Whether job protections were the next frontier of LGBT rights activism was unclear, but there seemed little doubt that those Christian traditionalists long invested in defending a norm in which the only appropriate outlet for sexual activity was heterosexual, monogamous, potentially procreative marriage, and in which men would reign dominant over women in religious, domestic, and societal realms alike, would keep fighting too—in the legal and political realms where possible, in religious and social realms where not. The stakes simply remained too high to surrender. At the heart of this dispute over same-sex marriage and related sexual norms, as Robinson and his opponents alike knew, lay a deeply entrenched struggle over power and freedom, authority and coercion, and the very core of the Christian message. The battle over marriage was a battle in which “freedom” to one cohort meant submission to clerical authority and its power to define morality, even reality itself, without state interference; while to another, it meant the legally and religiously sanctioned freedom to love and behave ethically without fixating on gender roles and conventional sexual rules. To both, and indeed to all invested parties within and beyond the church, the nation’s future was at stake.
EPILOGUE
THE OBERGEFELL DECISION MARKED THE end of one phase of the battle over same-sex marriage, but it hardly quieted the political and religious controversies over sexuality. If anything, the court’s decision flamed the fires of resistance. As same-sex couples across American made plans to wed, some cake bakers, florists, and photographers morally opposed to same-sex marriage refused to accommodate them. They and their outraged supporters insisted that it was not simply conscience that was at stake but the constitutional rights of Christians—particularly their right to religious freedom that should exempt them from following laws that infringed on their beliefs. Skeptics doubted such claims, noting that these wedding vendors rarely if ever had refused to serve straight couples whose histories included, for instance, adultery or divorce. But the appeal to religious freedom was a powerful one. In several speeches delivered during his tour of the United States weeks after the Obergefell announcement, Pope Francis himself praised the “fundamental right” of religious freedom and later made international headlines when he denounced the “global war” against marriage driven by the secular “theory of gender,” a theory he said went against God’s creation of man and woman and that threatened the church with “ideological colonization.”1 Same-sex marriage, so went the argument, was a threat to the liberty of the church itself. The appeal to religious freedom increasingly appeared to be a strategy embraced by conservative Christians in the wake of losing the legal battle over marriage, adopted for a world in which the old Christian consensus on sex had completely fractured.
Even as the fight over same-sex marriage pivoted in new directions, another chapter in America’s long conflict over religion, sex, and politics was beginning in June 2015. Ten days before the release of Obergefell, a New York billionaire—best known for his bombastic showmanship, real estate empire, and philandering through three marriages, the last to a woman twenty-four years his junior—announced his candidacy for president of the United States. Many scoffed at the idea that Donald Trump could be a serious candidate, since he had no political experience, regularly insulted vast sectors of the population and the globe—Mexicans, African Americans, Muslims, and more—and routinely did things—bend the truth, reveal his ignorance, traffic in conspiracy theories—that had disqualified candidates in the past. He seemed a particularly unlikely standard-bearer for the contemporary Republican Party, given that, although he had grown up Presbyterian and as an adult had worshiped sporadically at New York’s Marble Collegiate Church, by this time he had no regular religious affiliation and held no discernible faith. Although he prevailed in the primaries and became the party’s official nominee a year later, many still doubted that Trump could win the general election against Hillary Clinton, a former US senator and secretary of state. But after a rancorous and drama-filled campaign, and against the predictions of most pundits and national political experts, on November 8, 2016, Trump was elected the forty-fifth president of the United States.
Following the election, shocked liberals and progressives sought frantically to understand how this swaggering braggart with a seemingly insatiable appetite for attention and adulation but scant interest in policy could have possibly won. Many explanations were debated: economically distressed voters blamed their woes on globalization, immigrants, free trade deals, and neoliberal elites who ignored their plight, personified in Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Or: Trump voters were driven by racism and hatred of the prior president, Barack Obama, and believed that Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” would restore white supremacy. Or: Trump voters were poorly educated dupes swayed by right-wing radio shows, conspiracy websites, and the Fox News Channel, where audiences had learned nothing of Trump’s failings while consuming vicious lies about his opponent. Whatever the case, Trump voters believed that the man was on their side.
