There were plenty of applause lines written into the speech Donald Trump gave to the Faith and Freedom Coalition at the Omni Shoreham Thursday morning, while James Comey was up on Capitol Hill testifying against him.

The crowd went wild when the President mentioned his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. But then there was his slow, careful reading of Isaiah 1:17: “Learn to do right, seek justice, defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.”

You could have heard a pin drop.

It’s hard to imagine a Scripture less applicable to the Trump Administration, and the audience knew it.

“The entrenched interests and failed bitter voices in Washington will do everything in their power to try and stop us from this righteous cause,” Trump continued, to silence. That would be those entrenched interests and failed bitter voices seeking to prevent him from cutting Medicaid in order to lower taxes on the rich.

The speechwriters might have done better with, say, Psalm 23:5‘s “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.”

But it wasn’t as though Trump failed to give the premiere religious right outfit in America today some sense of what actually animates him.

“You didn’t let me down and I will never ever let you down,” he said. “You fought hard for me and now I’m fighting hard for all of you.”

All politics is to some extent transactional, of course, but normal political give-and-take is a far cry from the Trumpian modus vivendi.

Sixty years ago, political scientist Edward Banfield wrote The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, an influential study that sought to explain the absence of civic consciousness and commitment in southern Italy.

Banfield hypothesized that southern Italians acted according to the rule: “Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise.” Such “moral familism” meant that the interest of the group or community would not be furthered unless it was in a person’s private interest to do so.

I give you Trump family values.

In a society of moral familists, loyalty to anyone or anything beyond one’s own family — to employees or superiors, to the larger community, to abstract principles of law or patriotism, of honor or truth — will be very hard to come by, which may be why Trump is so anxious to obtain it.

Or, as Comey testified, “I got the sense my job would be contingent upon how he felt I conducted myself and whether I demonstrated loyalty.”

Because amoral familists see would-be leaders as amoral familists like themselves, leadership itself is hard to come by. The “nearest approximation to leadership,” wrote Banfield, “is the patron-client relationship.”  The client is, in effect, a member of the patron’s family.

Or, as Comey put it in his prepared statement, “My instincts told me that the one-on-one setting, and the pretense that this was our first discussion about my position, meant the dinner was, at least in part, an effort to have me ask for my job and create some sort of patronage relationship.”

If any segment of American society has been prepared to recognize Trump as patron, it’s white evangelicals. They have come to regard him as a latter-day Cyrus, the Persian king who freed the ancient Israelites from their Babylonian captivity and allowed them to return to Jerusalem.

As good clients, evangelicals will support Trump’s agenda and overlook his faults. And in turn, Trump will reward them for their loyalty — for as long as it’s in his family’s interest to do so.