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Before I answer, I’ve got to carefully tread. This is dangerous ground. So some words of caution.I’m still an evangelical Christian, but I must confess I find myself on the outside edge of things, sometimes, looking in. So before I say anything further, I’ll give my standard, and very important disclaimer: I know many wonderful evangelicals who do not think highly of Mr. Trump, nor do they subscribe unthinkingly to his policies. They are wonderful, loving people, concerned for the poor, migrants, immigrants (both legal and illegal, and more than willing to see that everyone, of every ethnic, racial and religious background gets the same fair shake that all the white, rich folks in the suburbs get. We can really be OK folks.But here’s the deal: There is a pretty noticeable and vocal group of evangelical leaders and their followers — a fairly large crowd, too — who inexplicably have elected to embrace Mr. Trump and see him as some sort of God-chosen answer to the things that they believe are wrong with America. Unfortunately, they get all the media attention, and they, as a result, label the rest of us as Trumpsters, one-issue radical right-wingers, and etc. You can imagine how much fun it is to be regularly and automatically mistaken for a follower of Franklin Graham or a devotee of Jerry Falwell Jr.The big reasons that have tempted evangelicals (and I elected to use the word tempted for a reason) to throw in with Mr. Trump are two:The painful and divisive pro-life/pro-choice controversy that has devised this country since Roe v. Wade. (It shouldn’t have to, but it does, and people on both sides of the issue share the blame for the growing divide. Evangelicals see this issue as so foundational that they have become willing to cast their votes blindly for the candidate that promises pro-life action on it, regardless of other allegiances. They voted for Mr. Reagan for the same reason. Mr. Trump is nothing if not an opportunist. He made a promise and even let a few top evangelicals pray over him. he got, for his trouble, millions of votes. At the end of his reign as President, he like Reagan, will have nothing to show for it, because the GOP and GOP-approved justices (even at the SCOTUS level) will be very unlikely to have the opportunity anytime soon to reverse 50 years of case law to the satisfaction of evangelicals. He knew that when he made the promise.There is a strain of evangelical Christianity that is very susceptible to conspiracy theories. evangelicals are, sad to say, among those responsible for the fear campaign that has been fomented against childhood immunizations, and has resulted in a number of states passing legislation relieving people of the necessity of doing so if it violates their beliefs. So now we have an epidemic going in Washington State, a local hotbed of anti-immunizationism. Never mind that the threatened connection between such things as autism and immunization have no proven scientific basis. The fear campaign is all over info-sources like Facebook, passed from evangelical to evangelical as gospel truth. And this is just a small piece of the larger conspiracy, the one Mr. Trump has labeled rather creatively as the “deep state.” Boy, there’s nothing like that secret-society overtone to get an evangelical worked up. We’ve gone through our anti-Masonic Temple and, more recently, even the anti-Boy Scouts phases, and there are those among us that just can’t resist finding a group to demonize. Well, we’ve never had a President that was so tailor-made for the paranoid at heart. Deep State sells, and the beautiful thing about it is that can be anything you want it to be. Nevermind that it’s a lot of stuff and nonsense. Tailor made for Mr. Trump.To your question: I have to say, based on the above, that while I believe these evangelical fans of Mr. Trump are a lot of other things, they aren’t hypocritical in their support of him. Hypocrisy is to believe one thing, but do another. No, these folks are doing what they believe. They believe that Mr. Trump, despite his many flaws and peccadilloes, is actually God’s instrument in today’s world. Those foreign, unbelieving kings who took Israel to task and made them slaves in the Old Testament? They were workin’ for God. Says right there in God’s Word. They know Mr. Trump might be as rotten as a container of grapes fallen out of a shopping bag onto the hot parking lot surface at the grocery, then run over by a car tire. But they believe that God sometimes uses rotten grapes to make wine, and they can give you the chapters and verses from their Bibles. So they think that God is speaking through him. Well, that’a all well and good.But here’s where the real hypocrisy problem lies: Why was Mr. Barack Obama, a man married to one wife, and by all accounts, also devoted to his wife and children, and had as his penultimate mission to guarantee, if possible, and against enormous odds, that everyone have health insurance that covered pre-existing conditions at a more reasonable cost, not also the Voice of God?Please. Really. I want someone to explain that one to me. Because even if he wasn’t born here (he was) and even if he was a Muslim (he was not), according to the evangelicals who support Mr. Trump, he’d be a prime candidate for one of God’s operatives, too. And I can show you the chapters and verses from their Bibles.