The Paradoxes Facing the Christian Right in Election 2024

Washington, DC—Tony Perkins, the clean-shaven, smooth-talking, dad-joking president of the Christian right think tank the Family Research Council (FRC), was halfway through a sentence at the group’s annual Pray Vote Stand conference on October 4 when he seemed to lose his way.  

“I want to examine this moment in which we are in,” Perkins said into the tiny microphone affixed to his face, “which is a very, very…” He trailed off, gazing at the thin crowd. Perhaps he was unwilling to say what, exactly, this moment was, since what it seemed to be was a low point of Perkins’s political career. This time last year, he had presided over a bustling convention where legions of faithful lined up to watch the Republican presidential contenders jockey for the white evangelical vote. Trump had won the group’s presidential straw poll in a landslide.

This year, Trump was not just absent from the conference. He had forsaken its most precious cause, declaring just a few days earlier that he would veto any nationwide abortion ban. In July, Perkins had publicly rebuked the Republican Party for ramming through a platform he saw as soft on abortion without giving delegates like him time to weigh in, a process he decried as “unbecoming of a party that champions free speech and due process.” To cap it off, even Melania was now calling herself pro-choice. Abortion, once the glue that cemented the alliance between the Republican Party and evangelicals, was pulling them apart. Chairs sat vacant in the ice-cold ballroom, the crowd doubtless thinned by the lack of big-name speakers; even Christian right stalwart House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared only by video. I counted one person in a MAGA hat.

Finally, Perkins landed awkwardly on the assessment that this was a “very, very potential moment. I mean, it’s filled with potential.”

Then he sat on stage beside a panel of three leading pastors who stared at the floor looking like their football team had just lost and began to rally the faithful for exile.

“We’ve lost the culture war, you could say,” said the Rev. Andrew Brunson. “We’ve lost the culture and we’re a post-Christian country now.”

When evangelicals exploded onto the scene as a political force in the late 1970s, they did so under the banner of the Moral Majority. The movement’s name reflected its presumption that most Americans would agree with its views on abortion and homosexuality. More than 40 years later, it’s clear that these views are held only by a diminishing minority that has kept its political influence only because organizations like the FRC have assembled one of the most effective voting machines in modern history. They’ve harnessed the power of politicized churches to get the faithful to the polls, often flouting federal rules about the separation of church and state. As senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, Frederick Clarkson has noted, white evangelicals in the United States have declined in numbers in recent years but risen or at least held steady as a proportion of voters, demonstrating, he told me, that “the Christian right is the best organized faction in American politics.”

This year’s annual conclave of that faction was defined by two central paradoxes, noted People for the American Way researcher Peter Montgomery. The first was that even as speakers conveyed a sense of persecution that, Montgomery told me, “has been core to the movement’s organizing strategy since it started,” the Christian right stills control the Supreme Court—not to mention school boards, attorneys general offices, and state legislatures across America. Indeed, they are so confident in their power to impose their minority view that, as Montgomery has reported, the American Family Association’s Phillip Jauregui stood on the main stage and outlined how Republican presidents should demand that future Supreme Court justices adhere to a “biblical worldview” that, by this faction’s own admittance, represents only a tiny percentage of the population. The second paradox is that even as leaders expressed their frustration with Trump, they still pledged to vote for him.

Bunni Pounds, founder of Christians Engaged, a voter network that recently merged with FRC’s Family Policy Alliance, told me her network hopes to amass “a million Christians in the next five weeks,” doubling their current rolls. “We’ve got to reestablish the social conservative movement at the forefront of the Republican Party,” she added, looking tired.

Their best hope at reestablishing this hold is their all-out assault on trans people, a cause they hope has a better crossover appeal than same-sex marriage and abortion. In the exhibit hall, I found a booth bedecked in royal blue and Barbie pink under a sign proclaiming “Don’t Mess With Our Kids.” Founded by Jenny Donnelly, a leader in the fast-growing New Apostolic Reformation—a movement animated by the belief that Christians need to take over all levers of power including the government and schools—Don’t Mess With Our Kids was modeled on a campaign by the same name in Peru. A woman at the booth who described herself as a former member of the “lesbian lifestyle” helped me download the Her Voice MVMT app so I could join a prayer hub and state-based chat to network with women in my area. She told me how moved she was by former Minnesota representative Michele Bachmann’s remarks on Israel the night before, describing how none of Iran’s missiles had killed a single Israeli.