The leaders who have now decided to rally behind Cruz provide a stunning example of just how far the movement has fallen. In 1980s, the religious right was led by powerful figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who were ubiquitous on television news shows and in major print publications. The secret meeting at the Sheraton outside Washington, however, was attended by people like direct-mail “pioneer” Richard Viguerie and Jonathan Falwell, the lesser known of the late Jerry Falwell’s two sons. Also in attendance was James Dobson, who founded Focus on the Family and then was ousted from that organization in 2010—just before it became markedly less political. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, an organization that has fallen out of favor even with some conservatives recently, convened the Sheraton meeting. If political advocacy were kickball, this group would definitely be the B team.

Many reasons exist for the religious right’s waning political power. The United States has continued to grow more racially diverse while conservative Christians have remained largely white. At the same time, millennials have begun to assert themselves in the political process, and the religious right is aging rapidly. Millennial evangelicals exist, of course, but they are not as solidly conservative or as politically unified as their parents and grandparents.

But perhaps most important, the ideological foundation of the religious-right experiment has been exposed for the sham it always was. The movement’s pioneers once believed that if religious leaders and their constituents banded together, they could consolidate political power and leverage it to legislate a more moral agenda. But the cold hard truth is that religion is just not as influential in most Americans’ lives as it once was.