An Evangelical Case for Four More Years

Introduction

As the field of candidates on the Democratic side starts to shape up, if you can call it that, one’s thoughts turn naturally to what the heck we are supposed to do in the fall, when our autumnal apocalypse arrives. This thing called “a general election with the brakes smoking” is barreling down upon us, and at some point we as hapless pedestrians are going to have to bolt for the sidewalk to our right, the only alternative being the sidewalk to our left. For various reasons, as I will describe below, I intend to break to the right, as in, you know—“A wise man’s heart inclines him to the right, but a fool’s heart to the left” (Eccl. 10:2, ESV).

And as you should also know by now, according to our moderate betters, compromising to the right like this is deep compromise, pure and simple, a betrayal of all evangelical values, while compromise to the left is realistic compassion, or compassionate realism, I forget which.

I used the phrase “our moderate betters.” These people are identified by the constant hectoring lectures they give us about our political compromises, as well as by the weepings and lamentations they send up to the various local baals of respectability, not to mention their bootless cries addressed to no one in particular.

This being the case, those who intend to do as I intend to do need to give some account of themselves. So watch me go.

Voting is No Sacrament

But first I need to clear some things out of the way, and I will begin with the observation that voting is not a sacrament. That being the case, I can participate (or not participate) in the process of voting without subscribing to the system of doctrine set forth by the magisterium of Our Holy Mother Democracy.

I can participate, or not, for reasons of my own. I can push this way or that way, just as we can push this way or that way, on the basis of our own agenda. We are not attending the religious services of another religion in order to partake of their sacrament, all the while assigning our own private meaning to it. We all have authority over the content of our vote, but we also all have authority over the meaning of it. Advocates of secular democracy would like to have authority over the meaning of our participation, and they sometimes talk as though they do, but alas for them. It is not the case. We can vote for whom we want, and we can vote for whatever reasons we want.

As a matter of fact, as Christians, we are prohibited from treating such a vote as partaking in a civic sacrament. To think of it that way would be idolatrous. And I will go further. There can be idolatry in the adverb as well as in the direct object. So a person could vote for Luther’s apocryphal wise Turk without idolatry, and somebody else could vote for a telegenic Sunday School superintendent from an Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and do so idolatrously. Everything else being equal, we should always prefer the godly ruler to the ungodly ruler (Ex. 18:21), of course and certainly. But suppose our choice is going to be between the one who will not remove all the high places over against the one who will set up a bunch of new ones?

A Signing Statement

When a magistrate is going to sign a massive bit of legislation, but there is a section of the bill that is obnoxious to him, and which he would like to repeal first chance he gets, a custom has arisen wherein he signs the legislation, making it a law, while at the same time issuing what is called “a signing statement” that registers his objections to the noxious bit.

So this section of this post is my signing statement. Unless something drastic changes, like the Democratic convention going completely off the rails, becoming the Mother of All Brokered Conventions, and resulting in them nominating Ted Cruz on the 28th ballot, I intend to vote for Donald Trump in the fall, as I did not do in 2016.

But this is what such an action does not mean. It does not mean that I have gotten on the Trump train, it does not mean that I own a MAGA hat, it does not mean I have abandoned my conservative principles, it does not mean that I have any sympathy for his grotesque comments on the Access Hollywood tape, it does not mean that I think Stormy Daniels was an innocent diversion, and it does not mean that I intend to tell lies on anyone’s behalf. None of that stuff. Put not your trust in princes (Ps. 118: 9; Ps. 146:3).

For a principled Christian conservative, Donald Trump’s failings and shortcomings are obvious, and to vote for him in the fall is in no way any kind of endorsement of those shortcomings or failings. If you ask me how this could possibly be the case, I would just pull out this signing statement and show it to you. See? The media is not in charge of what my vote means. I have authority over what my vote means. I have registered my dissent over any number of things, and will continue to do so.

For example, he does not give a rip about the sexual integrity of his appointees, and has said that he could happily vote for an openly gay candidate. If someone like Richard Grenell is loyal to him, it does not matter to him that he is disloyal to the sexual order that God established in the world.

But, some of his defenders say, he fights. Yes, he does, and given the times we live in, a bunch of that fighting has actually had a salutary effect. He does fight, but there is more than a bit of eye-gouging and ear-biting involved. He fights, and when people fight dirty against him, he fights dirty back, much to their dismay and astonishment. And when people fight clean against him, he fights dirty back. I would urge you to remember his allegation about Ted Cruz’s father being involved in the assassination of JFK, and his appalling attack on Heidi Cruz’s looks. But, some might say, we need a junk yard dog for this junkyard culture of ours. Yes, but not a junk yard dog on the surly end of the spectrum, one which has had a migraine headache for about three days to boot.

But the central issue that needs to be registered for me, the glaring issue, is the fact that Donald Trump is a proud and self-defining man. He is a self-promoter, and almost the last thing we need in this Age of Self is a self-promoter-in-chief. But note that I said almost, about which more in a minute. When he gets on a roll, he touts himself as the “best” president ever, an unbelievable presidential apotheosis in a long line of slackers. This kind of promotion would not be so bad if he were a carnival barker trying to lure ten-year-old boys into seeing the “biggest elephant ever.”

