It also should not be surprising that at least some in the breakfast crowd were positively disposed to the Russian visitors. The bond between America’s Christian nationalists and the Russian government goes back a long way, long before anyone conceived of the possibility of a Trump administration.

Paul Weyrich belongs on any shortlist of the individuals who created the religious right as we know it today. He was a central figure in the founding of numerous conservative organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, ALEC, the Moral Majority and the Council for National Policy. In the 1970s, Mr. Weyrich was one of the strategists who first conceived of outreach to evangelical churches in order to recruit activists to socially conservative causes. He was also among the first to grasp the potential for an alliance with religious conservatives in Russia and Eastern Europe.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Mr. Weyrich made dozens of trips to Russia, eventually becoming a strong supporter of closer relations. By the time of his death in 2008, Mr. Weyrich was writing and speaking frequently in defense of Russia and facilitating visits between American conservatives and Russian political leaders.

Another religious conservative who pursued the Russian connection was Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage. In 2013, Mr. Brown testified before the Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, in support of legislation opposing adoption by gay couples. “What I realized was that there was a great change happening in the former Soviet Union,” Mr. Brown told The Washington Post. “There was a real push to re-instill Christian values in the public square.”

Joining the National Organization for Marriage in the budding alliance were a number of other religious right groups, including the activist groups International Organization of the Family, also directed by Mr. Brown, and Family Watch International, an Arizona-based group that promotes an anti-LGBT and anti-abortion agenda around the world. In 2016, the World Congress of Families, a group that formed in Russia in 1997, held an event in Tbilisi, capital of the former Soviet republic of Georgia. Participants cast President Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the Orthodox Church as defenders of “Christian civilization” against a secular, decadent West.

In the run-up to the 2016 election, the passion for Russian values among America’s religious extremists grew still more ardent. In 2013, Bryan Fischer, then a spokesman for the American Family Association, called Mr. Putin a “lion of Christianity.” In 2014, Franklin Graham — the politically influential evangelist and vocal Trump supporter — defended Mr. Putin for his efforts “to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda,” even as he lamented that Americans have “abdicated our moral leadership.” In December 2015, Mr. Graham met privately with Mr. Putin for 45 minutes.

Although the religious right’s affection for Mr. Putin appears to center on a shared disgust with “the homosexual agenda” and other so-called family issues, it is impossible to overlook the attraction that the Russian leader’s authoritarian style has for his American admirers. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Mike Pence hailed Mr. Putin as “a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country.”