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The Conservative Caucus Podcast #07 – Victoria Cobb

Published: August 20, 2025
Network: The Conservative Caucus
Analysis: Conservative Caucus President Jim Pfaff

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The Virginia pro-family movement faces unprecedented challenges as progressive forces inject radical ideology into both politics and churches across the Commonwealth. In a revealing conversation with Jim Pfaff, Victoria Cobb—who has led the Family Foundation of Virginia for 25 years—exposes how atheist money is funding efforts to move churches leftward while Democrats push constitutional amendments that would enshrine unlimited abortion and eliminate traditional marriage definitions. Her insights reveal why Virginia has become ground zero for the national battle over life, family, and religious freedom.

Topics Covered

• The Unique Virginia Political Landscape
• Progressive Infiltration of the Church
• Battles Facing the Virginia Pro-Family Movement
• The Education Wars in Virginia
• Marriage and Gender Ideology Under Attack
• The Critical Role of Pastor Engagement
• Trump Era Implications for Conservative Movements
• Key Takeaways

The Unique Virginia Political Landscape

Understanding Virginia politics requires grasping its peculiar dynamics. Unlike most states, Virginia holds legislative elections in odd years, insulating state races from national trends while simultaneously creating a pendulum effect. As Cobb explains, the state is narrowly divided—the House stands at 51-49 Democrat, the Senate at 21-19—but when one party wins, they implement extreme agendas.

“We don’t just get your run-of-the-mill Democrat, you get the absolute hardest left-wing crazy,” Cobb notes, attributing this to Virginia’s proximity to Washington, D.C. Many candidates emerge from national advocacy organizations like the ACLU, bringing “California plus bad ideas” to the Commonwealth.

The Trump administration’s government workforce reductions could reshape Virginia’s political landscape long-term, Cobb suggests, but short-term anger among displaced workers may hurt Republicans in the November 2025 gubernatorial race. The challenge is that even Northern Virginia Republicans are “part of the system,” making them wary of disruptors who threaten their contracts and lobbying relationships.

Progressive Infiltration of the Church

Perhaps the most alarming revelations concern how progressive ideology has infiltrated conservative churches through well-funded campaigns. Cobb validates findings from Megan Basham’s book “Shepherds for Sale,” which documents how atheist billionaires like George Soros and Pierre Omidyar funnel money into organizations that influence churches toward leftist positions.

“We saw it before we knew how to name it. It started with things saying you can’t be truly pro-life if you’re not also [supporting our issues]—whether it’s immigration or climate. But you never heard the reverse. You never heard ‘you can’t be truly Christian if you care for refugees if you’re not also pro-life.'”
— Victoria Cobb, President, Family Foundation of Virginia

The strategy proved devastatingly effective. Campaigns like the “And Campaign” appeared superficially Christian but subtly pulled believers leftward on issues like racial justice (conflating biblical reconciliation with support for Black Lives Matter the organization), climate activism rebranded as “creation care,” and immigration policies that prioritized sentiment over law.

Cobb reports watching “entire churches move left” and knowing individuals well enough to predict their political shift simply by observing which church they joined. “If I know somebody that starts going to that church, I will watch them politically move left,” she states. “So don’t tell me politics aren’t happening in churches. They are. They just won’t do your kind of politics. They will only do the social justice ones.”

The infiltration works because it offers pastors a comfortable middle ground—appearing to bridge partisan divides while actually abandoning biblical positions on life, marriage, and gender. Meanwhile, conservative pastors who speak clearly on these issues face accusations of being “too political,” even though progressive churches openly advocate for left-wing causes without similar criticism.

Battles Facing the Virginia Pro-Family Movement

The Virginia pro-family movement currently confronts two existential threats in the form of constitutional amendments that would fundamentally transform the Commonwealth’s legal landscape on life and marriage.

