It hasn’t been an easy month for Mike Pence. Yesterday he was in Philadelphia to raise money for a Republican candidate for governor and protesters swarmed his hotel with signs that read, “ I Said: Love Your Neighbor As Yourself” and “Soul Suckers.” Later in the day his appearance on behalf of Representative John Katko in Syracuse, New York, was also marred by protests related to family separations—and when Pence defended the Trump administration’s practice of separating families, Katko, whom Pence was there to support, openly disagreed with him.

At least last week, when he took the nightclubby blue stage at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Conference in Houston, he might have expected a friendly crowd. But as much as he held his head high, he must have known he’d nearly been disinvited. Even conservative Christian groups seem to be starting to wonder how long self-styled men of faith can stand by policies and a president that fit no one’s definition of “Christian.” (On Tuesday, hundreds of members of the United Methodist Church filed a formal complaint in church court against Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an active Methodist, charging that his immigration policy constitutes child abuse, racial discrimination, and dissemination of doctrines that contradict church teachings).

Virginia Heffernan (@page88) is an Ideas contributor at WIRED and the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. She is also a cohost of Trumpcast, an op-ed columnist at the Los Angeles Times, and a frequent contributor to Politico.

In Houston, before the annual Southern Baptist Conference, Virginia pastor Garrett Kell had won applause when he proposed canceling Pence’s appearance on the grounds that it could alienate apolitical Christians and Christians of color. Kell’s proposal came at a time when others in the conference—notably J. D. Greear, now its popular new president—have also been raising their voices for #ChurchToo, a growing movement in support of women who have been harassed, abused, and silenced in the church. #ChurchToo would not seem to fall on the Pence side of the culture-war ledger.

And indeed Pence didn’t mention it. Instead, on the dais, he wore his usual expression of smarmy piety. He gave a stump speech for Trump-Pence 2020 and embellished it with convincing Christian testimony.

It was fine. There’s something distinctly unrousing about Pence, as much as he moves fluently to applause lines and cites scripture without a stutter. At one point on Wednesday, he seemed manfully to try to bring tears to his own eyes, which might have briefly glistened in the cobalt-colored LEDs. Still: not a wet eye in the house.

Fox News streamed the event, and on YouTube the comments that coursed down the right of the video expressed what might be called discordant support. Sure, there was a thick chorus of “amens” and “MAGAs”—used almost interchangeably—but there were also misgivings, nervousness, wingnut stuff, and even frank dissent.

YouTube commenter Miss Construde kicked off the proceedings with an eye roll: “Oh great Mike Pence speaking to his holier than thou constituents.” Another commenter, Steve Valk, warned: “​You morons knew trump was a snake when you took him into your home. Now you all you bible thumpers bow and pray to your neon God you have made.”

Mr Amerigo demurred. “I think that Pence and Trump are trying to do good in the government for God.” But then the nuance: “Unfortunately in the end they as politicians have to create equality for all even the gay and vile ones, so watch out.”

Things were off and running. Evangelicalism, never entirely cohesive, is now a house fragmented. Trump’s abject failure at Christian manhood can no longer be persuasively extenuated. And the ChurchToo catastrophe within the conference—the biggest Protestant denomination in the country, making up the majority of evangelicals—has also forced a reckoning.

As Jonathan Merritt, the son of a former SBC president, has reported in The Atlantic, the two principal architects of the modern Southern Baptist church, Paige Patterson (formerly president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas) and Paul Pressler (a retired justice of the Texas 14th Circuit Court of Appeals) have both been stripped of their Southern Baptist bona fides following their scandals.

Patterson and Pressler are linchpins of the faith, the duo that—in 1967—first contrived to move Southern Baptists hard right. They and their cohort managed to orchestrate a stealthy, slow-burn coup—a “fundamentalist takeover”—at a time when the SBC was aligned with social-justice Democrats in the style of Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, then an up-and-coming Georgia state senator.