These analyses, however, miss a crucial point: The religious right was never about the advancement of biblical values. The modern, politically conservative evangelical movement we know is a movement rooted in the perpetuation of racial segregation, and its affiliation with the hard-right fringes of the conservative movement in the late 1970s produced a mutant form of evangelicalism inconsistent with the best traditions of evangelicalism itself. Since then, evangelicals have embraced increasingly secular positions divorced from any biblical grounding, and supporting Donald Trump represents the logical conclusion of that tragic aberration. [...]
In the run-up to the 1980 presidential election, Falwell, Weyrich and others argued that the “godly” choice was not Jimmy Carter, a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher and evangelical, but a divorced and remarried Hollywood actor who, as governor of California, had signed into law the most liberal abortion bill in the country. Falwell nevertheless declared that Ronald Reagan “seemed to represent all the political positions we held dear.”
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