It seems unshakeable, the Beltway press's faith that Christian conservatives mean all that jibber-jabber about sexual morality. On Sunday, CNN's Jake Tapper laid into Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., for supporting the recently resigned Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., despite allegations that Gaetz paid an underage girl to have sex with him at a drug-fueled orgy. "You’re a man of faith, you’re a man of God, you’re a man of family. With some of these nominees, Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., I wonder — does it matter anymore for Republicans to think of leaders as people who are moral in their personal lives?" Tapper asked Johnson, who smirked before dodging the question.
Not that Johnson needed to answer the question, as anyone can see the answer is a big, fat no. Johnson obviously doesn't have a problem with men paying teenage girls for sex. By suppressing the House Ethics Committee investigation that reportedly has evidence of Gaetz doing such a thing, Johnson has shown that he's far more outraged at the possibility that a man might face consequences for this behavior. To be fair to Tapper, it's doubtful he's genuinely surprised at Johnson's priorities. Instead, the issue here is that Johnson loves to tell other people, especially women and LGBTQ people, that they are sinful for having far more ordinary sex lives. Worse, he built his career on using the law to force his rules for sexual "morality" on others, even arguing that laws against homosexuality, abortion, and divorce are necessary to prevent "sexual anarchy."
On the surface, that sounds like hypocrisy. But what's going on is far darker. Covering for a man accused of sexual abuse of a minor is not just normal for the Christian right, but so rote that it can be considered a tradition of the faith. Johnson is a Southern Baptist, the same denomination that saw a report released two years ago documenting how the church kept a "secret list of more than 700 abusive pastors" that they largely chose to protect, often while blaming the often-underage victims for "tempting" them. In one instant, a teenaged victim "was forced to apologize in front of the church" for being pregnant, but forbidden from naming the pastor that had raped her. When activists first tried to force transparency on the church, the Southern Baptist Convention's lawyer, Augie Boto, accused them of conspiring as part of "a satanic scheme."
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Johnson's views on sexual morality come from what critics of the religious right have deemed "purity culture." In my March report on the sprawling network of ex-evangelicals and other anti-fundamentalism activists, the experts repeatedly emphasized that, within purity culture, responsibility for sexual restraint is put mostly and often wholly on the shoulders of women and girls. Sometimes, there are half-baked attempts to claim they want men to control themselves, but that's more a P.R. move than a sincere effort. Far more common in the religious right is a belief that men are incapable of controlling their desires. If sexual "sin" happens — even if it's outright violence — the fingers are pointed directly at the girl or woman for not being "modest" enough.
Johnson's behavior is perfectly consistent with this worldview. By blocking the release of the report, Johnson isn't just protecting a man accused of a sex crime. He is also inflicting more cruelty on the women involved in these alleged sex parties. The attorney representing both has been sharing reported details from their testimony and pressuring the House to release the report. "They’ve already been through so much — and each time it happens, it kind of rips apart an old wound," he said of his clients. "They really don’t want to be called in to testify."
The attorney's stance makes sense to those who believe men can and should be expected to take personal responsibility for their behavior. These two women didn't ask for this grief, and Gaetz's denials and other obstructive behavior have made this already painful process worse for them. But in the topsy-turvy gender system of the Christian right — where men are expected to hold all the power but take none of the responsibility — these two women are temptresses who led men astray by being willing to have sex for money.
"Men, in this view, are seen through the lens of frailty—they are the sum of instincts and desires that are uncontrollable when in the presence of the power of the temptress—while women are viewed through the prism of calculating evil," Russell Moore, the editor of Christianity Today and a critic of some aspects of evangelical culture, wrote in September. He argued that it's a view that allows men "to blame others—sometimes innocent people—for their own abuse of power."
He's right about this, but his words will fall on deaf ears. One of the most alluring aspects of Trumpism to Christian conservatives is his vision of masculine power unchecked by accountability. For people who already believe that male dominance and patriarchy are mandated by God, it's easy to feel resentful when told the price of power is duty. MAGA shuns the Spiderman philosophy that great power requires great responsibility. Instead, they believe great power is about crushing others without apology. And then playing the victim when anyone questions why we're giving the power to the cruelest people in our society.
When Johnson rose from relative obscurity to the Speaker position, one of the few pieces of information that journalists dug up was that he had been in a documentary about "purity balls" in 2015. These events are fascinatingly creepy, in that grown men go on "dates" with their underage daughters. The girls take a vow of virginity premised on the idea that their bodies and sexualities are the property of their fathers, until ownership is transferred to a future husband. The fluffy dresses and elaborate dances are about romanticizing a dehumanizing view of women, in which they are male property, whose only value is in being a sex object.
The purity ball isn't very different from the sex parties Gaetz is accused of attending, right down to the focus on girls who are too young to consent. There are ways of doing sex work that honor the autonomy of sex workers, but the text messages and other information that's leaked out about Gaetz and his cronies — one who is serving time in federal prison for his role — suggest that is not how they viewed it at all. The alleged underage victim was even called "vintage 99" in text messages, as if she was a wine that one consumes, not a person. That's why there's simply no conflict between the Christian right and the leering version of MAGA represented by Gaetz and Trump. What binds them together is a belief that women are objects, to be used however the men who own them wish.
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