Simon Cox Blog: Where Evangelicals Fall on Roy Moore vs. Trump, Lauer, Franken, and Six More Men

Tuesday 12 December 2017

Where Evangelicals Fall on Roy Moore vs. Trump, Lauer, Franken, and Six More Men

Meanwhile, national evangelicals disagree with Alabama peers on Tuesday’s Senate election.

When it comes to Roy Moore and the long list of prominent men accused of sexual misconduct or assault, which side do believers believe?

Evangelicals share the concern of most Americans that such claims need to be taken seriously and are representative of a broader pattern of sexual misconduct in society.

However, when it comes to individual cases—particularly those involving conservative political leaders such as Moore, currently running for US Senate in Alabama, and President Donald Trump—self-identified evangelicals are slightly less inclined to give credence to the allegations.

There’s a gap between evangelical voters and registered voters overall when it comes to Moore, an outspoken Christian judge who has dominated political news ever since The Washington Post reported this fall on several claims of sexual assault against teen girls that date back 40 years.

According to a Politico/Morning Consult poll conducted December 1–3, 36 percent of self-identified evangelical voters find the accusations against Moore credible, compared to 42 percent of voters overall.

For 10 of the accused men in the survey, evangelicals were in most cases less likely than American voters overall to believe the accusers:

In two of these cases—Moore and John Conyers—a plurality said they didn’t know or had no opinion about the credibility of the accusations.

Ahead of Moore’s much-anticipated Senate race on Tuesday, Americans have looked to his fellow conservative Southern evangelicals—many of whom supported the former state judge as he defended a Ten Commandments monument at the Alabama Supreme Court and spoke out against same-sex marriage.

Moore denies the allegations against him, characterizing them ...