In Church, Merch, and State, Sarah Posner writes about the intersection of religion and politics in the United States. This column is part of Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

With the blue tsunami that inundated Texas on Election Day, the Christian right has lost the state that made it one of the most powerful forces in modern American politics. Since forging an unbreakable pact with the Republican Party in the Reagan era, for decades the Christian right purposefully notched its national successes by building robust state-level legislative and electoral machinery across the country. Texas was the crown jewel of this strategy, where operatives and elected officials together hatched plans to kill off church-state separation, Christianize the public schools, criminalize abortion, and eviscerate the civil rights of LGBTQ people.