Last month, after several women had credibly accused her husband, Roy Moore, of trying to seduce them when he was in his thirties and they were in their teens, Kayla Moore published on her Facebook page an open letter, signed by about fifty Alabama pastors, supporting her husband’s candidacy for the U.S. Senate. The letter made no direct reference to the allegations of sexual assault and harassment, which were first reported by the Washington Post, but its timing implied that the parts of the Christian right that had formed Moore’s base and propelled him to victory in the Republican primary still stood by him. “You can know a man by his enemies,” the letter insisted, before listing those who had long been Moore’s antagonists: the Southern Poverty Law Center, the A.C.L.U., the media, the political establishment.

The letter was a sham. The names of the pastors had evidently been copied and pasted from an earlier list of religious figures who had supported Moore. One of the signatories, Thad Endicott, the pastor of a Baptist church in Opelika, told local reporters that his name had been included “without asking if I still endorsed Moore.” He asked for his name to be removed, as did two Montgomery pastors, Fred and Tijuanna Adetunji. George Grant, whom the letter identified as the pastor of Parish Presbyterian Church, said that he had not spoken with Roy Moore in a decade, had no contact with the campaign, and, anyway, wasn’t an Alabama pastor any longer, having moved in the interim to Tennessee. It seemed to me, when I encountered this news recently, that Grant raised a different kind of problem for the Moore campaign, because his inclusion on Kayla Moore’s letter suggested that the campaign had been overstating its support from the religious right even before the scandals broke. Moore has been a signal figure for the religious right for two decades, ever since his days as a circuit-court judge in Alabama, when evangelical conservatives joined his fight to keep a plaque displaying the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. And yet, even before the latest allegations, his campaign had needed to artificially inflate his support among Christian conservatives by including pastors who had decamped for Tennessee.

A few days ago, I started calling around Alabama, trying to track down the rest of the pastors who had been listed on Kayla Moore’s letter. Some of them were easy to find, but others were elusive. I tried William Green, at the Fresh Anointing House of Worship, in Montgomery. A receptionist told me that she had never heard of Green. I tried Steve Sanders, at the Victory Baptist Church, in Millbrook. The current pastor told me that Sanders retired two years ago. I did not reach Earl Wise, also of Millbrook, but the Boston Globe did, and, though he still emphatically supported Moore, he had also left the pastoral life and was working as a real-estate agent.

Once you got beyond the ghosts and the real-estate agents, what was most notable about the pastors on Moore’s list was their obscurity. I found a list of the pastors of the thirty-six largest churches in Alabama, assembled this summer by the Web site of the Birmingham News; no pastor on that list appeared on Moore’s. I called leaders within the deeply conservative Southern Baptist Church—the largest denomination in Alabama and, for decades, the core of the religious right—and was told that not a single affiliated Southern Baptist pastor in the state was openly allied with Moore. The churches that appeared on Moore’s list tended to be tiny and situated in small towns, and some of the pastors on it held subsidiary roles within their churches. (A youth minister, for instance.) Of the several dozen pastors on the original list, four were affiliated with a small Methodist church called Young’s Chapel, in Piedmont. Five of the pastors were from Moore’s home town, Gadsden, but when I called a pastor of a major conservative church in that city, and read him the list, he recognized only a few names out of fifty.

One Moore supporter on the list whom I did reach was David Gonnella, the pastor of Magnolia Springs Baptist Church, in Theodore. Gonnella, an amiable sixty-six-year-old widower, was particularly significant because the Moore campaign had picked his church to stage the candidate’s first public appearance in Alabama after the news of the scandals broke. Gonnella was a supporter of Moore’s, but not an intimate—he had met the Senate candidate only twice in his life. Theodore is a small town near Mobile, and on a good Sunday, Gonnella told me, Magnolia Springs Baptist draws fifty or fifty-five worshippers. When the Moore campaign first approached him about using his church, Gonnella asked for a few days to prepare. The Moore campaign said that things had to move faster than that—they wanted the event to be held on November 29th—so Gonnella quickly set about informing his congregants and trying to get the church ready.

Among the congregants whom Gonnella told was a man who had served as a security contractor in Afghanistan. This congregant, when he learned that there would probably be a large media presence, grew alarmed, and warned Gonnella that the interior of his church was likely to be broadcast quite widely, and that Al Qaeda often scoured the media to find targets for terrorist attacks. Gonnella was not especially worried about Islamic terrorists coming to Theodore, but “to calm his fears” he asked all of the news cameramen who arrived on the day of the event to tighten their shots so that an agent of Al Qaeda, were he to tune in, could not gain a tactical awareness of the room. In a certain sense, the event at Magnolia Springs Baptist reflected the general drift of the Republican Party in recent years: the most outlandish viewpoint in the room had been listened to and duly accommodated.

When Moore spoke from the pulpit that night, he claimed that he had never met any of the women who had come forward with allegations (this contradicted earlier statements he had made) and suggested, nonsensically, that the whole episode was a conspiracy provoked by his aggressive prosecution of drug dealers some decades earlier. In a way, the Moore campaign got what it wanted from Magnolia Springs Baptist: the candidate appearing in a venue associated with piety and moral authority. But Moore couldn’t completely escape the atmospheric strangeness that has defined his campaign, which has been at once theocratic and largely unchurched, and in which the religious right has been everywhere and nowhere at once.

Many evangelical leaders experienced Donald Trump’s ascendance as a personal emergency. Some pastors watched, with dismay and confusion, as members of their congregations defended the moral character of a flamboyantly immoral casino mogul turned politician. During the primaries, the major evangelical pastors were generally allied with other candidates (polls tended to find that they preferred Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz), but, as the campaign developed, and as polls continued to find that evangelical voters held a strong preference for Trump, that general resistance began to weaken. Some pastors talked themselves into Donald Trump, while others remained horrified but kept quiet. “I was flabbergasted that pastors would get up and talk about the goodness of Donald Trump,” John Thweatt, who is the president of the conservative Alabama Baptist Convention, told me this week. “I was really flabbergasted that we were going to throw away Biblical values and dictates because he’s going to fit our party line.”

Trump seemed, to much of the country, a wholly novel political figure, but in Alabama he fit a certain lineage. The lone prominent American politician whose politics really matched Trump’s was Jeff Sessions, the state’s junior senator, and a strain of populist conservatism, often allied with an explicit sense of white victimization, stretches back throughout Alabama’s political history. Religion, for politicians in this strain, and for Trump, often operated as another element of their identity politics. Fob James, the state’s populist governor during the George W. Bush Administration, once pantomimed an ape turning into a man in front of the state’s board of education, while arguing for creationism in the curriculum. Moore operates within this strain, too. His Ten Commandments sculpture made him famous, but he has also suggested that no Muslim should be allowed to serve in Congress and, just this September, when asked to pick the greatest time in American history, opted for the pre-Civil War era. “I think it was great at the time when families were united—even though we had slavery—they cared for one another,” he said.

For those pastors in Alabama who had been horrified by Trump, Moore represented an escalation of the same challenge, of whether partisanship was a convincing reason to upend the normal moral categories. “I don’t think you could have the current situation with Roy Moore without the 2016 election,” Dr. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological seminary, said to me. “One of the long-term concerns I would have is how evangelicals are thinking through issues of personal character.” Another anxiety was whether the evangelical leadership still had the authority to define morality for the followers of its own movement, or whether it had ceded this power to the Republican Party and Fox News.