Don­ald Trump has been di­vorced twice and bragged about hav­ing af­fairs with mar­ried wo­men. He pre­vi­ously sup­por­ted abor­tion rights. He reg­u­larly uses ob­scene lan­guage and in­sults his polit­ic­al op­pon­ents. He’s even botched Bible verses on the stump.

And yet ac­cord­ing to one poll, the Re­pub­lic­an pres­id­en­tial front-run­ner holds an ad­vant­age of nearly 2-to-1 among evan­gel­ic­als—the group that would pre­sum­ably put the biggest em­phas­is on mor­al is­sues—in South Car­o­lina, where born-again Chris­ti­ans ac­coun­ted for 65 per­cent of the GOP primary elect­or­ate in 2012.

There isn’t a uni­ver­sal the­ory as to why the bom­bast­ic real­ity-TV star has emerged as the top choice of white evan­gel­ic­als both na­tion­ally and in the crit­ic­al third Re­pub­lic­an nom­in­at­ing state. Chris­ti­an con­ser­vat­ives around the coun­try and polit­ic­al op­er­at­ives in South Car­o­lina say evan­gel­ic­als, who are just as fed up with the status quo in Wash­ing­ton as any­one, are drawn to Trump’s strong­man im­age and no-gray-areas view of the world—even if his val­ues don’t com­pletely align with their own. “It’s just such a bizarre year,” said Or­an Smith, the pres­id­ent of the Pal­metto Fam­ily Coun­cil.