I see you have not read many, if any, books about US history in your time. What Jonah Goldberg is writing about is basic Turn of the 19th/20th Century American history. If you bothered to ever read any books on the subject, you would know that evangelicals, for the most part, leaned to the Left right up to the election of Jimmy Carter in 1976, who they voted for. The issues that concern them today were pretty much the consensus on all sides of the aisle until the 60’s, thus they voted for more activist government in the economic sphere (where the two parties differed). Small government conservatism was not all that popular in the South and other rural areas. Believe it or not, the stereotypical Small Government Conservative was to be found in states like Vermont and Massachusetts back in those days.
I think your reading has lead you to misunderstand why Christians vote for a man.
They were told Nixon was a criminal and Carter was a good Baptist.
They’ve just been trying to vote for a good Christian man all along.
If the GOP-E didn’t have contempt for God, they would provide a candidate close to a good Christian each time and they would win each time.
True enough, but what would Republicans or conservatives be without the Evangelicals? Either they’d be a much smaller party or they’d have to find votes in groups that are even less conservative than Evangelicals. If you define the conservative base as limited government free marketeers or as Burkean traditionalists, you don’t have a very big base.