For months, Rose Aller kept her support for Donald Trump a secret from colleagues at the Northern Virginia school where she works as a substitute teacher.

"You're judged for your beliefs," she said. "Our media branded you a racist, a bigot, a homophobe if you were Republican."

So Aller stayed quiet. Only at church did she feel surrounded by people who think like her, people who were distraught over the changing values they perceived around them and were pulling for Donald Trump as their unlikely standard-bearer to bring their chosen Christian policies back into the White House.

Late last Tuesday, Aller discovered that she and other members of her church were far from alone. Eighty-one percent of white evangelical voters had voted for Trump. Aller, 46, went to school that Wednesday wearing a red-for-Republican T-shirt and beaming at a few other teachers who seemed jubilant instead of despondent about the election results. She wasn't the only Trump supporter in school, it turned out.

And that night, at church, she was one of hundreds.

"Let's take a moment," Pastor Gary Hamrick exhorted about 500 uplifted congregants at Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg that Wednesday night, "to pray for our president-elect, Donald Trump."

Hands of praise shot into the air.

"Every church is going to be influenced by the culture," Hamrick said. "The issue becomes, will the church rise up and become an influencer of the culture?"

During the eight years of President Barack Obama's administration, white evangelical Christians, who make up one-quarter of the American electorate, felt the dominant culture moving away from them.

They watched as same-sex marriage became the law of the land, and as Christians were reviled for saying they didn't want to provide pizzas or cakes or photographs for those weddings. They heard "Black Lives Matter" and didn't understand when they were demonized for responding "All Lives Matter."

They witnessed their nation elect and reelect a president who had disparaged people like them who "cling to guns or religion," and then later seemed to think that anyone should be allowed to use any bathroom they like.

And then on Wednesday, evangelicals woke up remembering what it's like to feel victorious in American politics.

"Their deepest desires may be enacted into laws - or hated laws repealed. Their prayers were answered - by electing a rude, crude and morally unacceptable nonbeliever," Scott Thumma, a Hartford Seminary professor who studies megachurches and nondenominational evangelical churches, wrote in an email. "I have interacted with a few evangelicals since the election . . . and every one of them were proud and happy to have had a part in Trump's election - not exactly because of who Trump is, but what he stood for."

To be sure, these white evangelical supporters knew Trump was an odd champion. He is a self-declared Presbyterian but never a churchgoer. He is thrice married with a history of boasting about his infidelity, and he leveled insults at people including a beauty queen, a disabled reporter and even the pope.

Exit polls showed that 49 percent of Trump's voters said they had reservations about him, and almost 1 in 5 voters who considered Trump unqualified to be president still cast a ballot for him. Whenever they spoke in church about Trump, they, too, did it with caveats.

Of course he's not a Christian like we are. Of course I wish he hadn't said that thing about grabbing women by the crotch. Of course. But . . .

"People wanted to vote for Hillary because they're like, 'Trump is a bigot.' He is! But Hillary is 10 times worse," Scott Risvold said, sitting on an overstuffed couch in the lobby at Cornerstone Chapel, where he was 45 minutes early for the Wednesday night worship service.

On the opposite couch, Rob Cole nodded. "My sister, I just wanted to unfriend her on Facebook today, because she's a die-hard Democrat," he said.

Cole told Risvold, who left a position in military intelligence last year at 29, about a video he watched online in which a Christian speaker abroad hailed Trump's victory. "It really makes you feel great to be a Christian," he said.

That's how Aller, the substitute teacher, felt too. "There's been a big attack on our Christian faith. I think Christians took a big stand this time and said we're going to stand up for our faith."

The morning after the election, Aller said, a black second-grader came into her school and declared, "Trump was elected, so we're moving."

Aller said she responded: "We're going to miss you. Let me know when your last day is. We'll throw you a goodbye party."

She said she's sure the boy knew she was joking.

Then a little girl, also from a minority racial group, said she was unhappy about the result of the election, too, Aller recalled. "I think you should have a more positive attitude about that," Aller said she told the girl.

