The following is an excerpt from an interview in Atlantic magazine with Ben Howe, a white evangelical and author of The Immoral Majority. Howe is angry at white evangelicalism for, among other things, a wholesale embrace of the meanest parts of Donald Trump:

In the minds of a lot of conservatives, the left exists to impugn their motives, and the Republican Party regularly lied to them and said they would defend them and then didn’t. And that was the establishment. Trump became their hero, because he hated the establishment, and he beat up on the media, and he was fighting back against all these forces. The more he fights, the more they feel justified, like, He’s our hero because we needed someone to do this for us.

Trump’s appeal is not judges. It’s not policies. It’s that he’s a shit-talker and a fighter and tells it like it is. That’s what they like. They love the meanest parts of him.

And there you have it, from the lips of an insider. Doesn’t have anything to do with Jesus.