But he is not a carnival barker. He is Nebuchadnezzar on the wall, looking down on the greatness of Babylon, not knowing that he was also looking down on the meadows where he would shortly be grazing like a cow for the next seven years. The Lord’s judgment on this was not a statement that Babylon was somehow not great, but rather that Nebuchadnezzar’s arrogance was great. Many of the things that Trump wants to brag about are things that delight me. But rulers must not vaunt themselves. It is dangerous for rulers to vaunt themselves.

The God in Heaven is more than a divine place-holder whose purpose is to do nice things for America. Or Babylon.

As Nebuchadnezzar recognized when his sanity returned, the Lord Almighty does as he pleases. No one can stay His hand and say, “What are you doing?” (Dan. 4:35).

I am going to say something a bit risky, because I realize I am saying it from a great distance. Donald Trump does give glory to God, sometimes in surprising ways. And so I don’t think he is in danger of the Herodian worm treatment, but he reminds me of someone saying a phrase he has memorized out of a foreign language, not knowing what it really means. Whenever he starts speaking in his native language, it is all about him, and that is a hazardous place for any ruler to be.

Now some might say, “Wow, that’s quite a signing statement. How are you going to see your way to a vote for Trump out of this one? Talk about damning with faint praise.”

I want Donald Trump to prevail in his current battles with the deep state, and I am very glad that if he does, it will be with the indispensable help of evangelical voters. But I can want that to happen, without wanting any given Downstream Trumpian Ideal, as touted by his most ardent and loyal supporters. I still want the same things for the republic I have always wanted. But I believe that it will be far easier to get there when Trump leaves office in 2024 than it would have been to get there when Hillary left office in 2024. After eight years of Hillary, in my view, there would have been no getting there.

I have said before, using Victor David Hanson’s metaphor, that Trump is chemo-therapy. He is toxic, but he is more toxic to the disease that has been killing our body politic than he is to the body politic, which is the whole idea behind chemo. At the same time, once that disease is gone, evangelicals should be fully prepared to fight the downstream effects of that toxicity. And they will not be inconsistent or hypocritical in doing so. In the meantime, they should not fall in love with some of the bad side effects. If that happens, then they were in fact guilty of political idolatry, but that is the opposite of what is being urged here.

So if you can read the foregoing and say that my upcoming vote for The Donald is any way a capitulation to the voices urging compromise, then you are not paying close enough attention. And that is without taking into consideration the positive reasons outlined below.

Deciding on a Direction

When I determined not to vote for Trump in 2016, it was because I did not believe that he intended to go in a different direction than the country had already been going. I thought he was a New York liberal with a handful of conservative slogans scrawled onto post-it notes and stuck onto his campaign, like so many yellow afterthoughts.

I now have a basis for believing that the two directions we are deciding on will be very different directions — and not just a matter of the speed we might take in going the same old direction. If the Democrat wins, we will be in a very different place in 2024 than we will be if Trump wins. And I can see a route to where we ought to be from a post-Trump era, in a way that I cannot see from, say, a post-Sanders administration.

An Evangelical Case for Four More Years

Here are my reasons for what I intend to do, positively stated. There are not a ton of them, but I think they matter.

If Donald Trump is reelected, the chances are excellent that the federal judiciary will be completely remade for at least a generation, and in a decidedly conservative direction, up to and including the Supreme Court. This will have ramifications for life and liberty in every area of life, but the crown jewel of a remade judiciary will be the possible reversal of Roe. And if Roe is reversed, this will mean that one great pro-life battle will be transformed into fifty smaller pro-life battles, the majority of them winnable within the first year.

Second, if Donald Trump is reelected, the corruption that has permeated the intelligence community will be uprooted, and a number of people who ought to be in jail will be given a fair trial toward that end. The intelligence community of the United States has far too much power to be allowed any tincture of corruption, and it would be better not to have intelligence agencies at all than to have our corrupt ones. The FISA court needs to be abolished, and we need to recognize that congressional oversight has the basic deficiency of not being able to oversee. What the last three years have demonstrated in spades is that it takes approximately thirty seconds for the deep state and the complicit media to turn any attempts to clean out corruption as examples of corruption.

And last, the Trump era has exposed the real divide in America. This divide is not between Republican and Democrat (although the two parties have served as platforms wherein different factions try to manipulate the divide). The real divide has been between an elite and unaccountable ruling class, on the one hand, and the ruled taxpayer, on the other. But the problem is not the existence of elites, which is inescapable. The problem is the existence of unaccountable elites, which is the kind of thing our original constitutional framework was designed to prohibit and exclude. For every check, there must be a balance, and for every balance there must be a check. Our divided America is not an America divided between to rival political parties. Our America is now divided between two rival constitutions. One is the Constitution drafted by the Founders, and the other is an upstart constitution assembled out of various bits and pieces — erratic decisions by progressive judges, the implicit tyranny of the regulatory agencies, the apparatus that has been built up on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a kennel-fed media, and so on. While Trump does not represent the originalist approach, he does represent an existential threat to the other approach, which explains the state of high panic, and all the dirty deeds being done out in the open. Trump represents that kind of threat for all kinds of reasons, mostly having to do with the divine sense of humor.

My vote in the fall represents my little attempt simply to laugh along.