Unlimited Abortion Amendment: Democrats are pushing a constitutional amendment establishing an unrestricted right to abortion at any stage of pregnancy. The amendment is so extreme that when pro-life legislators attempted to add language ensuring legal protection for babies born alive after failed abortions, Democrats rejected it. This isn’t theoretical—former Governor Ralph Northam infamously defended infanticide in 2019, and Virginia currently allows third-trimester abortions under weak restrictions.

Marriage Redefinition Amendment: While same-sex marriage already functions in Virginia due to the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, progressives aren’t satisfied with functional victory. They want to remove Virginia’s constitutional definition of marriage as between one man and one woman and replace it with language affirming marriage between “any two people of any sex or gender.”

The Virginia Values Act represents another front in this battle. Despite its name, the legislation would mandate that churches and Christian schools cannot hire and fire according to their religious principles, forcing non-discrimination on LGBT questions even in faith-based employment decisions. The church rallied against this threat because it directly affected religious institutions, demonstrating that pastors engage when they perceive personal institutional danger—but often remain silent on issues like abortion that “only” affect the image of God in human life.

The Education Wars in Virginia

Virginia’s education battles reveal the stranglehold teachers unions maintain even in a state with strong homeschool protections. Despite homeschooling’s deep roots in Virginia—Home School Legal Defense Association is headquartered there—Democrats recently attempted to eliminate the religious exemption that allows approximately 6,000 families to homeschool without government oversight.

The attack failed only because homeschoolers mobilized massively, flooding legislators with calls and emails. Critically, homeschooling has become ideologically diverse, meaning even Democrat legislators heard from constituents who chose home education for various reasons—not just religious conservatives. Democrats ultimately withdrew their own bill rather than face a veto from Governor Glenn Youngkin.

On school choice, Virginia lags dramatically behind other states. The Commonwealth offers only a small tuition tax credit program with weak incentives—donors receive just 60 cents per dollar contributed to scholarship funds. This creates what Cobb calls unfair educational choice: “If you’re wealthy, you can choose wherever you want. Move to the right school district or put your kid in a private school. But we do not have fair educational choice for anybody who doesn’t have the income.”

“It’s really in cities like Petersburg, Virginia, where it’s economically not strong and it’s left-wing run. You get this ideology and you get an inability for parents to make a move for their children because they can’t pick up and move. They can’t pick a private school. That’s what we’re talking about—the kids that really need it the most.”
— Victoria Cobb

The obstacle isn’t just Democrats—it’s also Southwest Virginia Republicans from rural areas where public schools serve as major employers and private school alternatives barely exist. These legislators feel beholden to teachers unions and fear economic disruption, even though school choice wouldn’t reduce overall education employment and rural families satisfied with their schools wouldn’t utilize alternatives anyway.

Virginia’s post-COVID education recovery ranks among the nation’s worst, with data showing the Commonwealth made wrong decisions that harmed children’s learning. Yet even with this evidence, the political will for sharp correction remains elusive. Cobb emphasizes that COVID should have been a watershed moment nationally for Republicans to implement universal school choice, but the opportunity largely passed.

Marriage and Gender Ideology Under Attack

The assault on biological reality has reached absurd extremes in Virginia’s legislature. Just recently, Democrats battled to insert the term “birthing people” instead of “women” and “pregnant women” into state code, attempting to legally erase the reality that only females bear children.

Cobb and Pfaff identify a fundamental failure within the church regarding marriage that enabled the cultural collapse on this issue. “We suck at marriage,” Cobb states bluntly. “The church sucks at marriage.” The problem isn’t homosexual activists or even court decisions—it’s that churches fail to model marriages so demonstrably superior to secular alternatives that the culture naturally recognizes their value.

Churches offer insufficient marriage mentoring, tolerate heretical teaching (like the idea that if husbands follow God, wives will automatically follow, denying female moral agency), and rarely discuss marriage with the depth Scripture provides. Cobb notes that “Love and Respect” by Emerson Eggerichs stands as one of the few non-heretical marriage books she’s encountered in Christian circles.

