How Trump Divided and Conquered Evangelicals

To anyone who has followed the trajectory of the religious right from its founding in the late 1970s through the age of Trump, the image was a near perfect encapsulation of the bafflement, frustration and dismay that has roiled the evangelical world since Falwell Jr. endorsed Trump in January, just before the Iowa caucuses. That March 1990 issue of Playboy (in which Trump presaged a future presidential run) appeared on newsstands a little over a decade after Falwell's father, the late Jerry Falwell Sr., founder of the Moral Majority, played a key role in transforming Republican politics by turning white conservative evangelicals and Catholics — voters opposed to, among other secular sins, pornography — into the party's most dependable voting bloc.