Laura Turner is a writer in San Francisco.

Michael Farris was one of the early leaders of the Moral Majority, the conservative Christian political group formed in 1979 with a mandate to elect Ronald Reagan. Although the group would technically dissolve within less than a decade, Farris, like many other Christian Republicans, carried on its mission prominently by founding an evangelical college and an advocacy organization for homeschooling.

But now, Farris is declaring the death of the very group to which he once dedicated his life. He’s not alone either—and it’s all thanks to Donald Trump.


Over the course of the presidential campaign, members of the religious right have been locked in an intense debate over whether they can support Trump, whose religion, or lack thereof, is less aligned with evangelicalism than any Republican candidate in recent history. Trump says he is a Christian, but he has admitted to never having asked God for forgiveness and has repeatedly changed his positions on the issues that members of the religious right hold dearest. Although he claims to be pro-life, it’s hard for many conservative Christians to shake his declaration years ago that he was “very pro-choice”; it didn’t help that one of his prospective running mates, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, said on TV this weekend that he’s pro-choice. Among traditionally pro-Israel conservative Christians, Trump’s allegedly anti-Semitic tweet against rival Hillary Clinton makes matters worse. Not to mention that the candidate has been married three times, is known for his misogyny and infidelity, and advocates for the use of torture, which many evangelicals oppose.

The resulting divisions in the religious right movement have grown so deep that, 40 years after its creation, the very existence of this previously unified and politically powerful voting bloc is under threat. “The only thing about [Trump] that makes him vote-worthy is that he’s a Republican,” Farris says. “If that’s it, then we’re the church glee club for the Republican Party—and not the Christian right.”

Should they stay hitched to the party that made their movement relevant, or uphold the moral principles of their faith?

The religious right was founded to elect politicians who share the conservative evangelical worldview—or as close to it as possible—and who have good moral character. No recent Republican nominee has been a perfect fit, but there is serious doubt among conservative Christians that Trump comes close to meeting those standards, resulting in an unprecedented lack of enthusiasm for—and, some cases, outright opposition to—the presumptive GOP nominee. The question now for the religious right is: Should they stay hitched to the party that made their movement relevant, or uphold the moral principles of their faith?

The evangelical divide over Trump has been widening for months, but it was only in recent weeks that the pro- and anti-Trump camps definitively split, with an increasing number of conservative evangelicals coming out forcefully against the candidate whom GOP consultant Rick Wilson once called “Cheeto Jesus.” The breaking point came on June 21, when Trump—ironically in an effort to appease the religious right—met with nearly a thousand evangelical leaders and announced a 25-person “evangelical advisory board” to help him reach conservative Christian voters.

Almost all the members of that board have histories of being right-leaning, pro-life and pro-Israel—typical for conservative Christians. But as Ruth Graham noted at Slate, the group is really a who’s-who of former evangelical leaders: Ralph Reed, former leader of the Christian Coalition; Ronnie Floyd, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention; and James Dobson, former president of Focus on the Family. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that the board is mostly older (average age: 64), mostly male and mostly white, with only four people of color. They are a remnant, in other words, of the old guard Moral Majority-era conservative evangelicals whose political influence, on issues like same-sex marriage, contraception and school prayer, was already waning.

After all, Evangelicalism today looks very different from the bygone era of the Dobsons and the Falwells. (Jerry Falwell, Jr., the son of the Moral Majority’s founder, is also on Trump’s board.) For years, evangelicals have been leading the charge against climate change and supporting immigration reform, and 27 percent of white evangelicals now support same-sex marriage, up from 13 percent in 2001. Demographically, the fastest-growing segment of evangelicals in America is Latinos.

Christian blogger Fred Clark called the advisory board a “B-list of second-tier religious right figures along with a handful of peaked-long-ago relics.” The Hispanic Baptist Pastors Alliance took offense too, in a statement warning that “joining this board is not the wisest way to be salt and light” and cautioning against “jumping into a crowded office where the weed and wheat are undistinguishable.” It was essentially a call to stay out of politics—a rejection of the basic premise of the Moral Majority, that Christians ought to influence politics to see God’s Kingdom come.

I want the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role, and I think that’s where many evangelicals are.”

Trump’s board was criticized for much more than its demographic makeup, though. Russell Moore—an influential leader in the Southern Baptist Convention with a history of theologically and politically conservative views—immediately denounced the board’s “heretical prosperity gospel hucksters hailed as spiritual leaders.” Presumably he was taking aim at people like televangelists Kenneth and Gloria Copeland and Paula White, who are known for preaching the “prosperity gospel”; the Senate investigated the spending habits of their two ministries in 2007, though neither was found to have committed any wrongdoing. Still, White—who has been a spiritual adviser to Trump for years—is viewed skeptically by most evangelicals.

For some on the religious right, Trump’s alignment of himself with the movement’s old guard and its “prosperity gospel” wing fundamentally calls into question what the group’s role in politics should be.

