TRUMP ISN'T THE ONLY REASON EVANGELICALS ARE "RAUNCHY"

Last week, The New York Times published a piece by Ruth Graham headlined "Piety and Profanity: The Raunchy Christians Are Here." Graham wrote about a recently published right-wing calendar:

The “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America” 2024 pinup calendar features old-school images of sexiness — bikinis, a red sports car, a bubble bath....

In [one] image, a crucifix hangs prominently on the kitchen wall behind a woman in a tiny skirt, apron and platform heels. On the platform X, the model — Josie Glabach, who goes by “The Redheaded Libertarian” — said she was working to provide for her family, and defended her conservative bona fides in part by referring to her family’s Catholic faith. Using vividly vulgar language, she wrote that she doesn’t care “if the fact that I look hot doing any of it offends your senses.”

This calendar is controversial in Evangelical circles:

Allie Beth Stuckey, an evangelical commentator and podcaster, condemned the calendar as “soft porn” marketed to married men, and saw it as proof of growing polarization between Christian and secular conservatism. Other prominent Christian conservatives joined her in expressing their disgust.

But the calendar itself suggested that Christian and secular conservatism are not exactly as distinct as Ms. Stuckey and others might wish. The calendar’s cover model, Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer and activist against transgender women’s participation in women’s sports, frequently speaks at church events and evangelical conferences, and frames her cause as a “spiritual battle.”

Graham, of course, blames the increased raunchification of Evangelicals on Donald Trump:

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

At Threads, David French recommends a despairing essay on the same subject by Russell Moore, a prominent Southern Baptist theologian and critic of the edgiest right-wingers. In the essay, titled "Why Character Doesn’t Matter Anymore," Moore spreads the blame around:

Yes, part of the vulgarization of the Right is due to the Barstool Sports / Joe Rogan secularization of the base, in which Kid Rock is an avatar more than Lee Greenwood or Michael W. Smith. But much more alarmingly, the coarsening and character-debasing is happening among politicized professing Christians. The member of Congress joking at a prayer breakfast about turning her fiancé down for sex to get there was there to talk about her faith and the importance of religious faith and values for America. The member of Congress telling a reporter to “f— off” is a self-described “Christian nationalist.” We’ve seen “Let’s Go Brandon”—a euphemism for a profanity that once would have resulted in church discipline—chanted in churches.

Pastor and aspiring theocrat Douglas Wilson publicly used a slur against women that not only will I not repeat here but that almost no secular media outlet would quote—and that’s without even referencing Wilson’s creepily coarse novel about a sex robot.

(The congresswoman who joked about postponing sex with her fiancé in a National Prayer Breakfast speech was Nancy Mace. The "fuck off" member of Congress was Marjorie Taylor Greene. And Pastor Wilson described women whose interpretation of Scripture differed from his as "a couple of cunts." Glad I could clear all that up.)

This seems like a relatively new development, but some Evangelicals have wanted to be like this for quite a while. Back in 2006, I wrote about this Newsweek story:

Last Saturday morning, 200 Christian men gathered in a downtown warehouse in Nashville for a daylong spiritual extravaganza. Inside, strobe lights flashed, and tracks by the Killers thumped from speakers stacked on either side of a stage. Four large video screens showed clips of karate fights, car chases and "Jackass"-style stunts. Then the music lowered and Christian comedian Brad Stine appeared. With his rat-a-tat delivery and aggressive style, Stine quickly whipped the crowd into a chorus of “Amens!” “A lot of guys out there wouldn’t have the balls to be here,” he shouted. “Are you ready to be a man? Are you ready to kick ass? Are you ready to grab your sword and say, ‘OK family, I’m going to lead you?’ Buckle up. This is GodMen!”

The event was the first of what Stine and other organizers hope will be a series of testosterone-fueled Christian men’s gatherings across the country. Their purpose: to reassert masculinity within a church structure that they say has been weakened by feminization.

The tunes at this event weren't exactly "Amazing Grace."

The GodMen also reject typical Christian music. It “doesn’t usher me into the presence of God,” says Smith, Stine’s manager. “It just ushered me into boredom.” Not so with the GodMen band that played on Saturday. On stage, as a series of words flashed on screens—BOSS, BOLD, BRASH, BULLY, BLUNT—the band ripped into their first tune, “Testosterone High”: “Forget the ying and the yang/ I’ll take the boom and the bang/ Give me another dose of testosterone.” ...

When the GodMen band seized the stage again, they tore into an anthem called “Grow A Pair!”: “We’ve been beaten down/ Feminized by the culture crowd,” they sang. “No more nice guy, timid and ashamed/ We’ve had enough, cowboy up/ In the power of Jesus name/ Welcome to the battle/ A million men have got your back/ Jump up in the saddle/ Grab a sword, don’t be scared/ Be a man, grow a pair!”

This was around the same time that many right-wingers were claiming to be "South Park Republicans." In 2005, an essayist for the Manhattan Institute gleefully described one South Park episode:

Consider season nine's hilarious - and disturbing - opening episode. The boys' gay teacher, Mr. Garrison, decides to get a sex change. The procedure is shown, graphically, to be a horrific self-mutilation, which is already a brave bit of truth-telling in an era of "transgender rights." But you've never seen anything on television like what follows.

Mr. Garrison, now a "woman," mistakenly thinks he's pregnant - and that makes him very happy because he can rush off to get an abortion, and so prove that he's a real woman. Here's the key exchange, at a Planned Parenthood center:

Garrison: Hello, doctor. Looks like I need an abortion.

Doctor: An abortion?

Garrison: Yeah, I've got one growing inside of me. Now are you gonna scramble its brains or just vacuum it out?

The doctor then tells Mr. Garrison that he can't have an abortion because he can't get pregnant: His sex change is ultimately cosmetic. Mr. Garrison is crestfallen: "You mean I'll never know what it feels like to have a baby growing inside me and then scramble its brains and vacuum it out?" The doctor responds: "Nnn ... that's right."

[Matt] Stone and his fellow thirtysomething colleague, Trey Parker, portray both abortion and sex-change operations in ways Robert Bork would endorse wholeheartedly - but do so in one of the most offensively vulgar half-hours in television history. Now that's subversive.

All of this -- twenty years ago and today -- conforms to Cleek's Law: Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily. In the 1960s and immediately afterward, the left was identified with sexual liberation, and the right with its opposite. But in periods when feminism, respect for LGBTQ rights, and a focus on consent and mutual respect seemed to dominate on the left, the right decided to emphasize the opposite -- which was a good fit, as it turned out, because right-wingers hate LGBTQ people, hate feminism, and want heterosexual sex, but exclusively on straight men's terms.

Right-wingers talked less about all this in the Obama years, when liberals elected a straight male sex symbol as president. But since then, Democrats have run a feminist woman and an old codger as president, so Trump pretended to be the stud he may have been a few decades ago, and the right followed. But the tendencies were there all along.

And it's not just Trump. In seemingly non-political online spaces, "manosphere" influencers are encouraging young men to dominate women and be "pimps" while also expressing contempt for women who have active sex lives. Other influencers encourage women to be "tradwives" who marry young, stop working outside the home, cede decision-making to their husbands, and bear lots of children. This is the right hoping to remake the sexual zeitgeist, or at least persuade a significant number of young people that present-day sex and romance are a liberal plot against them. And that's the context for Elon Musk's recent online pronouncements that hormonal birth control is dangerous, a message that's also being spread to the young by junk-science influencers.

All this is consistent with the raunchy Evangelical movement, which I fear will outlive Trump.