(RNS) — Since July, when the Republican National Committee dropped a federal abortion ban from its national platform, several traditional religious right leaders have suggested that they have been betrayed, raising questions about whether evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics would support former President Donald Trump’s current campaign for the White House with the same vigor as in 2016 and 2020.
At the Pray Vote Stand Summit in Washington, the religious right’s annual confab held in the first week of October, some speakers took the occasion to denounce the decision: “Tragic and disgraceful,” said Robert P. George, the Princeton University legal scholar, of the disappearance of the anti-abortion plank.
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, who founded the event as the Value Voter Summit in 2006 and is still its principal organizer, chided the RNC’s political expediency: “If (Democrats) are making this one of their top issues and the Republican response to it is crickets, well, it’s not going to motivate the base,” he told the crowd gathered at the Omni Shoreham Hotel.
But if they were upset by the RNC’s pivot this summer, by the time the summit was in session, they had already moved on to denial. Speaker after speaker invoked Dobbs v. Jackson, the Supreme Court decision that …