On gender ideology specifically, the consequences of pastoral silence are devastating. When pastors refuse to teach that “God created them male and female” and that each person was designed exactly as intended, children become vulnerable to the “social contagion” spreading through schools. Kids spend far more time in educational institutions than churches, and without consistent biblical teaching on gender, they fall prey to confusion that leads some to irreversible bodily mutilation.

“There are actual victims,” Cobb emphasizes. “And it is not as simple as ‘now we just don’t all get along the same way.’ It’s devastating.”

The left’s position has moved beyond accepting same-sex marriage to eliminating marriage as a concept entirely. Pfaff references recent articles explicitly calling for marriage’s abolition to “save the feminist movement.” The progression he predicted in the early 2000s—that legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to polyamory and worse—is materializing exactly as warned, though critics dismissed such concerns as extremist fearmongering at the time.

The Critical Role of Pastor Engagement

The Family Foundation of Virginia invests heavily in pastor engagement, conducting regular events across the Commonwealth. Next week, they’ll host eight gatherings from Richmond to far Southwest Virginia, following a similar tour eastward to Virginia Beach. These breakfast and lunch meetings inform pastors about critical developments like the abortion and marriage constitutional amendments.

But mobilizing pastors remains challenging. Cobb observes that pastors engage most readily when threats directly affect their institutions—like the Virginia Values Act targeting church employment practices. When issues seem more distant—like abortion, which doesn’t threaten church buildings but destroys the image of God in human life—pastoral engagement drops significantly.

“For every issue that they think is political, it’s affecting the people in their congregation that they are called to shepherd. When you talk about abortion, you have a congregation sitting there, many of whom have been affected personally. They’ve either had an abortion, they’ve been a part of one, they know someone. They need to know God’s heart on this in both the areas of what is right and good and also in the area of ministry and forgiveness and mercy.”
— Victoria Cobb

Pastors often justify silence by claiming they want to avoid “contentiousness” or political division. But as Cobb points out, Jesus spoke perfectly and people still walked away. The gospel itself creates division because it convicts. If pastors only address topics without opponents, they’ll never preach the gospel, which has Satan as its primary opponent along with all his deceptions.

The Romans 13 misapplication particularly frustrates both Cobb and Pfaff. This passage about submitting to governing authorities gets weaponized against conservative engagement while progressive churches face no similar restrictions on their political activism for social justice, climate policies, or immigration advocacy. The double standard reveals the manipulation at work.

Pfaff draws a historical parallel to Justin Martyr, the 2nd-century apologist who argued to Roman emperors that Christians deserved protection because they obeyed laws, didn’t practice infanticide (unlike Romans who abandoned unwanted babies in the woods), and maintained strong marriages. “We’re the example,” Justin Martyr declared. Pfaff questions whether modern church leaders could make the same argument given current Christian divorce rates, marriage quality, and cultural witness.

Trump Era Implications for Conservative Movements

Cobb sees significant positives in the Trump administration’s approach to life and family issues. The administration’s willingness to state biological realities plainly—that males are male and females are female—provides crucial cultural leadership that previous Republican officials often lacked. JD Vance particularly impresses her by regularly discussing root causes rather than symptoms, talking about children as blessings and the value of strong nuclear families.

“There was a period where that wasn’t out there enough in our elected official vernacular,” Cobb notes. “They might talk about abortion, but they weren’t talking about children as a blessing and families—that we need strong families, that we need these nuclear families.”

The administration’s reduction of federal workforce and elimination of DEI programs directly impacts Virginia, where government employment dominates Northern Virginia’s economy. If displaced workers truly leave rather than simply rotating into contractor positions (the usual pattern), Virginia’s political landscape could shift rightward long-term. Short-term, however, anger among affected workers may hurt Republicans in 2025.

