But any of the other 16 non-vulgar, non-erratic Republican candidates in 2016 would also have nominated a Gorsuch. We look to our lawmakers not just to enact policies, but also to represent our nation on the global stage with the dignity that their offices demand. American exceptionalism is set back every time the president takes to Twitter to ridicule the least of these our brethren, as the Gospel puts it. Likewise, the world’s greatest deliberative body will be tainted if Mr. Moore is seated in the Senate.

Well, respond the Trumpian conservatives, our vote is just the opener. We will call our leaders’ moves as we see them — the good and the bad.

Except they don’t. They might take issue with this or that White House policy. But they rarely if ever call out the president’s moral degradations. And such criticism is the only kind that truly irritates Mr. Trump.

That’s precisely why the likes of the Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr. shy away from it — even to the point of contorting themselves to defend Mr. Trump’s unconscionable response to white-nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Va. Idolatry of class, nation, race and leader is a constant temptation for people of faith, and too many are succumbing to it today.

Behind social conservatives’ Trumpian turn, I suspect, is deep pessimism about America’s future. Many fear that under secularism’s relentless onslaught, Judeo-Christianity will be banished permanently from the public square. I feel similar angst.

But then I look back on the late 20th century, when, thanks to heroic figures such as Pope John Paul II, the Christian idea bested Soviet Communism, an ideology that was far more hostile to religious faith than America’s Enlightenment liberalism has ever been. I also look to the explosive growth of Christianity in places like China and Iran today.

Unlike under Communism or Iran’s Islamic theocracy, Christianity in America has the First Amendment and freedom of conscience. And there are other reasons to be optimistic about our place in the culture in the long term. The cascading harassment scandal, for one thing, suggests that even liberals may rethink some aspects of the sexual revolution. And if ultra-permissive liberalism is passing away, then the people who grew up in its wreckage will eventually turn toward tradition.

Christians are called to live in faith, hope and charity. Political fear should never drive them to tie their fate to the Roy Moores of the world.