eight years after Trump first secured the Republican nomination for president, it’s clear that the aesthetics, the language and the borders of public morality in evangelical America are shifting.

“As with so many things with Trump, it’s a longer history, but he has also changed the game,” says Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian who has studied evangelicalism and masculinity. She cites gleefully combative talk radio of the 1990s as a touchstone in the coarsening of evangelical mores.

‘Not a saint’

The shift is perhaps most visible in politics. Rep Lauren Boebert, who has called for an end to the separation of church and state, was caught on a theatre security camera in September vaping and groping her date. (She later blamed her “public and difficult divorce” for her behaviour, and said the behaviour “fell short of my values”. ) Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has embraced the label of “Christian nationalist”, drops vulgarities in hearings, on the House floor and in conversations with reporters.

Last summer, Nancy Mace, a Republican representative from South Carolina, joked about premarital sex and cohabitation, once obvious taboos, from the lectern at a Christian prayer breakfast in Washington. Praising the event’s host, Senator Tim Scott, she opened her talk by saying she had made a special effort to arrive early.

“When I woke up this morning at seven, I was getting picked up at 7.45, Patrick, my fiance, tried to pull me by my waist over this morning in bed,” she told the audience, which included her pastor and Scott, an outspoken evangelical. “And I was like, ‘No, baby, we don’t got time for that this morning’.”

She added: “He can wait, I’ll see him later tonight.”

Mace later brushed off backlash to the remarks, writing on X that “I go to church because I’m a sinner not a saint!”

A new set of incentives

Well into the 21st century, conservative evangelicals maintained their reputation for strict standards within their own churches and schools around language and public displays of sexuality.

They did not avoid just profanity, but often also mild transgressions like “wuss” and “darn”. Evangelical Christian schools enforced strict dress codes focused on modesty, especially for girls. In the 1990s, teenagers attended conferences and wore “purity rings” to pledge their commitment to wait until they married to have sex.

There was a widespread agreement that the Bible was clear on these matters. “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths,” the Apostle Paul wrote in the New Testament book of Ephesians. And elsewhere: “Flee from sexual immorality” and “abstain from all appearance of evil”.

But for some conservative Christians, the stakes of the moment are now high enough that a certain amount of vulgarity is not just tolerated, but also required as a form of truth-telling worthy of the prophets. At a conference in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2020, hosted by a right-wing Christian network, an Arizona pastor named Jeff Durbin described institutional evangelicals as captive to secular ideals, comparing them to “a slut who lies down in the middle of a burning city, spreading her legs to the rioters and looters”.

Most transgressions come not from the pulpit or the podium, but the keyboard. There was Jerry Falwell jnr, then the president of evangelical Liberty University, tweeting that pastors like David Platt, a prominent Virginia evangelical leader, need to “grow a pair”. He later deleted the tweet. (Falwell resigned from Liberty in 2020 in the wake of a sex scandal.)

Influential Idaho pastor and author Doug Wilson, whose profile has risen in the Trump era, casually uses vulgarities like “gaytards” online, and has used an obscenity on his blog in reference to a Lutheran pastor.

Some Christian conservatives argue that the degrading of expectations around crude language and sexual exhibitionism started on the cultural left and cannot be blamed on Trump.

“I consider Trump a product of the changes in the world,” says Aaron Renn, a conservative writer who has written about Trump’s appeal but admonished Christians to “reject vice”.

After flirting with running for president for decades, Trump finally ran seriously in 2016 because “he sensed the world is different today, the old standards that meant someone” like Trump “would no longer be considered a viable candidate are no longer operative in society at large”, Renn says.

Others see the cause as partly technological. Evangelicalism is a decentralised movement, and has always embraced new technology as a way to reach more people. But the old institutions and personalities that defined the culture are fading: church attendance has declined at the same time that several lions of the movement have died, retired or been felled by scandal. Influencers and outsiders have filled the vacuum.

Online, “the way you stand out is by being the most devoted, the most extreme in the cause”, says Jake Meador, editor-in-chief of the evangelical publication Mere Orthodoxy, who has been critical of the blurring of evangelical and secular standards.

“That creates totally different incentives,” he says, than the consensus-building of the era when a local church was the primary source of Christian authority and community.

‘Wholesome’ lust

As for behaviour in the bedroom itself, the old stereotype of the Christian prude belies the complex recent history of evangelical frankness around sex in certain settings.

In the late 1960s and ’70s, evangelical authors and publishers produced stacks of “marriage manuals” that were, in practice, sex advice books. The genre had become popular in secular culture in the context of the sexual revolution, and many Christians sought their own guidance in a cultural moment in which many felt threatened by feminism and shifting gender expectations. (One of the bestsellers, The Act of Marriage: The Beauty of Sexual Love, was written by Beverly and Tim LaHaye. The latter would go on to co-author the Left Behind series of apocalyptic thrillers.)

The manuals were deeply conservative in their way, with prohibitions against sexual activities outside the heterosexual marital bed (and some activities in it). But “there’s an automatic assumption that men are more sexual than women and they have this hypersexuality that is natural”, says Kelsy Burke, a sociologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who has written about evangelicals and sexuality. A certain amount of lust is “a sin that they acknowledge but is also part of the natural male condition”.

This generation of evangelical leaders was easily teased for its puritanism, and, whenever a sexual scandal erupted, for its hypocrisy. But they were trying to thread a difficult needle, maintaining high community standards without withdrawing from an ever-coarsening mainstream American culture.

With a mission to evangelise that culture, they also wanted to remain relevant and appealing, communicating that you don’t have to give up fun and good sex to become a Christian. It was a complex balancing act between an acknowledgment of basic human urges and the dictates of their faith, whose strictures around language and sexual behaviour they saw reflecting deeper theological commitments.

But shared fears can make some vices look like virtues. In a moment in which some Christians feel the world has become dangerously unbalanced, piety can be framed as “wokeness”, and breaking taboos as bravery.

The partial embrace of vulgarity, Kobes Du Mez points out, is happening in a moment of deep conservative outrage, an often visceral disgust, at rising rates of non-traditional gender and sexual identities, particularly among young people. In that context, an indulgence in heterosexual lust, even if in poor taste, is becoming seen as not just benign, but maybe even healthy and noble.

Part of the reason transgender identities are considered a threat is that they blur gender difference, Kobes Du Mez says. “Against that backdrop, it’s a wholesome thing for a boy to be lusting after a very sexy woman.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.