Introduction
In order to keep these things plain and clear and lucid and comprehensible and transpicuous, you and I are going to have a little talk about this here election tomorrow. And in this little talk I am going to play the role of a Dutch uncle, which means, in its turn, that I am going to set certain things before you. As I do so, I will seek to speak with a becoming frankness. The wood will be unvarnished, the signal ungarbled, and the rhetoric unadorned. The amp will be plugged in, but the distortion knob will be turned all the way to the left.
So I am going to splain here why a Trump vote is the path of true wisdom, and why a refusal to cast a Trump vote is walking a different path. What is the name for those who walk that different path? Because we are good friends, you and I, I will tell you, jabbing your forehead with an affectionate forefinger. I will limit myself to the sort of names that are consistent with our long-standing relationship, not to mention our mutual Christian confession. You know, names like Dryer-Vent-Lint-for-Brains.
You may well ask if I am going to just use a name like that. Yes. I am doing it so that you may test my mettle, and my commitment to this November thing. No qualifications. Look at the calendar. The election is tomorrow, for pity’s sake. No sense trying to talk me into qualifications. And if you keep pressuring me like this, I will have to make it the lint from two dryers.
But November or no November, we will eventually need to get to the actual argumentation. That doesn’t involve any compromise with the ground rules.
Comparing Like With Like
When we turn to the Scriptures for guidance in such matters, we want to turn to passages that are relevant. We want to open our Bibles to the places that are actually comparable. We don’t want to have an orange problem, which some people believe we actually do have, and turn for help to the apple passages. And yet even here there are layers. You can tell at a glance that there has been equivocation in the use of the word orange.
The Scriptures give us various ways to break this down. For example, the Lord told us the parable of the two boys who were told to go work in the vineyard. One dutifully said he would go, and then didn’t. The other said he wouldn’t go, and then did (Matt. 21:28-32). Which one did the will of their father? This is not a trick question. One politician talks pro-life for his entire political career, but when in office doesn’t do anything about it. Another one talks all over the place, and before he was elected the first time there was no telling what he thought, but when he got into office, he did more to advance the pro-life cause than all his conservative predecessors combined. So which one do you vote for? Yes, someone says, but he just can’t get over the fact that when he told his father he wouldn’t go work the vineyard, he was quite disrespectful. Rude almost.
Here’s another way to look at it. When it comes to evaluating kings on the basis of policies and personal life, the Old Testament gives us a broad array of kings to look at. We have a king after God’s own heart, like David, who failed grievously in his personal life, and yet whose policies were really good. We have a king who inherited those wonderful policies, and who was beloved by God, and who even wrote Scripture, like Solomon, but who introduced manifold corruptions into Israel later in his reign. Likewise, Amaziah and Joash began well, and cratered later. We have reformers like Asa, who removed corruptions, but whose personal life had real problems. We have reformers like Josiah, whose personal life was sound enough, but who didn’t get the job of reform completely done. We have kings who occupy other places along the spectrum, like Hezekiah or Jehoshaphat, and who are still identified as good kings.
In Scripture, a man can be a good man and a bad king, like Solomon, and a man can be a bad man and a good king, like Asa. Life is complicated — but it is much simpler if you recognize that it is complicated. The question you should be concerned about is whether high places are going to get removed. Or, failing that, whether no new high places will be built. We even have the complication of Nathan the prophet working to get Solomon on the throne instead of Adonijah, even though Solomon was the one who was going to set the stage for Israel going astray later. A prophet should know that, right? And yet, Solomon’s party is where the good guys gathered at the time, and we don’t fault Nathan for supporting Solomon.
Sins and Crimes
The problem with the metric that John Piper applied to Trump is that he failed to distinguish sins from crimes. Even on his assumption that Trump had not repented of the sins that Piper listed, all of them were sins, not crimes. In my ideal biblical republic, nobody would ever be prosecuted for being boastful, or factious, and so on. But Biden’s policies advance child sacrifice, sexual mutilation, grand larceny, and more. These should be considered by us as crimes, whether they are pursued as part of an individual’s personal choices, or through the more respectable procedure of framing mischief through a law (Ps. 94:20).