Many of the specific flashpoints of America’s past century of moral combat were again debated in the course of the 2016 election, a reminder of the deep and persisting political divide that followed the country’s ruptured consensus regarding sex and sexual morality. At issue were debates over contraceptive access that recalled the birth control controversy, arguments over abortion rights, disputes over the significance of sexual harassment, and continued wrangling over same-sex marriage, to name but a few. Trump pledged to cut government funding for Planned Parenthood and stated that “there should be some kind of punishment” for women who had abortions; Clinton stood up for reproductive rights. Trump threatened to sue or censor women who feuded with him or who had accused him of sexual assault; Clinton presented herself as a tireless fighter for all women. White nationalists who condemned interracial marriage, like the radio host James Edwards, were among Trump’s staunchest supporters; Clinton condemned them.2 In an attempt to turn the tables, Trump brought Paula Jones and other accusers and adulterous lovers from Bill Clinton’s past to the second presidential debate, hoping their visible presence would rattle his wife on stage. That didn’t work, but the stunt became a major news story that caught fire among Trump supporters who found political merit in the idea that Clinton’s husband was a predatory sleazebag.3
But aside from the specific sexual issues raised, the election revealed the depth of the national divide in a still more fundamental way. Trump’s opponent was a woman, the first female presidential candidate of a major political party in all of American history and a liberal feminist who supported gender equality, abortion access, and LGBT rights. Since her husband’s first presidential run in 1992, it had been clear that Clinton wanted to have a professional identity of her own, separate from his and concurrent with her own role as a mother. That year, she had told a reporter asking about her career, “I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.” The statement infuriated voters who felt Clinton was sneering at traditional stay-at-home women, and her active political role in her husband’s administration—she was the first presidential wife to have an office in the West Wing, where she worked on domestic policy issues—had only intensified conservatives’ disgust toward her. Her work on health care and, especially, abortion alienated them still further: as one evangelically bred writer later remembered, Clinton was the first woman she ever heard being called a “feminazi,” and she was roundly booed and called a “bitch” in the writer’s traditionalist Christian circles.4
None of that aversion to Clinton had faded when she became the Democratic nominee for president. For her to run at all seemed overly ambitious—“She wants it [the presidency] too much,” many said, as if desire for the job were itself disqualifying. For an independent-minded, nontraditional woman like Clinton, perhaps it was.
In view of the fact that Clinton was a commit
ted Christian with Methodist bona fides going back to her childhood, she could have expected to win over Christian voters. Since serving as first lady, she had spoken periodically about the need for “a new politics of meaning,” saying things like, “We have to summon up what we believe is morally and ethically and spiritually correct and do the best we can with God’s guidance.” And her campaign rhetoric was for more explicitly indebted to Christian precepts than Trump’s. Several times during her campaign, she cited a saying from her Methodist faith as her “creed”: “Do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.”5 She frequently referenced the Bible, as in, “Scripture tells us to incline our ears to wisdom and apply our hearts to understanding,” and, quoting Galatians, “‘Let us not grow weary in doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.’”6
Progressive Christians roundly supported Clinton in the general election and outspokenly condemned Trump’s xenophobic, sexist, and bigoted words as the very antithesis of Christian faith. They were certainly not the only constituency to do so. Her coalition also included less frequent churchgoers, nonbelievers, non-Christians, women, nonwhites, and other people supportive of issues that could be seen through a Christian lens or a secular justice lens: gender equality and sexual freedom, racial and economic justice, and humane policies for immigrants, among others. Ultra-conservative Christians, however, were not won over and certainly did not see her professed faith as an asset. Many claimed throughout her campaign that she was a liar and a crook, pointing to apparent scandals that they believed made their case and joining in at rallies with other Trump supporters to shout, “Lock her up!” Most evangelical Christian voters did not like Clinton’s feminism, and her support for abortion rights kept away many who saw that issue as an urgent one and the appointment of anti-abortion Supreme Court justices the most important factor in the election. Trump had once held pro-choice views but had recanted, pledging to cut government funding for Planned Parenthood and appointing a staunchly pro-life, self-proclaimed “evangelical Catholic” as his running mate.7 The splintering of American Christianity into two distinct and divergent moral systems, long in the making, was nowhere better personified than in the clash between the campaigns and constituencies of Trump versus Clinton.
As it turned out, conservative Christians were among Trump’s most dedicated voters. Exit polls showed that the majority of white evangelicals, white Catholics, and Mormons voted for Trump. Eighty-one percent of voters who described themselves as evangelical or born-again voted for Trump, 3 percent more than had voted for the Republican candidate Mitt Romney four years before. Sixty percent of white Catholics voted for Trump. Sixty-one percent of Mormon voters voted for Trump. When interviewed, many conservative Christian voters said that Trump would protect their religious freedom better than his opponent and would appoint Supreme Court justices who strongly opposed abortion. Even though several high-profile religious figures had condemned his behavior or openly opposed him—including Michael Gerson, a widely read Washington Post columnist and former George W. Bush speechwriter; Eric Teetsel, the president of the Family Policy Alliance of Kansas; Beth Moore and Jen Hatmaker, Christian writers and frequent public speakers; and Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention—those leaders with the widest influence supported him, including James Dobson, Jerry Falwell Jr., Franklin Graham, and many more. Ultimately, a solid majority of white religious conservatives found reason to vote for him and came out in droves to do so.