Some evangelicals, like Southern Evangelical Seminary president Richard Land—another member of Trump’s board, though he has not officially endorsed the candidate—continue to see their calling as being “salt and light” to those in positions of power. They believe Christians have a mandate to influence politics through whatever avenue is available to them, whether they like the candidate or not. If they want the next president to nominate a conservative Supreme Court justice to fill Antonin Scalia’s seat, for instance, they should vote for Trump over the presumptive Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.

Dobson, for instance, has encouraged evangelicals to “cut [Trump] some slack,” calling him merely a “baby Christian.” Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a long-favored candidate on the religious right, has also stood by Trump, defending his family as “one of the most admirable I’ve ever seen from any father with children.” One member of Trump’s advisory board, Reverend Robert Jeffress, put it more bluntly in making the case to evangelicals for supporting a Trump presidency: “I want the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role, and I think that’s where many evangelicals are.” (I contacted a number of other pro-Trump evangelicals to get their take on why they're supporting the candidate—Dobson, Falwell Jr., Ralph Reed and Jack Graham—but none of them responded to me.)

On the other side of the divide are people like Farris and Moore, who would rather walk away from power than give an evangelical seal of approval to a candidate who is known more for his misogyny and racism then his conservative policy positions. (It’s as if the book of Proverbs anticipated this dilemma thousands of years ago: “When you sit to dine with a ruler, note well what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony.”) “There's never been infighting among Christian leaders about whether to support a serial adulterer… who lauds the work of Planned Parenthood, mocks the disabled, inflames racial tensions and vowed to order American military personnel to commit war crimes,” says Eric Teetsel, 32, one of the most prominent leaders of evangelicalism’s “new guard,” a subgroup committed to social justice issues.

Much of the fighting over Trump is happening in the media. Blog posts are being published back and forth as different pastors defend their positions; popular evangelical author and pastor Max Lucado, for one, wrote a viral post called “Decency for President,” explaining why Christians shouldn’t vote Trump. Many other evangelicals have been behind the #NeverTrump movement on social media.

It’s as if the Book of Proverbs anticipated this dilemma thousands of years ago: “When you sit to dine with a ruler, note well what is before you, and put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony.”

But the debate has also been happening at a more personal level. The powerful Southern Baptist Convention, for instance, is a house divided: Ronnie Floyd, the former SBC president, serves on Trump’s evangelical advisory board, while Moore, president of the group’s public-policy arm, is speaking out publicly against him. (“An unrepentant lost person pronounces himself to be a believer. And you stand there and applaud?” Moore recently tweeted.) Farris told me the debate is also playing out on an e-mail thread (he’s not sure who created it) among hundreds of evangelical leaders. “They went to some directory and swiped a whole bunch of people's emails, like Dobson and Mike Huckabee and me—there’s like 200 people on this list, unwillingly on it, getting about 10 or 12 emails a day from people on this list battling … about whether it’s a godly thing to support Trump,” he said. “I just sent them an email urging everybody to stop doing it because I don't think it’s doing any good.”

What can evangelicals like Moore, Farris and Teetsel do in the face of a candidate they can’t support?

For Teetsel, the fight is not over—nothing short of the fate of the religious right as a movement is at stake. He was the director of faith outreach for Marco Rubio’s campaign in the Republican Party; now, rather than switch his allegiance to the presumptive GOP nominee, he hopes to convince his fellow evangelicals not to vote Trump. The same day of Trump’s meeting with evangelicals, Teetsel stood outside the Marriott Marquis in New York holding a homemade sign that read, “Torture is not pro-life. Racism is not pro-life. Misogyny is not pro-life. Murdering the children of terrorists is not pro-life.” “When influential Christian leaders give cover to a man like Donald Trump we shouldn’t be surprised when our neighbors are uninterested in the Gospel,” Teetsel told me. “As I walked towards that venue, I felt compelled to do something to confound the idea that Christianity is just a religious vehicle for a political agenda. Yes, the Gospel has implications for public policy, but it is so much more than that.” That doesn’t mean he wants conservative Christians to vote for Clinton; he would prefer them to support a potential third-party candidate or write-in another name. “I believe it's imperative that Christians participate in the political process,” Teetsel says.

For other evangelicals, Trump’s candidacy has occasioned the nearly impossible: causing them to vote Democratic. Thabiti Anyabwile, a pastor in Washington, D.C., and blogger for The Gospel Coalition, a fellowship of churches with a Calvinist bent, wrote on his blog in early June that he would vote for Hillary Clinton to stop the “stop the twin evils [of abortion and racism] that Mr. Trump represents.” Anyabwile suggests that both candidates will be equally ineffective at fighting abortion, but suggests that Trump’s racism is a deal-breaker for him. Deborah Fikes, an executive advisor to the World Evangelical Alliance, recently endorsed Clinton. “Hillary Clinton is the leader who people of faith are looking for and we are praying that Sister Hillary and not Mr. Trump will be elected in November,” Fikes said the day that Trump held his evangelical leadership summit.

Trump needs the religious right to win this election. The religious right needs Trump in order for its agenda to move forward. But if the group can’t unite behind the conservative candidate—and that candidate doesn’t even have a coherent conservative agenda in the first place—the religious right has been weakened beyond recognition. It is no longer an organization. It is a memory.