The president and the porn star

Of late an adult-film actress and stripper named Stephanie Gregory Clifford, professionally known as Stormy Daniels, has said that she had an affair with President Donald Trump about a dozen years ago and that he has tried to buy her silence, per a recent interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” As I understand it, part of the controversy is that the $130,000 figure thrown out may have been paid out of campaign funds, which would be illegal.

Several female Trump supporters who I believe to be evangelical Christians have said in response, “You’re trying to impeach our president.”

That’s rich.

Here’s the problem: Would they say the same thing about a Democrat in this kind of pickle? I think you know the answer to that.

What I’ve believed for nearly 30 years is that Christians have maintained an obvious double standard when it comes to sexually immoral activity. When a conservative “messes up” that transgression is often covered, but when a liberal does it they want him removed. (I don’t recall any of these same believers calling for now-former Rep. Tim Murphy’s head after his mistress revealed that he had asked her to get an abortion. Murphy, who formerly represented a district here in southwestern Pennsylvania, resigned on his own.)

Anyway, other believers have referred to Trump as a “baby Christian” and for that reason alone don’t hold anything he does against him. The truth be told, I haven’t seen any concrete evidence that he’s changed his ways, and he certainly hasn’t said about this situation, “What I did was wrong.”

And I think I know why. Their goal was never really the propagation of the authentic Christian faith — it was always about maintaining conservative Christian hegemony. In such a case, however, the two are mutually exclusive because Godly standards don’t change.

This might be one of the reasons younger people are leaving churches. Christians who wink at sin for the sake of political power end up selling out God at the end. And thus we sabotage our own efforts to share the Christian faith — doing so comes off as inauthentic, let alone hypocritical.

It’s one thing for a Republican president who ran “the most secular campaign in [recent] history” not to trust God. It’s something else entirely when His own people don’t, either.