The Christian right has been declared dead many times. Before this election, though, it truly seemed to be staggering toward the grave. According to the Pew Research Center, as of last April, barely a third of Republican voters who attended religious services weekly supported Mr. Trump. He had consistent evangelical support, but it tended to come from less strongly affiliated Christians — people who might identify as born again, but who weren’t connected to the congregations that once formed the building blocks of the religious right, and who didn’t take marching orders from the movement’s leaders.

By winning the primary over the strenuous objections of prominent Christian conservatives, Mr. Trump revealed their diminishing sway. When those same leaders decided to champion him, they had to shrug off everything they’d ever said about the primacy of personal morality in politics. Had he lost, they’d have been utterly discredited.

But Mr. Trump didn’t lose, and now the movement that helped deliver his victory faces a deliverance of its own. President Trump may lack a coherent ideology, but he shares with the religious right a kind of Christian identity politics, a sense that the symbols of Christianity, if not its virtues, deserve cultural precedence. As he said in a speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in June: “We will respect and defend Christian Americans. Christian Americans.”

His personnel choices suggest he meant it. Consider Vice President Pence, a man who regularly tries to make policy obey the dictates of faith. In 2002, he gave a speech on the House floor criticizing public schools for teaching evolution but not creationism, even though creationism “was believed in by every signer of the Declaration of Independence.”

Running for Congress in 2000, Mr. Pence called for federal AIDS funding to be directed to groups that “provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behavior,” which many have understood to mean gay-conversion therapy, though a spokesman has said this mischaracterized his intent. When in 2002, then Secretary of State Colin Powell endorsed the use of condoms to prevent sexually transmitted diseases, Mr. Pence argued (falsely) that they offer “very, very poor protection” and decried Mr. Powell’s support for them as “too modern of an answer.” He is, needless to say, a tireless foe of Planned Parenthood: In 2011, when the House voted to defund the family planning provider, the legislation was known as the Pence Amendment.

Among senior members of the incoming administration, Mr. Pence is far from alone in opposing secular modernity. Jeff Sessions, Mr. Trump’s choice for attorney general, has said that the idea of a “wall of separation” between church and state “is not constitutional and is not historical.” He once attacked Justice Sonia Sotomayor for having a “postmodern, relativistic, secular mind-set” that is “directly contrary to the founding of our republic.” During Mr. Sessions’s confirmation hearing, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, asked about his attitude toward the attorneys who will work for him at the Justice Department: “A secular person has just as good a claim to understanding the truth as a person who is religious, correct?” Mr. Sessions replied, “Well, I’m not sure.”