Evangelicals' top excuse for backing Trump torn to shreds in scathing NYT column

Evangelical Christians say they feel under siege and want a purported "street fighter" like President Donald Trump to protect them from the onslaught of secular liberalism.

This worldview was given voice recently by Attorney General Bill Barr, who delivered a speech at Notre Dame in which he accused liberals of promoting "the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good" and bemoaned "the campaign to destroy the traditional moral order."

New York Times columnist Thomas Esdall has written a scathing rebuttal to Barr and other Christian conservatives in which he not only skewers their hypocrisy for standing by Trump, but also for being wrong on the substance of their charges.

"It is the well-educated, often secular liberal elites so detested by social conservatives who are reviving the traditional two-parent family, with declining divorce rates and a commitment to combine forces to invest in their children," he argues.

Edsall also notes that while secular liberals have increasingly been building more stable families, conservative blue-collar white families have been the ones that have been increasingly distressed.

"The white working class -- the segment of the population with the weakest ties to, if not outright animosity toward, liberalism, feminism and other liberation movements -- has, in recent years, experienced the strongest trends toward social decay," he writes.

And the cause of this isn't the influence of cultural liberalism, Edsall believes, but the decline in employment stability and wage growth for workers who lack college degrees.

Read the whole column here.