Reminder: unlike Glenn, I don’t block or delete comments re Christian faith by any of the thugs.

Lies, though, about  Trump’s disastrous and horrific presidency won’t be allowed.

As Meador notes, President Trump has watered down the Republican plank on abortion. The party no longer endorses a human life constitutional amendment that would protect unborn life, and its platform left abortion policy up to the states, its most pro-choice stance in more than 30 years.

The Trump administration has defunded evangelical ministries that focus on helping the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. Trump’s allies have attacked the religious liberty of dissenting Christian institutions.

And is there any remaining commitment to character in leaders at all?

“It is becoming increasingly clear,” Meador writes, “that evangelical Trump voters are, by and large, not abandoning Trump’s G.O.P. for any reason.” Evangelical “views and policy priorities simply can be ignored by the real leaders of the current G.O.P. because there is no reason to concede anything to people whose vote you will have no matter what.”

At the same time, however, it seems very strange to argue that the religious right is gone. Trump owes his election to white evangelical voters. He welcomes faith leaders into the Oval Office, Trump’s Christian allies hold worship services in the White House, and the Republican Party is stocked top to bottom with elected officials who loudly broadcast their Christian faith.

But, as Meador observes, “sure, Vice President Vance will make an appearance at the March for Life. President Trump will show up to the National Prayer Breakfast. But even when he does acknowledge a Christian event, it often will come loaded with hatred and vile self-aggrandizement.”

Trump’s Easter message on Truth Social — in which he insulted “radical left lunatics” and offered an insincere “Happy Easter” while he accused them of “fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country” — was a perfect example of Meador’s point.

What is going on?

I’d modify Meador’s thesis slightly. The Christian right is dead, but the religious right is stronger than it’s ever been. Another way of putting it is that the religious right has divorced itself from historical Christian theology but still holds its partisan beliefs with religious intensity. The religious fervor is there. Christian virtues are not.

There is data to support this thesis. In a fascinating 2019 article, Ryan Burge — one of the nation’s foremost statisticians of American religion — took a close look at the political beliefs of evangelical and nonevangelical Republicans and made a sobering observation: “Looked at broadly, we see from this data there is essentially no difference between a Republican who is white and born-again and a Republican in general.”

In addition, there’s evidence that white evangelicals are unusually loyal to the Republican Party. In a 2020 piece, Burge analyzed a survey that asked members of different religious groups to place themselves in ideological space.

White Catholics and mainline Protestants, for example, saw themselves as left of the Republican Party. Black Protestants saw themselves as right of the Democratic Party, and atheists saw themselves as left of the party. Among Christians, only white evangelicals precisely overlapped with their party. For the past decade, there has been no daylight between white evangelicals and the G.O.P.