WASHINGTON (RNS) — As the GOP pivots to an unpredictable general election season, it remains committed to framing the contest in the familiar tropes of the Christian right. The choice the nation faces, the party leaders assert, is between godly governance or the triumph of the ungodly. Former President Donald Trump, according to this narrative, has divine protection — and the proof is in his survival of the assassination attempt on July 13.
The representation of Trump as a candidate from on high, however, extends well before the assassination attempt. Last month’s Road to Majority Policy Conference, a rally organized by Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition that has been meeting annually since 2010, distilled a yearslong effort to anoint Trump and reimagine America’s political conflicts as a spiritual battle.
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri addresses the Road to Majority conference in Washington, D.C. (Video screen grab)
There was much at Road to Majority that was familiar: the refrain that this nation was founded on the Bible, the idea that conservative Christians are being actively persecuted, and condemnation of abortion.
The conference also reflected some of the ongoing demographic shifts in the movement’s base of supporters. Contrary to the notion that faith-driven Republicanism consists only of old, white evangelicals, the crowd at these gatherings is getting younger and more diverse, with the inclusion of Catholic, Pentecostal, and charismatic Christian speakers and notable surges in people of color at the podium and in the audience.
This year’s conference should also definitively quash any doubts about the religious right’s enthusiasm for Trump, despite his moral mismatch with this audience. One speaker after another spoke of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee as if he were sent from heaven. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina affectionately described him as “a handful” but added, “He is your best hope.” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, having long gotten past Trump’s humiliating attacks on his wife, also appeared to have made his peace with the nominee.
The latest senator to undergo ritual loss of dignity at the hands of Trump is Oklahoma’s James Lankford, the GOP’s point man in the negotiations that produced a strict bipartisan immigration bill last fall. The bill was hailed on both sides of the aisle as a major step in managing the border crisis before Trump signaled his faction in Congress to sabotage the bill, and it died.
At the Washington conference, Lankford toed the MAGA line, appearing to blame the Biden administration for Trump’s act of sabotage. “I’m willing to work with anyone to be able to solve the issue of the border. Because I understand what’s happening. We have terrorists crossing every day. We had a 12-year-old murdered in Houston this week,” he said. “Because President Biden allows thousands of people to cross the border every single day.”
The association between immigration and crime does not show up in crime statistics, but it was unquestionable doctrine at the Road to Majority event. Cruz was especially keen to make sure that even people not living in border states should feel the fear. “You may think you don’t live in a border town,” Cruz said. “You’re wrong. Every city in America is a border town because this administration is putting illegal immigrants on planes and buses and sending them to cities across America.”
He did not mention that his own state’s governor, Republican Greg Abbott, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, also a Republican, have made headlines for sending migrants by plane and bus to New York, Chicago, and other cities that tend to vote for Democrats.
Many speakers here ran victory laps on abortion, celebrating the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and effectively eliminated abortion rights in many states. These speakers’ message was, in essence, “Don’t look back.”
Trump has attempted to moderate his messaging on the issue, most prominently through his revision of the GOP abortion plank, signaling to blue- and swing-state voters that they need not worry about losing their rights. But conference attendees were eagerly pushing an abortion ban, and Trump, in his address to the gathering, appeared to drop a hint that the anti-abortion activists would eventually get what they want, reminding them of the three conservative justices he had put on the Supreme Court.
As for the revised plank, he said: “You have to also remember you have to get elected,” he said, perhaps an allusion to the fact that majorities of American voters do not support abortion bans. “Over time it will all work out.”
But Graham went the furthest to reassure the audience on abortion: “Being pro-life is good politics,” he said. “Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.”
A potent item of common interest was the war between Hamas and Israel and the student protests that took place across university campuses this past year, which several speakers laid at the feet of the current administration. “Oct. 7 was not just an attack on Israel. It was an attack on the entire West,” said Jason Miyares, attorney general of Virginia. “This president (Joe Biden) … abandoned America to Hamas.”
Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley also appeared to blame the Biden White House for the demonstrations. “We now have protests here in America with pro-Hamas, antisemitic mobs that are doing what they can to drive Jewish students out of our American campuses. And Joe Biden is at the forefront of this.”
The desire to defend Israel stood in awkward juxtaposition with the isolationism that runs through some sectors of the movement, especially in matters that touch on Russian national interests. A “cabal of woke warmongers” was to blame for leading the U.S. into Ukraine’s war, according to former Hawaii U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.
None of the speakers articulated a concrete alternative to the current administration’s foreign policy, instead raising the specter of a globalist woke elite ostensibly stabbing America in the back.
