Eat Pray Love Vote Stand

Leesburg, Virginia
One of the major subplots in American politics over the past half-decade is evangelical Christians—the political constituency without which Trump would have never been elected president—becoming the dog that caught the car. They just haven’t had much reason to go to the polls since June 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned the legal right to an abortion in its landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.

The Family Research Council’s Pray Vote Stand Summit was once a marquee political gathering for evangelicals and their allies in politics. But at this year’s event in Leesburg, Virginia, decline was evident everywhere, from the downsized venue far outside the Beltway to the sparse attendance and general lack of interest from elected officials. When the organization’s leader, Tony Perkins, addressed the audience, it became clear that he has been relegated to the D.C. sidelines after enjoying years of high-contact play as a leader in the anti-abortion movement.

Perkins’s position had once made him something of an evangelical kingmaker. But those who followed his lead in earlier times now largely get their information and political impetus from a shrinking number of online channels or from Trump himself. Perkins’s voice doesn’t resonate the way it once did with conservative audiences. This became clear from watching the crowd while he spoke.

Perkins’s remarks hit on one theme repeatedly: Notwithstanding the Dobbs decision, the right-to-life fight is not over. He supported this point with a real statistic: There are more abortions taking place in Trump’s America—including in deep red states—than in the years immediately preceding the overturning of Roe.

“Mailboxes across America have been turned into the instruments of abortion,” Perkins said, referring to abortion pills like mifepristone that can be delivered by mail. “As a result, we have more abortions today than before the overturn of Roe v. Wade—about a 21 percent increase in the number of abortions since 2020.”

“Many of you come from pro-life states. I’m from a pro-life state in Louisiana. It doesn’t matter,” he added. “We now have more abortions in Louisiana than before Roe [was overturned] because of this abortion pill.”

Each time he mentioned higher rates of abortion following the overturning of Roe, attendees shook their heads in disbelief. Utterances could be heard throughout the crowd of “My God” and “That can’t be.”

Perkins placed the primary blame for this situation on former President Joe Biden rather than Trump, citing the Biden administration’s rule change to allow abortion pills to be sent to private addresses through the United States Postal Service, sidestepping the need to go to a clinic to end a pregnancy, including in states that used the Dobbs decision as a license to ban abortion outright.

But Perkins’s beef isn’t just with Biden. Throughout the event, he expressed frustration with the Trump administration for a lack of interest in addressing abortion rates, and with Congress for claiming to be pro-life while showing little follow-through.

“It’s been kept in place by the Trump administration,” Perkins said of the FDA decision to allow mifepristone to be shipped by mail. “It has allowed the abortion industry to adopt an Amazon model for business.”

Perkins frequently noted ways in which “the Republican party has lost its voice on this issue,” citing the GOP’s removal of support for a nationwide abortion ban from its official platform in 2024.

“We’re fighting for this life issue that many people thought was solved in 2022 when the Court overturned Roe, but it’s more of a battle today than it was then,” Perkins said, adding that conservatives “have an administration that’s not as committed to it as we’ve seen before.”

Perkins and other evangelical leaders are hardly alone in feeling dissatisfied with Trump’s second term. Everyone from Big Oil executives to his most die-hard rallygoers has expressed doubt about whether the president’s priorities are in line with the country’s needs. And that sentiment has become predominant among the American public, according to recent polling.

Despite the lackluster attendance and smaller venue for its flagship conference, the Family Research Council isn’t short on cash. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with substantial annual revenue, FRC is obligated to file 990 tax returns, which are public documents; the organization’s filings show that its revenue