The devil went down to Georgia this week, and he was surprised to find that white evangelicals had already beat him to soul stealing. This time, though, no amount of good fiddle playing is going to make the state’s evangelical voters let go of Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker, an anti-abortion rights candidate accused of paying for a former sexual partner’s abortion in 2009.
A few decades ago, the allegation that he paid for an abortion would have disqualified Walker from consideration by white evangelicals.
That woman, whose name we don’t know, told The Daily Beast that she has a canceled check Walker gave her to pay for the abortion and a get-well card he signed for her after the procedure. After Walker denied paying for an abortion and denied having any idea who his accuser could be, she gave the news outlet permission to identify her as the mother of one of his children, one of the children whom he hadn’t publicly acknowledged at the start of the campaign. As she put it, “He didn’t accept responsibility for the kid we did have together, and now he isn’t accepting responsibility for the one that we didn’t have.” The New York Times reported Friday that the woman said Walker wanted her to abort another pregnancy in 2011 but that she refused and gave birth to their now 10-year-old son.
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A few decades ago, the allegation that he paid for an abortion would have disqualified Walker from consideration by white evangelicals. He definitely would not have been their preferred candidate. Not anymore. Today’s MAGA evangelicals are willing to forgive anything and everything for their candidates — as long as they keep running as hardline MAGA Republicans.
You’re not alone if you find this all hard to understand. You may be like those politicos and opinion writers who took white evangelicals at their word when they professed to have strong beliefs about morality, family and abortion. But the historical truth, as I have shown in my book, “White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America,” for evangelicals, is the politics of morality isn’t about their candidates’ morality. It’s about legislating their particular brand of morality for others who are outsiders to the faith.
Their Christian beliefs, while seeming rigid to outsiders, allow for those who have transgressed (especially men who have transgressed) to seek forgiveness and say they’ve been forgiven. In the case of someone like Walker, who continues to deny that he paid for an abortion, the reality is, even if he admitted that he did, they would still accept him. The apparent lies are for the benefit of the media.
The support that Walker, a legendary running back at the University of Georgia, enjoys from many white politicians and churches makes him a unique figure in this morality play. By virtue of his willingness to continue to play along, to continually protest his innocence even in the face of his son Christian Walker’s tweets that he was a horribly violent father pretending to be a “moral, Christian, upright man,” he can present himself as the aggrieved party who’s being attacked by vicious political forces.
What his son says and what the woman who claims Herschel Walker paid for her abortion says may sound persuasive to everybody else, but to white evangelicals, these attacks are lies, sent by the father of lies, that is, the devil. According to leaked video, at a prayer meeting for Walker at First Baptist Church in Atlanta the day after The Daily Beast’s initial story about the abortion was published, Anthony George, the senior pastor, prayed: “We ask you to rebuke the devil … Satan will not get the victory.”
While this hypocrisy is deplorable, it is part of the tactical religious strategy that works for the Republican Party. Though it promotes policies that don’t even consider a threat to a mother’s life as justifying an abortion, male candidates suspected of gross hypocrisy can find forgiveness from Republicans thirsty for power. Consider what right-wing television and radio host Dana Loesch said about the allegation that Walker paid to terminate a past partner’s pregnancy: “I don’t care if he paid some skank! I want control of the Senate! “
Morality is not something that white evangelicals actually demand of their candidates. What they want is for their chosen candidates to bring them power and prestige. They want their candidates, such as former President Donald Trump, to deliver policies, judges and laws that erase abortion and same sex-marriage rights. Their aim is not democracy, but theocracy. Radio host Dana Loesch said: “I don’t care if he paid some skank! I want control of the Senate! “ That is why white evangelicals continue to vote for such candidates, despite their moral failings. To them Herschel Walker, a Heisman trophy winner who allegedly paid for an abortion is better than Sen. Rafael Warnock, who holds a doctorate from Union Seminary and pastors Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist church, the church Martin Luther King Jr. pastored. Right-wing talk show host Erik Erickson, after initially dismissing the allegations against Walker as “old news” and something everybody already knew, went so far as to claim that Warnock is not a Christian. It’s clear to anyone who can see that white evangelicals, who have a symbiotic relationship with the Republican Party, are not looking for candidates that are pristine, only those they think can win. No one should expect evangelicals or their candidates to live by what they want the rest of us to live by. In 2016, they quickly forgave Trump after that Access Hollywood tape captured him boasting of how he grabbed women inappropriately, and they voted for him in record numbers. No one should be surprised that Walker is getting a pass or that the devil looking to trade Georgia’s white evangelicals’ souls for his fiddle would find that they’d already given it away — in pursuit of power.
Anthea Butler is a professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania. 
