From the beginning it was but a cynical caricature, this so-called "Religious Right" or "Christian Conservative" movement.
But on Monday it fell over into full farce.
A blowhard billionaire casino operator, who thought that the way to refer to Second Corinthians was to say "Two Corinthians," ventured triumphantly to Caricature College in Lynchburg, Va.
It's also known as Liberty University. It was founded by that now-departed bellower named Jerry Falwell, who made himself the leader of what he presumed to call the Moral Majority, which, as they say, was neither.
And there it was that Donald Trump said to cheers that, as the Republican president, he would save the nation, and Christmas while he was at it, for Christians.
Then he quoted One, Two and Three John.
I'm kidding on that last thing.
This movement's essence always was secular political Republicanism, not actual religious practice or behavior. It draws its lifeblood from secular political pandering, mainly on three issues--prayer in school, abortion and homosexuality--not a living Christian example.
It shouts "amen" only when politicians say what it wants to hear. It dismisses and even condemns those in politics who seek to demonstrate Christianity in their behavior but get on the other side of these few emotional issues--usually by embracing instead the constitutional principle of individual liberty, which the caricature cannot countenance.
The American "Religious Right" or "Christian Conservative" forgives everything except liberal opinion and Democratic Party affiliation. There it draws God's red line. It freely forgives sexual weakness and misbehavior--unless it's Bill Clinton's, which is different, because he's a Democrat and on the other side of the Big Three of issues.
A "conservative" and "family values" preacher getting caught making sexy time outside marriage or in a lusty physical intertwining with one of the same gender ... why, he needs only to stand in the pulpit and weep and pander, also known in the caricature movement as confess and repent.
He'll be back on TV and in the private jet in no time.
This movement began when a divorced man who didn't attend church, Ronald Reagan, came to Dallas in 1980 to apply his professional actor's line-delivering genius to pander to pliant Southern Baptists and the emerging and so-called Moral Majority.
Reagan said he wanted to put prayer in school and undo a woman's right to choose abortion. At that point gays hadn't much started their movement in pursuit of humanity.
So these "religious" people zealously allied with Reagan instead of his political opponent, who only so happened to be a demonstrably devoted and even pious Southern Baptist Sunday School teacher named Jimmy Carter.
So the issue never was conventional Christian affiliation or behavior. From the beginning the issue was secular conservative cultural and political policy, and a willingness to make shameless grandstand plays thereto.
Now comes Trump to demonstrate that meekness and humility and compassion and the turning of the cheek have no place in the raging American "Religious Right" caricature. He even cursed--saying "what the hell"--in his speech at Liberty, which has a policy against students talking that way.
Falwell's boy, Jerry Jr., extolled Trump as he'd extolled no other politician to visit the college.
So it appears that the Jesus of this "Religious Right" is a fickle front-runner.
He favored Mike Huckabee in 2008, but rejects him now. He favored Rick Santorum in 2012, but can't seem to remember his name now.
Have those fellows changed? Tragically, no. Huckabee is as irresponsibly hyperbolic as ever. Santorum is as intolerantly sneering as ever.
This time the Jesus of the "Christian Conservative" caricature favors the casino-ist Trump and a Canadian named Ted Cruz, whom mainstream Republican colleagues in Congress detest as a smarmy grandstander. What commends Trump and Cruz seems only to be that they thrive in the polls.
Above all else, the "Religious Right" wants a committed panderer to get nominated at long last--instead of another mushy moderate like McCain or Romney--and wage the caricature's crusade against the wife of the great unforgiven.
The irony--and there always is one--is that the wife of the great unforgiven, this Hillary Rodham Clinton, is, actually, a strongly religious person in a conventional sense. People who know her well consistently tell you that she is guided by the Wesleyan themes of Methodism.
Of course Methodism is not typically of the "Religious Right" or "Christian Conservative" movement.
It's not so much about going to Liberty University and presuming to sell yourself by the hollowness of what you are willing to spout rather than by the personal code by which you live.
Trump vowed at Liberty University to "protect" Christianity.
But the country doesn't need for Christianity to be protected. It needs only, and desperately, for Christianity to be lived.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 01/21/2016