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Despite his hundreds of rallies, his many interviews and his hyperactive Twitter feed, it’s still really hard to tell the difference between what Donald Trump actually believes, what he says to whip up his crowds, and what he says merely because it popped into his head one afternoon.

Not so with Senator Ted Cruz, the arch-right Texan who is one of Mr. Trump’s two remaining Republican opponents. Americans can be sure he believes what he says, and that is pretty terrifying. His calls for carpet bombing Muslims to punish the Islamic State, and more recently for putting Muslim neighborhoods under ongoing police surveillance, are good examples. His view of religion is another.

Mr. Trump sort of talks the Republican talk on “religious liberty,” which is how the right wing expresses its desire to promote conservative evangelical Protestantism over all other religions. But it’s hard to be sure he truly believes it, since he wasn’t exactly an outspoken Christian until he started running for president.

Mr. Cruz is a hard-core member of the group of Americans whose politics are driven primarily, or even entirely, by their personal religious beliefs. They think these beliefs should be the law of the land, although they always take care to act as though they are simply trying to honor the Constitution’s mandate to protect religious freedom.

And so Mr. Cruz created a “Religious Liberty Advisory Council” to offer suggestions of things he can do as president to protect religious freedom — in other words, to make sure that evangelical Christianity is embedded in government and the law, and that gay Americans and other godless non-believers are dealt with properly.

As Zack Ford pointed out at ThinkProgress, the council includes only members of “the most conservative iterations of Christianity.” It is led by Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council, a group that makes the Tea Party look like a gang of socialist agitators. So the results were predictable, and predictably disturbing.

They include making sure that gay Americans don’t have any special protection against discrimination in the public arena or the workplace; repealing the mandate that employers’ health insurance plans include contraception coverage; allowing religious groups to go on claiming tax deductions for blatantly political activity; and on and on.

Mr. Cruz is currently losing the nominating contest, so why worry about this? Because anti-Trump forces in the Republican Party actually point to Mr. Cruz sometimes as an alternative, because Mr. Cruz is going to go on being a senator, and because these ideas form the bedrock of the agenda of the right wing.

However the nomination fight turns out, the intolerant Christian right is not planning on folding up its tent and leaving the field of battle any time soon.