‘Jesus is my saviour, Trump is my president.’ Why the religious right is rooting for a convicted conman | Arwa Mahdawi

What were you doing at 1.22am on Friday morning? I was engaged in my favourite hobby: sleeping. Donald Trump, it seems, was also busy with his favourite pastime: being unhinged on social media. In the early hours of Friday, Trump hit the well-worn caps lock key on his digital device and started “truthing” on his Truth Social platform.

“I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER,” he wrote. “READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG??? THIS MAY BE, IN FACT, THE FIRST MAJOR STEP IN THE REVIVAL OF RELIGION, WHICH IS DESPERATELY NEEDED, IN OUR COUNTRY. BRING BACK TTC!!! MAGA2024”

Trump’s outpouring of religious appreciation wasn’t inspired by some sort of road to Damascus moment, it was prompted by politics. Louisiana recently became the first state in the US to require the Ten Commandments be posted in school classrooms – galvanising other Republican states into saying they plan to follow suit.

Clearly Trump thinks he can wring a lot of political capital out of “TTC” because he has continued to sing their praises. On Saturday, he addressed a group of influential evangelical Christians in Washington, telling them they “cannot afford to sit on the sidelines” of the November election. He also asked if they were acquainted with the commandments. “Has anyone read the ‘Thou shalt not steal’?” Trump asked at the Faith and Freedom Coalition. “I mean, has anybody read this incredible stuff? It’s just incredible.”

Incredible stuff indeed. It will not have escaped anybody’s notice that Trump seems to have taken it as a personal challenge to break as many commandments as he can. The man is a convicted felon, for goodness sake. Last month, a jury found him guilty of falsifying business records in an attempt to cover up a hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. According to Daniels, the alleged affair took place just months after Trump’s wife, Melania, had given birth . That’s at least two commandments violated right there.

Trump didn’t present himself as a particularly devout man before he embarked upon his political career, but seems to have found God when it became politically expedient to do so. When he’s not comparing himself to Jesus , the former president invokes religion regularly. His rallies are full of merchandise such as baseball caps emblazoned with phrases like “Jesus is my saviour, Trump is my president”. Earlier this year he started selling Bibles . While he’s always courted evangelicals, it’s been noted his campaign now seems increasingly infused with Christian imagery .

Back in 2016, many evangelicals accepted Trump’s somewhat unconvincing religious act because it made strategic sense to do so: they hated Hillary Clinton and Trump was promising to appoint Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v Wade. (Which, of course, he went on to do.) Trump and evangelicals entered into an alliance that was mutually beneficial. But the question is: why continue to back Trump? It’s not as if the religious right hasn’t had other options this election cycle. They could have chosen, for example, to back Mike Pence , a born-again Christian. But instead they’ve continued to rally around a convicted conman.

Perhaps this is because they seem to value practicality over purity. A Pew Research Center report from earlier this year found that: “Most people who view Trump positively don’t think he is especially religious himself. But many think he stands up for people with religious beliefs like theirs.”

More broadly, it seems evangelicals are able to shrug off Trump’s personal shortcomings because he’s successfully sold them on a vision, rather than himself. Just look at Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives and one of the most powerful figures of the religious right in the US. Back in 2015, Johnson complained Trump “lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House.” Now he’s one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders. Trump, Johnson recently explained , “is not just … an individual running for president. I think now he’s seen as a symbol, a symbol of one who is willing to fight back against that corruption, the deep state and all the rest.”

It’s much harder to discredit a symbol than it is an individual. Trump may seem a clear conman to most of us, but thou shalt underestimate him at your peril.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist