The past week, my wife Dottie and I binged watched the final season of Downton Abbey. The nine episodes kept circling back to the same obvious observation: the times are changing.

When the show began it was 1912. The great house was flush with servants, guests arrived in horse-drawn carriages, there was no radio or telephone, and valets clothed their gentlemen in tails every evening.

The show ends as 1926 begins and we know what changes came next: the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, the Third Reich, the Blitz, world war. What about Downton Abbey? The house is actually Highclere Castle. For £22 you can see it all.

The times were changing, were about to change, and are changing — and not necessarily for the good.

Unless something unexpected occurs, Donald Trump is the odds on favorite to become our next president indicating (at bear minimum) that the times have changed. What happened?

Some commentators insist there is something amiss with Trump’s supporters. Obviously such people have either been duped or are among “the undereducated” — an elitist slur if there ever was one. Surely, they seem to argue, you, gentle reader, are not among them.

Others have sought to find more rational motives behind Trump’s success including his success among evangelicals. People always choose what they perceive to be the good. What then is the good they are choosing?

In her Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan distinguishes between “the protected” and the “unprotected.” “The protected,” she writes, “are the accomplished, the secure, the successful — those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created.” They make policy, business and journalistic decisions and they would never support Trump.

The unprotected are those “with limited resources and negligible access to power” who are stuck living with the decisions made by the protected.

Thus the protected, living as they do in homogeneous enclaves, have the luxury of making decisions concerning illegal immigration in the abstract. Their neighborhoods, schools and jobs are insulated from the results of those decisions save for the good result of cheap labor.

Meanwhile if you are among the unprotected, “You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border” for political reasons. And while the protected play politics, the unprotected “suffered from illegal immigration — its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing.”

Fed up, the unprotected, argues Noonan, feel they owe the protected “nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.” Her conclusion: “Mr. Trump came from that.” After all, they reason, he can’t be any worse than what we already have.

In a similar way, First Things editor R. R. Reno wrote about evangelical support for Trump in the Washington Post. It’s not, he says, that evangelicals have given up on faith and morality. Instead, they feel betrayed, demeaned and taken advantage of by a Republican establishment that only pays them lip service. On issues related to abortion, marriage and religious liberty they’re on their own and they too are fed up. “They’ve voted and voted and voted for candidates put forward by the Republican establishment,” he writes, “Where has it gotten them? Like so many people in Middle America, religiously and socially conservative voters are ready to smash things.” Then he adds, “They may come to regret their support for Trump. But I don’t blame them.”

And I don’t blame them either though: (1) “the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:20) and (2) I can’t support a candidate — actually two candidates — who exemplify the polar opposite of virtuous leadership. Choosing between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton fills me with dread. Regardless of who wins, the times will change and, I suspect, not for the good.

Not that I recommend giving up. Despair and cynicism are grave and pathetic sins. As happy warriors, we soldier on. But that’s only possible by remembering what Richard John Neuhaus wrote in Death on a Friday Afternoon. Life, he reminded us, does not revolve around politics, business, family, country or any of the other things we include when we use that unfortunate phrase “the real world.” These are not “the real world.” The real world is what we encounter when we encounter Jesus Christ crucified and risen. The cross of Christ, he insisted, “is the axis mundi, the center upon which the whole cosmos turns.”

What does the future hold? Change. Beyond that, who can say? The good news is that amid the change — for the good and for the bad — the axis mundi, that unchanging center, never fails.