The critical challenge ahead is sustainability. Trump is a lame-duck president, and 2026 congressional elections loom. If the movement remains attached to personalities rather than principles, gains will evaporate. Both Cobb and Pfaff emphasize that local party structures must embody these principles, not just follow charismatic leaders.

“We can’t expect our leaders to carry it for us,” Cobb stresses. “It’s about the people actually engaging. It isn’t just about, ‘Hey, we got this president’ or ‘I got this governor at a state level.’ To be sustainable, it is about all of us being vigilant all the time.”

Pfaff adds that without transforming education, conservative gains cannot last. “If we don’t change the course of education in this country, we’re not going to be able to sustain the positive aspects of the era of Trump 20, 30, 40, 50 years down the road.” The correlation between higher education levels and leftist ideology isn’t coincidental—it’s the result of systematic indoctrination, particularly at the collegiate level.

The emphasis on trades rather than universal college attendance offers one solution. As Pfaff notes, trade schools provide less opportunity for indoctrination—students focus on welding correctly or understanding HVAC systems rather than absorbing ideological curricula. The post-tariff manufacturing emphasis could naturally redirect more young people toward trades, weakening the left’s educational monopoly.

But congressional action remains essential. Executive orders, however beneficial, disappear when administrations change. Congress must codify Trump’s policy directions into law to prevent the next president from reversing everything with a pen stroke. The window for legislative action is narrow and closing.

Key Takeaways

1. Virginia’s Political Volatility – The Commonwealth’s odd-year elections, one-term governorships, and narrow legislative margins create constant instability, with extreme swings between hard-left and conservative governance depending on which party holds power.
2. Progressive Church Infiltration Is Real – Atheist billionaires like George Soros and Pierre Omidyar fund organizations that subtly move churches leftward through campaigns that appear Christian but prioritize social justice issues over biblical truth on life, marriage, and gender.
3. Constitutional Amendments Threaten Life and Marriage – Virginia Democrats are pushing amendments that would enshrine unlimited abortion (even refusing protections for babies born alive) and eliminate traditional marriage definitions while constitutionalizing transgender ideology.
4. Education Reform Is Critical for Long-Term Victory – Without transforming education and breaking teachers union control, conservative political gains cannot be sustained generationally. School choice remains inadequate in Virginia despite strong homeschool protections.
5. The Church’s Marriage Failure Enabled Cultural Collapse – The loss of marriage protection stems primarily from churches failing to model marriages demonstrably superior to secular alternatives, not from homosexual activism or court decisions alone.
6. Pastor Engagement Requires Institutional Threat – Pastors most readily mobilize when their churches face direct threats but often remain silent on issues like abortion that “only” affect the image of God in human life, revealing a troubling hierarchy of concerns.
7. Trump Era Gains Need Legislative Codification – Executive orders on gender ideology, DEI elimination, and federal workforce reduction will disappear unless Congress passes laws. The 2026 elections and Trump’s lame-duck status create urgency.
8. Popular Sovereignty Must Be Reclaimed – The constitutional principle of “We the People” means citizens are sovereign, not subjects. Sustained engagement at local levels—school boards, party structures, state legislatures—is essential for lasting change.
9. Post-Roe Landscape Offers New Opportunities – For the first time in 50 years, states can demonstrate what full protection of human life looks like, providing practical examples rather than theoretical arguments, though ballot initiative campaigns continue to succeed through emotional manipulation.
10. Movement Must Transcend Personalities – Attachment to Trump or any individual leader rather than principles will cause conservative gains to evaporate. The Virginia pro-family movement and similar efforts nationwide must build principle-based structures that outlast any single political figure.

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About The Conservative Caucus:
The Conservative Caucus is a grassroots public policy action organization, formed in 1974. Headed by President Jim Pfaff, the Caucus is committed to advancing free enterprise, limited government, and traditional values.

Originally broadcast August 20, 2025 on The Conservative Caucus.