In Defense of the Religious Right
The older culture warriors favored Ted Cruz; younger Christians wanted Marco Rubio (Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University voted decisively for the Florida senator); the naïve wanted Ben Carson. Iowa, the evangelical stronghold whose first-in-the-nation status makes every sophisticated G.O.P consultant groan, gave Trump one of his worst early-state showings, while more secular Northeastern states handed him landslide wins.
.. The bottom line is that if it weren’t for the religious right, the Trump takeover would have been far easier, the G.O.P.’s surrender that much more abject
.. Asking Christian conservatives to accept a Clinton presidency is asking them to cooperate not only with pro-abortion policy-making, but also their own legal-cultural isolation.
.. For every Carson, murmuring on cable about how “sometimes you put your Christian values on pause to get the work done,” there is a Russell Moore or an Erick Erickson or a Beth Mooreattacking their co-religionists for making a fatal moral compromise.
.. America needs a religious right. Maybe not the religious right it has; certainly not the religious right of Carson and Falwell Jr. But the Trump era has revealed what you get when you leach the Christianity out of conservatism:
A right-of-center politics that cares less about marriage and abortion, just as some liberals would wish, but one that’s ultimately far more divisive than the evangelical politics of George W. Bush.
.. without the pull of transcendence, the future of the right promises to be tribal, cruel, and very dark indeed.