Suddenly, it seemed, the very Christians who had long guarded against sexual immorality had shucked that principle for the sake of gender hierarchy, or at least of putting this one particular woman in her place so as to elect a macho man. The T-shirts and campaign paraphernalia popular at Trump’s rallies spoke volumes about this sexualized divide, loaded with vulgar slogans praising Trump for having “balls” while jeering Clinton’s outward appearance and calling her “bitch,” “tramp,” “cunt,” and more. Any differences between Trump’s Christian and non-Christian supporters were difficult to discern in this resort to crudeness, but if it’s true, as one Christian witness said, that “Christians aren’t allowed to say ‘bitch,’ but they make an exception for Hillary,” then it’s not hard to imagine some of the faithful participating in such ribaldry.8 While advocates of gender equality were infuriated by this boorish treatment, Clinton supporters were ultimately outmatched by a campaign whose most fervent advocates reveled in pro-Trump mantras drenched in choleric, often sexually explicit misogyny. Even if Trump had been incoherent on issues such as abortion and marriage equality, the election seemed to be about the candidates’ very identities, embodying the culture war over sexuality in the most literal way.9
Many observers were shocked that Trump’s misogyny did not doom his campaign. Trump won despite a long history of insulting women with names like “dog,” “slob,” “bimbo,” and much else. He won despite well publicized demeaning comments about female media personalities from Rosie O’Donnell to Megyn Kelly, numerous allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault, and revelations that his first wife had leveled rape accusations in a deposition during their divorce. He won despite the release of lewd audiotapes in which he was heard bragging about his aggressive sexual approach to women and how he could, as a celebrity, simply “grab ’em by the pussy.” He won despite his slut-shaming of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado and sexually inappropriate comments made about young girls and his own daughter Ivanka. And he won despite insulting Clinton with a series of sexist comments and innuendos—“If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” he repeated on Twitter, a nod to the Monica Lewinsky scandal—that culminated in his declaring her “such a nasty woman” in a debate weeks before the election.10 Those sporting misogynistic slogans at his rallies were following his lead, and the #NeverTrump conservatives, however horrified by him, hardly rallied to Clinton’s defense.
A Donald Trump supporter wears a crude campaign T-shirt praising the candidate’s male anatomical parts at a rally in Virginia, 2016. ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES.
Feminist Clinton supporters were most disheartened to learn that while 54 percent of female voters overall voted for her, the majority of white women voted for Trump, including over 60 percent of white women without college degrees. That number showed a sharp contrast with black women voters, 94 percent of whom voted for Clinton (she also won among Hispanic and other women of color). And it also differentiated working-class white women from white women with college degrees, 51 percent of whom voted for Clinton and 45 percent for Trump. Analyzing what these disparities said about race and class, one observer noted that when speaking to women, Clinton and her supporters spent too much time talking about shattering the glass ceiling to get the first woman elected president: “If Clinton had really focused on sexual harassment, which is a very common experience for women in low wage jobs and middle class jobs, instead of focusing on the glass ceiling, I think that she could have had more white working class votes,” especially white working class women’s votes. Clinton’s feminism, according to this argument, looked privileged and elitist, and it did not move vast numbers of white women.11
History suggests how Trump may well have won not in spite of his attitude toward women but because of it. Polls persistently showed that most Republicans felt that Trump “tells it like it is” rather than stooping to the so-called political correctness of people committed to gender and racial equality. Huge numbers of his supporters apparently saw his open sexism as refreshing. At least among Trump’s most loyal base, men and women alike cheered his putdowns of Clinton and the virile potency they believed his words and actions embodied. For many, Trump, the avatar of a patriarchal and largely white Christian right, was distinctly preferable to Clinton, the so-called elitist pseudo-Christian
feminist who could appear to be, as one evangelical periodical made explicitly clear two months before the election, the Grim Reaper, à la her pro-choice stance on abortion.
Nearly a full century after American women gained the right to vote and fought successfully for the right to speak publicly about contraception without threat of arrest, the nation’s colossal clash over gender and sexuality was nowhere near over. In fact, sexism and outright misogyny seemed to be undergoing a resurgence amid Trump’s campaign. The more that feminists, liberals, and progressives publicly condemned the latest chauvinistic statement by Trump, the stronger his support seemed to grow. One might have expected his manifestly immoral personal behavior or his past support of abortion rights and same-sex marriage to have undermined this support (as indeed it did early in the primaries). But because he shared, in the coarsest fashion, a worldview shaped by fear of women’s empowerment and a determined opposition to gender equality, the majority of conservative Christians trusted him to defend their moral outlook in the political realm. In other words, it was because the election showcased such a clash of worldviews that Trump got the same sort of conservative Christian support that had traditionally been bestowed upon much more conventional Christian candidates.
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