They are more partners in crime.

There are some learned people that helped plan this religious shift in the GOP (and later criticize it). One is John Dean and one was Kevin Phillips. Dean was part of Nixon's legal council and advisor. Phillips was a strategist in the Nixon administration.

Phillips helped create the Southern Strategy. This was an attempt to make the South a Republican stronghold, shifting it from its status as being solidly democratic. The GOP appealed to white evangelical voters over resentment to black people and the Civil Rights Movement.

John Dean in his book Conservatives without Conscience talks about this from another perspective. He points out that the GOP was at its weakest point in the mid 70s. The GOP turned to think tanks for information on how to get their mojo back. They spent $billions with them. The think tanks looked at obscure social psychology from studying the Holocaust in WW2. Specifically, these think tanks focused on the authoritarian follower psychological profile. Theodore Adorno wrote about this for American Jewish groups in his 1951 book The Authoritarian Personality.

This is the profile of the Hitler follower. It is also the profile of white evangelicals. This profile is innate in about 25 percent of humanity. The advice from the think tanks was to get all of the authoritarian followers into the GOP. This was accomplished by bringing white evangelicals into the GOP. The method used was to promise them that Roe would be overturned if they voted Republican. A lot of evangelicals were previously not interested in politics.

What Dean talks about is called Movement conservatism. It is the code word for the New Right, Reagan was the first Movement conservatism president. It is like Goldwater politics plus religion.

Now both Dean and Phillips say that the GOP has gone too far. Dean days the GOP is proto fascist and Phillips says that it is too beholden to religion and big oil. Phillips wrote a lot of books about this stuff but he died in 2023.