There are others who opposed him, not because they necessarily disliked his platform, but because they believed that character matters in elected officials and found his objectionable.
it's 9 years old now, but it's still remarkable:
In 2011, 30 percent of white evangelicals said that "an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life." Now, 72 percent say so — a far bigger swing than other religious groups the poll studied.
It's just one poll, but it does suggest a sizable shift in how Americans of several religious stripes think about the connection between morality and politics. White evangelicals also are less likely than they used to be to say that "strong religious beliefs" are "very important" in a presidential candidate. That share fell from 64 percent in 2011 to 49 percent this year.
White mainline Protestants and Catholics also grew more accepting of a candidate who has committed "immoral acts," while religiously unaffiliated people barely changed. Those "unaffiliated" people in 2011 had been much more willing than the broader population to believe candidates who had committed "immoral acts" could do their jobs. Now, they are in line with Americans as a whole.
in the archive.org copy of this article (linked), there's a nice graph that illustrates what happened more clearly than text can (NPR's current version has lost the graph image).
sometime between Obama and Trump, huge numbers of people in the religious groups surveyed changed their minds about how much personal morality mattered for Presidents.
which, IMO, is all you need to know about how highly those religious groups people actually valued that particular morality.
if one can abandon a principle that quickly, there's a good chance that principle was never very strongly-held.
There are others who opposed him, not because they necessarily disliked his platform, but because they believed that character matters in elected officials and found his objectionable.
it's 9 years old now, but it's still remarkable:
in the archive.org copy of this article (linked), there's a nice graph that illustrates what happened more clearly than text can (NPR's current version has lost the graph image).
sometime between Obama and Trump, huge numbers of people in the religious groups surveyed changed their minds about how much personal morality mattered for Presidents.
which, IMO, is all you need to know about how highly those religious groups people actually valued that particular morality.
if one can abandon a principle that quickly, there's a good chance that principle was never very strongly-held.