While the Family Research Council’s recent and final Pray Vote Stand national activist conference was a pale imitation of the group’s glory years, speakers made clear that the still-powerful religious-right movement is committed to advancing an anti-equality, anti-freedom, exclusionary Christian nationalist agenda—and looking to make it all possible by keeping Republicans in power in the upcoming midterm elections.
Ending Access to Abortion
The stars of the opening night were U.S. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and his wife Erin Hawley, a lawyer for the Alliance Defending Freedom, which played a major role in getting the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Sen. Hawley, a close ally of dominionist activist Sean Feucht, expressed anti-abortion activists’ frustration that the number of abortions in the U.S. have risen since Roe was overturned, because federal policy changes made during the Biden administration facilitate the distribution of the abortion drug mifepristone by mail, allowing patients to access it despite state-level abortion bans.
Religious-right groups have been demanding that the Trump administration reverse those policies, which Hawley complained “is turning every mailbox in America into a Planned Parenthood.”
Trump administration officials say they are undertaking a safety review of the drug, and suggest that it will lead to a withdrawal of its approval by the Food and Drug Administration, but that has not satisfied its religious-right supporters. And even if the FDA does what Hawley wants and reverses its finding that the drug is safe, that won’t be enough for him.
“They need to go beyond that,” Hawley said. “We need to go beyond that. Congress needs to ban the abortion drug in the United States of America, period.” Hawley has introduced a legislative ban but his colleagues have not rallied around it, presumably because they know that most Americans oppose abortion bans.
The week before Pray Vote Stand, Perkins joined Hawley and other conservative Christian leaders in releasing a “Declaration for Life.” At their press conference, Perkins complained that “the Republican Party has lost its voice on the life issue.”
On the PVS stage, Hawley promoted an initiative on the ballot in Missouri this year that would place an abortion ban in the state constitution. He asserted that Missouri is a “pro-life state,” despite the fact that it was Missouri voters who enshrined abortion rights in the Constitution in 2024.
Reversing Marriage Equality
Overturning the Supreme Court’s 2015 marriage equality ruling is another goal of the Alliance Defending Freedom, and it is the primary goal of the “Greater Than” coalition launched earlier this year by strident anti-equality activist Katy Faust and dozens of religious-right groups. The drumbeat of anti-equality propaganda may be reflected in reduced support for marriage equality among Republicans, though about two-thirds of Americans still favor allowing same-sex couples to marry.
Faust’s strategy is to portray “gay marriage” as a dire threat to the wellbeing of children, returning to an old and dishonorable strategy of the anti-LGBTQ movement. She demeans gay couples who want to be parents as “selfish” people who have enabled a “global baby trade." She told the Pray Vote Stand audience, “You do not regulate a baby buying industry…You abolish it.”
Faust began her diatribe at PVS by talking about abuses of surrogacy, starting with the story of a Chinese tech billionaire who she said has between 100 and 300 children procured through surrogates in California. But she does not appear interested in exploring legal changes that might, for example, create similar procedural safeguards as those involved in adoption. Instead, she wants to use a few horror stories to justify banning surrogacy altogether because it violates what she says is God’s plan.
Faust vowed that the campaign she is leading is going to “retake marriage” and she outlined its three-pronged strategy:
- Pursue a legal strategy to pass laws that the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority can use to overrule marriage equality—similar to the strategy used successfully by the Alliance Defending Freedom to overturn Roe v. Wade.
- Shift public opinion with an “army of influencers” promoting the campaign’s propaganda message that “gay marriage results in child victimization.”
- Engage the church with materials designed separately for Catholics and Protestants
Conservative Christians Only For Federal Judges
The Family Research Council has repeatedly given a platform to right-wing judicial activist Phillip Jauregui and his Center for Judicial Renewal to promote their campaign to convince Republican presidents and senators to require that future Supreme Court justices and other federal judicial nominees meet his “biblical worldview” test—never mind the Constitution’s ban on religious tests for public office. Conservative judges who don’t pass the test are put on a “red list” that the group uses to lobby against their promotion. At this year’s conference, Jauregui told activists that his group’s ratings are already working.
In a separate session, Jordan Lorence of the First Liberty Institute, another religious-right legal group, praised Trump’s judicial nominees, saying, “I feel like it’s been Christmas morning for the last few years at the Supreme Court, and you’re getting, you know, everything on your list.” In addition to overturning Roe, his list included rulings undermining church-state separation, limiting gun regulation, expanding presidential power, upholding the Trump team’s enforcement of immigration laws, rebuking the transgender rights movement, and more.
All of this, said Lorence, was because Trump was elected in 2016 with a Republican-majority Senate, and “then by the providence of God got three vacancies to fill on the U.S. Supreme Court.” He warned that if Republicans lose their majority in the Senate, “There’s not going to be a whole lot of good judges getting confirmed.”
Lorence called former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “a hero” because he “basically did not confirm almost all of President Obama’s nominees for the last two years of his presidency,” creating a backlog of judicial vacancies for Trump to fill—and of course for refusing to allow the Senate to consider Obama’s nominee to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
Lorence tried to mollify right-wing activists enraged at conservative justices who rejected Trump’s attempts to overturn birthright citizenship, saying we’ve had it for 100 years and there were good arguments on both sides.
The Religious Freedom Asterisk
Asked about right-wing Christian claims that Islam is incompatible with the First Amendment and the Constitution, Lorence waffled, saying that it’s “troubling” to think about people who would use the First Amendment to weaken the First Amendment, but added that not every Muslim is an “Islamicist” and that he has Muslim neighbors who he gets along well with, and “the last thing they would want to do is do jihad in the neighborhood and make us be inferior as either Christians or Jews.”
No such nuance was evident when Perkins convened a panel on Islam and the supposed threat of Sharia law supplanting the U.S. Constitution. (Note: Muslims represent about one percent of the U.S. population.) Panelists included Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch; former Rep. Michele Bachmann of Regent University; and Shahram Hadian, a former Muslim turned Christian pastor.
Hadian portrayed interfaith efforts as a Trojan Horse for Muslim’s strategy of conquest. “There’s no common ground. There’s no interfaith. There’s no ecumenicalism with Muslims,” he said. Bachmann and Hadian said that communities that allow the public broadcast of the Muslim call to prayer have already been “subjugated.”
Perkins and other FRC officials have repeatedly suggested that Islam is incompatible with the Constitution and does not enjoy the same First Amendment protections as Christianity because it is a political system not a religion, which is ironic given that the Christian right has spent years arguing that their interpretation of the Bible should dictate everything from gender roles to tax policy.
