Super Tuesday Was Not the End of the Road For the Religious Right

Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:47 pm

Time and time again obituaries have been written for the Religious Right, and time and time again they have been premature. The suggestion is being made again in the wake of Super Tuesday’s results. Evangelical voters were supposed to be the deciding factor in the primaries. Yet Trump won. What happened?

MSN asked Wednesday, “Was Super Tuesday a coming-out party for atheists or a funeral for the religious right?” noting that “Christian evangelicals voted for Trump in record numbers. Christian conservatives helped Trump secure a victory over candidates with stronger records in faith: Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Ben Carson.

The results were so counter-intuitive from a Religious Right standpoint that Mark Silk, Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College asked Wednesday, “who killed the religious right?”

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OK, maybe Super Tuesday just put it out of its misery. But the thing was moribund, an invalid for a decade. What happened yesterday was a mercy killing, or better, candidate-assisted suicide.

To answer that, first we have to be sure it’s dead, and I don’t think that’s as certain as Silk would make it.

Daniel Burke, CNN’s Religion Editor, wrote,

“For years, journalists have been writing the religious right’s obituary, only to see the movement rise from the grave during general elections and rally behind the GOP’s presidential candidate.

“But the religious right has never seen a hammer quite like Trump, and on Super Tuesday he finally nailed the coffin shut.”

It is true that the Religious Right did not have a good day. Ted Cruz was this year’s favorite, the only man who could save America from a wrathful deity, as bona fide a messiah as we’ve seen since Jesus, or so we were told.

Yet exit polls show Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Vermont and Virginia. The man with his “little wine” and “little crackers,” and a Bible waves if does not crack open, a man whom, as Burke put it, “epitomized the opposite of their values.”

The results weren’t unexpected, of course. Peter Montgomery wrote Monday at Right Wing Watch that as David Lane tried “to get evangelicals to coalesce around one of their own in the Republican primary,” some of the leaders he depended upon were endorsing Trump, some Rubio, some Cruz.

There are many explanations to be offered up as to why this happened. Rest assured none of them will affect Religious Right voters in the least, for whom cognitive dissonance will be their consolation. If they can survive the death of their earthly savior and turn him into a heavenly savior, they can survive the rout of Ted Cruz.

David Kinnaman, president of the evangelical Christian polling firm Barna Group, pointed out going into Super Tuesday that the Republican Party is fractured into theological conservatives, fiscal conservatives and social conservatives, and that might be a problem for them, though as Donald Trump has shown, hate is universal and religion isn’t even really necessary.

Republicans wanted a unifier, and they got one. He just isn’t the one any of them wanted.

It is possible, as has been suggested by Silk, that the absence of Jerry Falwell, founder of the so-called Moral Majority, is being felt. Certainly, nobody was impressed by what his son and successor felt, and Bill Graham’s boy Franklin is an empty cipher.

The Religious Right may have been an invalid for the past decade, as Silk insists, but even if they can’t get a president elected, they have been a potent invalid, driving Republican ideology in state after state, where repressive legislation targets not only atheists and gays but women. Muslims have been another recent target.

So moribund? Maybe. Maybe not. We mustn’t forget that the Religious Right got George W. Bush elected. This may not have been a good thing for them, given how horrible a president Bush proved to be. What sane person wants to go through that again? Not many apparently, to judge by his brother Jeb’s lack of success this time around.

It will take more than a miserable Super Tuesday performance to warrant an autopsy. The Religious Right is still a force to be reckoned with, lacking only a leader who can do more than scheme.

The Tea Party finally got their leader in Donald Trump, which has a certain symmetry since that movement was “crowd sourced” by the wealthy like vampiric thralls.

As is so often the case, the conventional wisdom is wrong. The Religious Right was still there Wednesday morning doing its evil, and it, too, eventually, will find another leader to take them to the promised land.


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