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Piety and Profanity: The Raunchy Christians Are Here

Article Date - 03/17/2024

The “Conservative Dad’s Real Women of America” 2024 pinup calendar features old-school images of sexiness — bikinis, a red sports car, a bubble bath.

The models are influencers and aspiring politicians familiar to the very online pro-Trump right. In one image, a BlazeTV host in a short skirt lights a copy of The New York Times on fire with a cigar. Another model, the former N.R.A. spokeswoman Dana Loesch, hoists two rifles.

Published by a “woke-free beer” company hastily launched last year as an alternative to Bud Light, the calendar was clearly meant to provoke liberals. But when photos of it began circulating online in December, progressives did not pay much attention. Instead, it sparked a heated squabble on the right over whether “conservative dads” who happen to be Christians should reject the calendar on moral grounds, or embrace it as an irreverent win for the good guys.

Allie Beth Stuckey, an evangelical commentator and podcaster, condemned the calendar as “soft porn” marketed to married men, and saw it as proof of growing polarization between Christian and secular conservatism. Other prominent Christian conservatives joined her in expressing their disgust.

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But the calendar itself suggested that Christian and secular conservatism are not exactly as distinct as Ms. Stuckey and others might wish. The calendar’s cover model, Riley Gaines, a former college swimmer and activist against transgender women’s participation in women’s sports, frequently speaks at church events and evangelical conferences, and frames her cause as a “spiritual battle.”

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A calendar with a woman in a bikini on it.
The calendar’s cover model, Riley Gaines, is a former college swimmer and activist against transgender women’s participation in women’s sports.
Credit...Conservative Dad's Ultra Right Beer
In another image, a crucifix hangs prominently on the kitchen wall behind a woman in a tiny skirt, apron and platform heels. On the platform X, the model — Josie Glabach, who goes by “The Redheaded Libertarian” — said she was working to provide for her family, and defended her conservative bona fides in part by referring to her family’s Catholic faith. Using vividly vulgar language, she wrote that she doesn’t care “if the fact that I look hot doing any of it offends your senses.”

Such a debate would have been unimaginable at the turn of the millennium, when the best-known evangelical Christians in America were the evangelist Billy Graham, George W. Bush — the embodiment of establishment Republicanism — and Ned Flanders, a character on “The Simpsons” known for his cheerful prudery.

As a core faction in the Republican coalition, conservative evangelicals have long influenced the party’s policy priorities, including opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. And the influence extended to conservative culture, where evangelical norms against vulgarity were rarely challenged in public.

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In some ways, they remain intact. Most pastors don’t cuss from the pulpit, or at all. Mainstream conservative churches still teach their young people to save sex for marriage and avoid pornography.

Yet a raunchy, outsider, boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class, accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions and a shifting media landscape increasingly dominated by the looser standards of online culture.

When Mr. Trump was elected president in 2016, winning the votes of about eight in 10 white evangelicals, many observers saw it as an essentially transactional relationship. Mr. Trump, a twice-divorced reality television star from New York City, had promised to appoint conservative judges and to defend Christian interests. But he rarely showed up in church, and he defended a recording of him bragging about grabbing women’s genitals as “locker-room banter.” He pitched himself as a protector, not a pious fellow traveler.

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Representative Marjorie Taylor Green stands on a stage under a cross.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has embraced the label of “Christian nationalist,” drops vulgarities in hearings and on the House floor.Credit...Annie Mulligan for The New York Times
But it’s hard to remain fiercely loyal to a figure like Mr. Trump without being changed by him. Eight years after Mr. Trump first secured the Republican nomination for president, it’s clear that the aesthetics, the language and the borders of public morality in evangelical America are shifting.

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“As with so many things with Trump, it’s a longer history, but he has also changed the game,” said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a historian who has studied evangelicalism and masculinity. She cited gleefully combative talk radio of the 1990s as a touchstone in the coarsening of evangelical mores.

The shift is perhaps most visible in politics. Representative Lauren Boebert, who has called for an end to the separation of church and state, was caught on a theater security camera in September vaping and groping her date. (She later blamed her “public and difficult divorce” for her behavior, and said the behavior “fell short of my values.”) Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has embraced the label of “Christian nationalist,” drops vulgarities in hearings, on the House floor and in conversations with reporters.

Last summer, Nancy Mace, a Republican representative from South Carolina, joked about premarital sex and cohabitation, once obvious taboos, from the lectern at a Christian prayer breakfast in Washington. Praising the event’s host, Senator Tim Scott, she opened her talk by saying she had made a special effort to arrive early.

“When I woke up this morning at 7, I was getting picked up at 7:45, Patrick, my fiancé, tried to pull me by my waist over this morning in bed,” she told the audience, which included her pastor and Mr. Scott, an outspoken evangelical. “And I was like, ‘No, baby, we don’t got time for that this morning.’”