OTOH still miles above any true believer of socialism on the scale of sanity.
We’ve forgotten that any valid American idea of conservatism began with the bible, and no that does not equal a theocracy, but only a decent, fair government AND A PRIVATELY REVERENT PEOPLE.
Take this as the anecdotage it is, feel free to find refutation if you can (I don’t mind hearing corrections to bad news announcements), but about 2 decades ago the divorce rate wasn’t any better among claimed Christians as among the unwashed pagans. This presaged trouble.
And I fear that Ted Cruz and Glenn Beck shared a characteristic of belief that some religious elite was going to rise above the rest of the country and somehow inherit it by divine promise.
This is the thing that made the difference between small-o orthodox Christianity and Mormon faith appear very little to the two. They were both aboard the Train to Blessing, or so they imagined. They didn’t expect to be beat by a rather secular Trump Bullet Train.
Actual Christian revival, as borne out by both the bible and by history, is a very “democratic,” grass roots phenomenon.