A panel discussion during the Road to Majority conference in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Katherine Stewart)
Monica Crowley, a political commentator who briefly worked in the Trump White House, said the threat started “as a KGB operation” and continued with “communism, Marxism, neo-Marxism, which we are fighting right now, and globalism,” she explained. “They banned God. Why? Because the state is supposed to be your God.”
Ben Carson, former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, saw similar conspiracies. “The United States of America is the major obstacle to one-world government. They cannot bring us down militarily,” he said. “So what do you do next? You go inside. You divide the people on the basis of race, age, income, gender, religion, political affiliation. You have them all at each other’s throats and you destroy the fabric and the morality of the people.”
Domestically, too, conspiracies were said to have blossomed under Biden, particularly in the alleged weaponization of the Justice Department against Trump.
On one panel, “Weaponized: Reestablishing Balance in a Justice System That Can Target Private Citizens?,” the three speakers, including a former official in the George W. Bush administration’s Department of Justice and a state senator from North Carolina, reflected on overcriminalization in the legal system.
The argument, typically invoked in the war on drugs and racially disproportionate prosecutions, here was clearly implying that overcriminalization was behind the legal woes of Trump.
“So now that we’ve had the prosecution of political enemies, with what’s been done to Trump … so that horse has left the barn, the doors are wide open,” said one audience member at the panel. “A lot of conservatives are saying, hey, we need to turn the tables and start doing our own prosecutions of actual criminal behavior against these people so they can get a taste of their own medicine.”
Patrick Purtill, director of legislative affairs for the Faith & Freedom Coalition, said: “I’m very nervous about that approach. I also understand the desire, I really do, because it’s hard to tell somebody not to punch back when they’re punching you in the face.”
But another audience member countered, “I understand why you don’t want to open the Pandora’s box, but honestly, the other side doesn’t have any trouble opening every door they want to,” she said. “They go after a former president; they go after anyone who they disagree with.” She continued with a long discussion about what she called the unfair treatment of Jan. 6 prisoners.
“I think the question that people are trying to debate with is how to punch back,” Purtill replied. “Because I’m worried that if we simply adopt their techniques, we’ve lost the rule of law.”
The crowd wasn’t having it. “We’ve lost it. It’s done. We don’t have a choice,” said a voice from the back of the room. Amens and affirmative noises spread.
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, in his address to the conference, leaned into this theme. “To the attorney general of the U.S. government, Merrick Garland. To the FBI director, Christopher Wray. Preserve all of your documents. Preserve all of your decision papers. Because what has happened to this man is going to happen to you. We are coming for you.” The audience applauded.
Hawley seemed to want to unite conservative Christians around their faith, but also use religion as a force that divides right from left. “We hear all the time that religion divides this country,” Hawley said. “Religion unites Americans! We are a religious people. I’ll tell you what divides America. What divides America is the left’s attempt to demote religion, to erase our heritage, to erase the foundation this country has in, yes, the Bible.”
Jason Williams, executive director of the North Carolina Faith & Freedom Coalition, took a more direct approach. Democrats, he said, are “godless reprobates.”
At a panel titled “Kingdom Men Within the Sphere of Influence,” moderator Madgie Nicolas, national strategist of African American engagement for the Faith & Freedom Coalition, took the characterization a step further. “Look at the Democrats, ladies and gentlemen,” she said. “If you take the Democrats and you put a Republican next to it you can see demonic. It is visible. We are fighting Satan as flesh.”
Trump himself took the stage around noon on the third day of the conference, shouting over the boisterous crowd to ask, “Who likes the Ten Commandments, by the way, going up in the schools?” — referring to a recently passed Louisiana law mandating display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. It brought the house down.
“The radical left is trying to shame Christians and silence you,” Trump said. “If Joe Biden gets back in, Christians will not be safe. Your religion will certainly be in tatters.” Biden, Trump said, is surrounded by “fascists, communists.”
The bottom line, for organizers of this conference, has always been to get out the Republican vote, and Reed got straight to the point in his speech, rising to channel the attendees’ anxieties into using the tools of democracy.
“We’re going to leave here and we’re going to knock on 10 million doors of Christian and conservative voters, in every single battleground state,” Reed told the crowd. “We’re going to make 10 million phone calls. We’re going to send 25 million get-out-the-vote texts. We’re going to put 30 million voter guides in 113,000 churches, and when we’re done you’re going to see the biggest turnout of Christian voters in America.”
It was almost the same speech he gave at the conference in 2016, 2022 and 2023. It rather accurately predicted the massive turnout of religious conservative voters for Trump and Republicans in those instances. There isn’t any reason to think it won’t work again.
(This story was reported with support from the Stiefel Freethought Foundation.)
