Trump is terrorizing the RELIGIOUS RIGHT and making them irrelevant.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/christian-rights-trump-ageddon-how-donald-trump-tearing-religious-conservatives-apart?akid=14245.294211.Gn8RST&rd=1&src=newsletter1056168&t=4

One of the fascinating ongoing sideshows of the Conservative Crack-up is the deep schism Trump has revealed within the Christian Right. It’s just one of many sub-stories in this outrageous campaign, but since so-called conservative “values voters” have been such major players in GOP politics and American political life in general for decades now, it’s an important one.

Although there have been rumblings of discontent over the past few years, as younger evangelicals with more tolerant views began to infiltrate the movement, the embrace of Trump by millions of evangelical Christians is a development very few people saw coming.

(I certainly didn’t when I wrote this piece last year about the history and impending break-up of the conservative coalition between Catholics and Protestants; I ended it by saying the evangelical right was solid as a rock. Chalk that one up to yet another pundit fail.)

The current split among the evangelical right started to become obvious when Donald Trump was feted as an exalted visiting dignitary by Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. It turned out that he had visited before, and had been making gestures of friendship for some years. Indeed, Jerry Falwell Jr. is a big fan, who says that Trump reminds him of his own father.

It became clear that this wasn’t an anomaly when Trump’s electoral success among this cohort derailed Ted Cruz’s southern strategy, with which he had hoped to corner the Christian Right and therefore take the delegate lead long before the campaign got to more godless environs. That didn’t work out, obviously, and Cruz along with everyone else was surprised by the willingness of so many people who call themselves conservative Christians to vote for man who is anything but pious and repeatedly shows that he is religiously illiterate. As it turned out a lot of those people aren’t actually all that religious themselves:

[E]vangelicals do boast higher worship attendance numbers than other faith communities, and those who do go to church regularly tend to vote and behave in ways that match the greater evangelical agenda. But that doesn’t mean they all sit in the pews every Sunday, nor does it mean they blindly accept whatever their pastor tells them: anywhere from 35 to 40 percent of evangelicals attend church occasionally, seldom, or never. You’re less likely to see this more wayward subset of evangelicalism singing hymns on Sunday morning, but they’re happy to identify as evangelicals on opinion polls anyway, and have often been the group lifted up by progressives as examples of evangelical “hypocrisy.”