6. They don’t care what The Beautiful People think.
As Charles Murray has pointed out, people live in bubbles. Elites, in particular, live a pretty cordoned-off life and belong to their own internationalist class, and their contempt toward the ways of life in Trump country has been palpable for decades. A Trump tweet considered a shameful embarrassment in Boston would be welcomed with an approving snicker in West Virginia.
The evangelical world is also affected. There is a section of the evangelical world that is quite eager to shuffle off as much cultural stigma as possible. And there is another section that does not care about that cultural opprobrium because they distrust and dislike the creators of stigma today.
We saw some of this dynamic when Russell Moore and others decided to agitate against displaying the Confederate battle flag. What some saw as a righteous and long-awaited change, others saw as contemptible virtue signaling. Condemning Reconstructionist icons would have been courageous in the Jim Crow-era, but now it simply seems to be currying favor with forces and factions that have proved themselves to be moral idiots on the subjects of sexual morality and life. Who cares what they think?
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