Sitting in the back row of Cornerstone's huge sanctuary on the night after the election, Aller related these stories to fellow churchgoer Morgan Hamrick, who also works as a substitute teacher. "That's what I was telling the kids. What do you think is going to happen that's so bad? Like, make America great again," Hamrick, 23, said.

Hamrick's father-in-law is the pastor at Cornerstone, a bustling church almost 40 miles outside Washington. Cornerstone's congregation, predominantly white and multigenerational, is growing fast, and that post-election service was the last Wednesday service before it moved into a new building with a sanctuary twice the size. Stripped for the move, the room was unadorned except for an eight-foot-tall wooden cross on one wall and a few gourds on the stage where a well-amplified band played rock-style hymns.

About 500 people had gathered for worship, and about 220 young people, from a year old through high school-age, met separately for services at the same time.

A number of these Leesburg churchgoers make the long commute to work in the District of Columbia, where many of them feel like the only conservative - and perhaps even the only Christian - at their workplace, Gary Hamrick said. Church is normally their refuge, their place for meeting with like-minded people. When he laid out the candidates' platforms in a pre-election sermon and then preached that they should vote for the candidate who best matched their values, they almost all knew he meant Trump.

Hispanic Catholics, Jews and some from other faiths voted heavily for Clinton on Election Day. White Catholics and mainline Protestants split for Trump, by a much smaller margin than evangelicals did. But the people who worship at Cornerstone and similar churches turned out in legion for Trump. White evangelicals made up 26 percent of the electorate, according to the exit polls, and Trump won about 8 in 10 of their votes. That's three percentage points more voting for Trump than voted for Romney in 2012.

White evangelicals were crucial to Trump's victory. Had no white evangelicals voted, Clinton would have won in a landslide, 59 percent to 35 percent.

"I've got real concerns with him as an individual," Gary Hamrick said of Trump. "But that said, I still have to look at the bigger picture." For him, that bigger picture includes Trump's choice of Mike Pence as his running mate. Pence has called himself an "evangelical Catholic," and is hugely popular at Cornerstone. It also includes Trump's pledge to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade and eliminate federal protection of abortion rights.

On the night after the election, Hamrick preached about the culture that has bewildered and infuriated evangelicals during the Obama years.

"There's gender confusion. There's sexual identity confusion. People are inventing words now," he said. Mentioning the pop star Miley Cyrus, he continued: "Pansexual. What do all these words mean?"

The problem, he said, is that public morality seems to have become a matter of personal choice rather than biblical dictates. "You know the reason why there is such confusion in our culture today?" he asked. "Without a common fixed reference point, then there's confusion. Nobody seems to know what's right, what's wrong, what's up, what's down."

Many members of the congregation expressed similar concerns, saying that Trump seemed to support the Bible-based morality that they crave and that they imagine was the standard in the bygone America he promises to bring back.

"It's like every day our morals in America are being chipped away. Now on the radio you can say words you couldn't say eight years ago," said Risvold, the military veteran. "The more we go immoral and crazy . . . everybody's feelings count - 'I feel this and I feel that.' "

Rachael Sales, 24, cradling her 3-month-old son in the church's bustling cafe where she could watch the service on television, made a similar point. "It's like your definition of the word [morality] now. That's not something I can put my faith in, someone else's definition. My sense of morality can't come from just what I believe in my heart. For me it's the Bible."

Having a baby strengthened her convictions about what she views as Bible-based morality, Sales said. A woman should not be able to decide to abort a fetus - that should just be wrong, period, she said. And she thinks Trump will stand against abortion.

Sales also hopes he will slash taxes for businesses, which might help her get a graphic-design business off the ground.

"Hopeful" was the first word Sales used when asked to describe her feeling about Trump's America. It was the same word that Aller used first, and Morgan Hamrick.

"Hopefully, now we can see some progress for some evangelical causes in our country," Gary Hamrick said. "I feel like we actually have an advocate now in the White House."

He used another word to describe the mood of evangelical Americans waking up as victors once again: "Relief."