How the religious right embraced Trump and lost its moral authority

In “The Death of Outrage,” Bennett showed the absurdity of tolerating grossly immoral behavior on the grounds that everyone sins.

The Gospel’s injunction to “judge not, lest ye be judged” is a warning against hypocrisy and self-righteousness, he wrote. “It is not — it cannot be — a call to withhold all judgment or never to express a critical opinion of another.” After all, both Old and New Testaments repeatedly condemn immoral behavior. Christians are not called upon to overlook sin, Bennett pointed out, but to resist it. There is nothing admirable about refusing to “make reasonable judgments based on moral principles” — particularly in weighing the actions of democratic leaders.

Equally intolerable is the willingness to ignore a candidate’s brazen moral offenses because you like his stands on public policy. Such ends-justify-the-means arguments are “Nixonian,” said Bennett. “Moral precepts are real; they are not like warm candle wax, easily shaped to fit the ends of this or that president, or this or that cause.” When Trump backers downplay their candidate’s scandalous conduct on the grounds that Supreme Court appointments matter more, they are as bad as Clinton backers who downplayed the president’s Oval Office debauchery because they liked his position on abortion rights.

Yet Bennett now exemplifies the phenomenon he excoriated. When it came to Clinton’s depravity, Bennett was unsparing. Trump’s depravity he doesn’t mind so much. In August, Bennett accused anti-Trump conservatives of “put[ting] their own vanity and taste above the interest of the country.”