"I do not believe that America can survive another four years of Joe Biden," Ralph Reed, founder and chair of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, told a gathering of the religious right in Washington last Friday. "I haven't felt this way since Jimmy Carter was president." The audience burst into knowing laughter.
Reed promised they would knock on 10m doors of Christian and conservative voters in every battleground state, make 10m phone calls, send 25m text messages and put 30m voter guides in 113,000 churches, producing "the biggest turnout of Christian voters in American history".
With Trump running ahead of Biden in many swing state polls, religious right voters scent a historic opportunity to impose a radical agenda that could ban abortion nationwide, curb LGBTQ+ rights and blur the separation of church and state.
At last Friday's conference, speaker after speaker framed it as a righteous crusade and the only way to resist a tide of liberal secularism sweeping America.
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