Third, religious conservatives are as divided as any other conservative faction over Trump. Yes, evangelical voters have (up till now) supported Trump at the rate you would expect for a normal Republican nominee. But the religious right is an ecumenical movement: It includes Latter-day Saints rebelling against the Republican nominee, Catholic voters drifting toward Clinton, and conservative Catholic bishops advising the faithful that they need not vote for either Hillary or Trump.

Moreover, within evangelicalism’s complicated leadership, anti-Trump sentiment abounds. For every Falwell Jr., talking implausibly about how Trump is supposedly a changed man, there is a Russell Moore or an Erick Erickson or a Beth Moore attacking their co-religionists for making a fatal moral compromise. Trump is exposing the folly of certain old-guard evangelicals, but he’s also exposing a major generational struggle over what the religious right should be — one that matters to the country and not just the participants, because …

America needs a religious right. Maybe not the religious right it has; certainly not the religious right of Carson and Falwell Jr. But the Trump era has revealed what you get when you leach the Christianity out of conservatism: A right-of-center politics that cares less about marriage and abortion, just as some liberals would wish, but one that’s ultimately far more divisive than the evangelical politics of George W. Bush.

When religious conservatives were ascendant, the G.O.P. actually tried minority outreach, it sent billions to fight AIDS in Africa, it pursued criminal justice reform in the states. That ascendance crumbled because of the religious right’s own faults (which certain of Trump’s Christian supporters amply display), and because of trends toward secularization and individualism that no politics can master; it cannot and should not be restored.

But some kind of religious conservatism must be rebuilt, because without the pull of transcendence, the future of the right promises to be tribal, cruel, and very dark indeed.