In his book The Immoral Majority, Ben Howe coins the term “divine nationalism.” This is his name for the political battles waged by many evangelicals for Donald Trump.

He discusses one of their names for Trump: a “divine vessel.” Howe says they are “claiming a divine approval for him that he’d never claimed for himself.”

Howe talks of an unsettling aura in the white evangelical embrace of Trump. “Trump evangelicals have taken this earthly object of their adoration and quantum-locked him to God’s will.”

Trump is freed even from “the burden of accountability.” Indeed, Howe says, Trump has become an idol to his evangelical followers. The same evangelicals who denounced Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern are perfectly okay with Trump’s affairs.

Perhaps this seeming moral relativism is one reason the number of evangelicals appears to be declining while the religiously nonaligned are increasing.