Evangelicals Find a Way Forward With Herschel Walker

The time had come for the Christian supporters of Herschel Walker to make a way where there seemed to be no way.

It was the morning after the Republican senate candidate’s ex-girlfriend came forward to say he had paid for her to have an abortion, though he supports banning the procedure without exception. Dozens of people gathered in a fluorescent hall of First Baptist Atlanta, a prominent Southern Baptist church. Pastor Anthony George sat on a platform, with Mr. Walker at his right hand.

The pastor recalled God’s protection of King David, the ancient Israelite king, and claimed similar promise for Mr. Walker. The candidate shared a testimony of how Jesus changed his life. The pastor invited people to the front to pray for him.

They surrounded him and extended their hands toward the former football star.

“This is the fight of his life, holy God,” the pastor prayed. “And we call forth your ministering angels to be his defenders.” The people clapped and gave shouts of amen.

The scene, a private event revealed in videos shared on social media, reflected the evangelical language of sin and salvation, persecution and deliverance. It was a ritual of sanctification, the washing away of sin and declaration of a higher call.

The Senate race in Georgia has become an explicit matchup of two increasingly divergent versions of American Christianity. Mr. Walker reflects the way conservative Christianity continues to be defined by its fusion with right-wing politics and tolerance for candidates who, whatever their personal failings or flaws, advance its power and cause. Mr. Walker has wielded his Christianity as an ultimate defense, at once denying the abortion allegations are true while also pointing to the mercy and forgiveness in Jesus as a divine backstop.

Senator Raphael Warnock, his Democratic opponent, is a lifelong minister who leads the storied Ebenezer Baptist Church, home to the Christian social activism embodied in the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He has inherited the legacy of the Black civil rights tradition in the South, where faith focuses on not just individual salvation, but on communal efforts to challenge injustices like segregation.

“We are witnessing two dimensions of Christian faith, both the justice dimension and the mercy dimension,” said the Rev. Dr. Robert M. Franklin Jr., professor in moral leadership at Candler School of Theology at Emory University.

The loyalty to Mr. Walker reflects an approach conservative Christians successfully honed during the Trump era, overlooking the personal morality of candidates in exchange for political power to further their policy objectives. After some hesitation in 2016, white evangelicals supported Mr. Trump in high numbers after reports about his history of unwanted advances toward women and vulgar comments about them. They stood by Roy Moore, who ran a failed campaign for Senate in Alabama, after he was accused of sexual misconduct and assault by multiple women.

The last presidential administration shifted people’s tolerance for making allowances for their preferred candidates, said the Rev. Joseph N. Cousin, who leads Allen Temple A.M.E. Church in Cherokee County, a Georgia Republican stronghold that supported Mr. Trump by nearly 40 points in 2020. For many white evangelicals, there seems to be a comfort with religious hypocrisy if power can be achieved, he said.

“It’s a free-for-all,” said Mr. Cousin, who has invited candidates from both political parties to speak to his historically Black congregation.

“If you really bring it along racial lines, perhaps it is a group that was in the majority for so long trying to stay in that majority,” he said, “but on the flip side, you have to draw a line and say right is right, wrong is wrong.”

Mr. Walker’s campaign strategy has focused on building base support among Georgia’s white conservative Christians. The prayer luncheon at First Baptist Atlanta had been arranged even before the report about the abortion dropped, after the America First Policy Institute, a group that serves as a think tank for Mr. Trump’s political world, connected the candidate with the church. In recent months, Mr. Walker has sat down with similar groups at a string of evangelical, largely white megachurches.

Jentezen Franklin, one of Mr. Trump’s top evangelical supporters who has hosted Mr. Walker at his church, Free Chapel in Gainesville, Ga., said he supports Mr. Walker because everything Mr. Walker stands for in terms of policy, from abortion to crime, reflects his own views.

“I always vote for policy more than personality,” he said, declining to comment further.

Tony Perkins, president of the political action committee associated with the Family Research Council Action, endorsed Mr. Walker on Friday. Mr. Walker’s story, he said in the statement, “is about the power of grace, redemption, and the opportunity America still provides.”

Ralph Reed, the longtime political mobilizer of social conservatives in Georgia, has stated the reports about Mr. Walker paying for an abortion, first published by The Daily Beast, could actually increase turnout for him.

On Friday, The New York Times reported that Mr. Walker had urged the woman, the mother of one of his children, to terminate a second pregnancy, but that she refused and the relationship ended. Mr. Walker has called the report that he paid for the abortion a “flat-out” lie.

It is unclear if any of these revelations will meaningfully soften overall evangelical support for Mr. Walker. But the race is so tight that even the loss of one in 50 potential voters could swing it in favor of Mr. Warnock, according to a Times analysis.

John Abrantes, a congregant at Atlanta’s Northside Drive Baptist Church, said Sunday morning that he isn’t sure if he will vote in the upcoming election. Mr. Abrantes, who voted for Mr. Trump during his first run for president and Mr. Biden most recently, considers himself a conservative.

Mr. Walker’s reported actions, Mr. Abrantes said, “probably do not align with how I believe a person of faith should live.”

In June, conservative Christians accomplished a decades-long goal of overturning federal abortion rights with a Supreme Court decision made possible by Mr. Trump’s three appointees to the country’s highest court. It was the result of a trade-off that further acculturated conservatives to accepting less stringent standards in the personal lives of the candidates they support.

For months, conservative Christianity’s uncompromising quest for political power has been central in the midterm elections. Candidates have openly rejected the historic principle of the separation of church and state. Rituals of Christian worship are embedded in right-wing rallies. Abortion abolitionists believe they are fighting a holy Christian mission.

Mr. Walker has made his hard-line opposition to abortion with no exceptions a key point of his campaign. Following the report about Mr. Walker’s former girlfriend, the Senate Republican campaign arm released an ad using the focus on abortion to attack Mr. Warnock. “This guy has no problem with aborting babies who are inconvenient, and the worst part, this guy claims to be a Christian,” the voice-over said.

Mr. Warnock called the allegations against Mr. Walker “disturbing.”

“I am a man of faith. I am a pastor. I have a profound reverence for life, and I have a deep and abiding respect for choice,” he said at a campaign event on Friday. He has called the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe “a departure from our American ideals.”

Mr. Warnock, too, has presented some challenges as a candidate. He has been involved in a public child custody dispute. In April, his ex-wife sued to adjust the terms of their agreement and increase payments to account for the income he receives as a senator and as lead pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church.

Mr. Warnock won the Senate seat two years ago stressing his Baptist heritage that was rooted in the ideals of Black liberation theology, which involves not just the salvation of the individual but of society. This time around, his campaign has spent time emphasizing his legislative work, including prioritizing farmers and veterans and lowering insulin costs. He has framed voting rights as a moral issue and spoken of shared humanity as cutting through political divides.

In his latest ad, Mr. Walker accused Mr. Warnock of being the one who “doesn’t even believe in redemption,” questioning the minister’s belief in a central Christian principle.

Mr. Walker ends the ad saying, “I’m Herschel Walker, saved by grace.”

Sean Keenan contributed reporting.