The U.S. President’s team of strategists are seeking to undo what they see as federal overreach are looking back as far as the New Deal, and some even further, to the Progressive era at the turn of the 20th Century. With Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court and hundreds of Gorsuch-like judicial nominations in the pipeline, they’re making big plans.
Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition’s recent annual conference “Road to Majority,” which brings religious conservatives together in Washington DC had a triumphalist atmosphere, almost giddy, in sharp contrast to previous years. Religious conservative leaders are already reaping the rewards of connecting to the Trump White House. It was the conservative Christians that put Mr. Trump in the White House. Republican leaders’ gratitude was evidenced by their extraordinary participation at Road to Majority. President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and House Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows all spoke at some point during the three-day event, along with other luminaries like Sen. Ted Cruz and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. So much for perennial predictions of the Religious Right’s political demise. Mr. Trump spoke at the opening luncheon, declaring, “You didn’t let me down and I will never, ever let you down, you know that.” Trump assured them, “Believe me, we’re not finished yet.”
Mr. Trump won loud cheers for withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord and his sweeping ban on foreign aid funds going to groups that even support, much less provide, access to abortion. But by far the biggest prize for Trump’s supporters was the Supreme Court seat that Mr. Trump successfully filled with Neil Gorsuch, a strong conservative. Conservative religious leaders have a half-century-long grudge against the Supreme Court over rulings on church-state separation, the right to privacy, legal equality for LGBT Americans and more. They were thrilled when Mr. Trump nominated Gorsuch. They rallied support for his nomination and celebrated when he was confirmed. They made it clear that they are counting on him to undermine the separation between church and state, work to overturn the Court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling, while Anti-abortion activists are dreaming of the day that Roe v. Wade will be overturned.
But today’s conservative evangelicals are interested in far more than abolishing legal abortion and reversing new rights for LGBTQ Americans. They want to place limits on the role of the federal government in education, health care, and more. They want a Christian Reconstructionist model which would limit government involvement in education, alleviation of poverty, which they believe are jobs that belong to the church and family. Ted Cruz addressed the gathering and drew cheers when he said, “We have a Republican majority in the House. We have a Republican majority in the Senate. We have a Republican in the White House. How about we act like it?”
Sen. David Perdue of Georgia said, “We are in a war for the future of this Republic. The great progressive experiment of the last 100 years, with bigger and bigger government, has failed, period.” The Road to Majority conference also placed a lot of emphasis on the more than 100 vacancies on the federal bench, which the Senate created by “slow-walking” Obama appointees. Appointing strongly conservative judges (which are lifetime appointments) in the next eight years (which usually involves an additional 400 replacements approximately) could radically change the direction of the country away from democratic policies implemented even as far back as the New Deal and the Great Society, both of which were socialist in principle. Shifting the culture is one of the key goals of the religious right and the Trump administration.
Conservative religious leaders have been telling their supporters — and Mr. Trump himself — that he is on a divine mission. They had warned that the election of Hillary Clinton would mean an end to religious freedom in America. They declared him anointed by God to save America by destroying political correctness and bulldozing the Washington establishment. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said of Mr. Trump’s election, “I think that was God’s hand.” At Road to Majority, author Eric Metaxas portrayed Trump’s election as a sign that God has given America one more chance to stave off His judgment, saying, “the governor of the universe has given us a reprieve in this election but we now need to stand and fight.” Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., told Road to Majority attendees that he is “genuinely excited about what God is doing in America right now.” He said God had given Americans “an opportunity to have a re-founding of our nation” and return it to “those ideas of our founding fathers, those principles, those things that our founders were clear were biblical mandates.” Loudermilk said Election Day was like the landing at Normandy, with the real fight ahead against the enemy, which he defined as “an ideology that is destructive not only to our ideas but to mankind altogether.”
During a Road to Majority session on Capitol Hill, House Freedom Caucus chairman Mark Meadows demonstrated the extent to which the Tea Party and Religious Right have always been overlapping movements. Meadows told Faith and Freedom participants that he was their “brother in the Lord” and that “we have work to do to take this city and return it to its rightful place to honor God and faith.” Meadows added, “the option of failure is not possible” because “our God still reigns over the affairs of nations.”
When religious conservatives gain political power, religious laws will inevitably follow. “And he exerciseth all the power of the first beast before him, and causeth the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.” Revelation 13:12.