Not only were Trump’s listed failings sins, not crimes, almost all the Christians I know who are voting for Trump recognize them as failings, do not applaud them, and wish it were otherwise. They are not going to follow him down that path, not even a little ways, while at the same time recognizing that his public policies are far to be preferred over Biden’s.
Someone might say that character does matter, and wonder aloud whether a man of Trump’s character will keep his word. That was an entirely fair question . . . in the fall of 2016. But now we have four years of governance behind us, along with the color commentary that his Tweets provide. We have a very good idea of how Trump will govern over the next four years, and a pretty good idea of how he will talk about it. Who in their right mind would not prefer that total package to Biden’s cavalcade of regulations and diktats and controls. And when I refer to his cavalcade of oppressive and suffocating governmental edicts, I am not using a figure of speech. He has a drum major out in front of it and everything. He is proud of how he hates liberty.
Disagreement, Not Disappointment
I would much rather have open disagreement in certain areas than convoluted disappointment in other key areas. And what I mean is this. I disagree with Donald Trump on a wide range of issues, but he has kept his promises on the pro-life issue. I am not a thoroughbred single-issue voter, but I am pretty close to that. And when it comes to a president doing what I want to see done in this area, Trump has really been good. He has kept his word to those of us in the pro-life movement. Trump has done what he said he would do in the areas of disagreement, and he has done what he said he would do in the areas of agreement. This is very different from agreeing with Republicans, and then being let down by them.
So here’s the thing. I know exactly what my issues of disagreement with Trump are. In the 2016 election, he promised to spend money like a drunken sailor on shore leave, and he has done so. I wish he hadn’t, but he did exactly what he said he would do. At the same time, he also promised that he would appoint conservative judges to the federal bench like crazy, and he has done that as well — about 300 to date, including three on the Supreme Court. If Trump is reelected tomorrow, we could easily see him appoint at least two more SCOTUS justices, along with many more federal judges, which would have the direct effect of my grandchildren having the liberty to work for continued and most necessary reformation.
Some of the things they will have to clean up would be some of the negative effects of the second Trump administration. They will still be free to do so because there was a second Trump administration. Under Biden, they will have total freedom to agree with all the HR departments of corporate America, and to clap at official nonsense like they were at a North Korean missile parade. Fortunately my grandchildren wouldn’t do any of that, but I would still rather have them working for reforms in a country that is still recognizably free, as opposed to attending those mandatory tolerance seminars in the gaylag archipelago.
Quitting at the Battle of the Bulge
Among conservative Christians, a common retort to the argument I have set out above (viz. that Trump has been a consequential pro-life president) is the reply that the traditional pro-life movement is a money-making scam, and that nobody is really serious about outlawing abortion.
I view these discordant voices as men who got really tired of all the fighting right after the Battle of Bulge, and who decided to quit there. Why haven’t we captured Berlin yet? Why all this fooling around?
The answer is that this a long war, and long wars aren’t short ones.
The longer answer is that we can tell how serious traditional pro-lifers are by how seriously they are taken by the all-in dedicated pro-abortionists. Abortion is their blood sacrament, and they will do anything — up to and including open insurrection against the government — to prevent the outlawing of that sacrament. They will do anything, including burning down American cities, to prevent the appointment of any more traditional pro-lifers to the Supreme Court. Why? They see a serious threat, as do I.
Do you want to do the radical thing at the state level? Great, and God bless you. What you should want then is a Trump High Court that outlaws (or even weakens) Roe. When and if you get it, don’t forget to say thank you.
So Then . . .
So then, I voted early, and did it last week. And I did what I never thought I would do back in 2016 — I voted for Donald J. Trump. And do you know what? That night I slept like a baby. I did not have any agonistic contests in my soul. I did not experience any turmoil beneath my sternum. I did not google anything about how to change my vote.
And do you know why? It was because when it came to saving my nation from becoming a fetid swamp of totalitolerance, I did my bit.
You should do yours. I highly recommend it.