Why Believing the Election Was a Fraud Can Be Key to Your Future Prayer Life

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Introduction

Yes, I know. This one should hold your interest, at least for a bit.

Among conservative Christians who are politically engaged, we currently have two basic schools of thought. One of them is that Trump won the election decisively, and that massive fraud is responsible for making it even possible to pretend otherwise. Apart from the official vote count, which is the thing being disputed, numerous other metrics we can look at indicate that something like that was the case. But on the other side of the street, we have those conservatives who believe that fraud did occur, as it does in every election, but that it was not of a magnitude to affect the final outcome. Another way of putting this is that Biden won the election handily, and did so by a margin of millions.

Certain things follow from both positions.

The point of this post is not to drill down into the dispute itself, which I have done a good bit of already, but rather to point out the ramifications for the prayer lives of those Christians on either side of this disagreement. I am not including secularists in this discussion, those who have no fear of God before their eyes. I am simply talking about Christians who believe that Biden actually won, on the one hand, and those Christians who believe the election was fraudulent on the other. In the eyes of this latter group, it was not fraudulent across the board, but it was fraudulent everywhere it needed to be.

What do those two convictions do to the future prayers of those who hold those two convictions?

Cocaine Down the Toilet

I said I wasn’t going to drill down into the dispute itself, but before moving on to examine the question about our prayers, let me just briefly review what I believe happened.

Let us envision a police raid on a crack house, but it was a raid where the drug dealers had a few minutes of advance warning. This meant that they were able to flush most of their powdery goods down the toilet, and then were able to turn to face the cops with angelic looks on their faces. Unfortunately, one of them had put one of the packets on the lip of the tub and forgot it, and so that particular packet did not make it down to the place where the sewer rats were going to have a very exhilarating afternoon. In fact, that was an afternoon that the rats never did figure out, though they often looked back on it fondly.

Now to make our illustration run a little more smoothly, let us give that little packet of cocaine that was accidentally left on the edge of the tub a name. Let’s call it Antrim County in Michigan.

In the hands of a capable prosecutor, it should be possible to make a connection between the one packet of cocaine that the police had in their possession, and what the prosecution insists—rendering general by induction—was flushed down the john, that being the rest of the cocaine. The story that was proffered by the three men in the bathroom—that one of them had accidentally flushed his goldfish, and that his friends were trying to help him get it back—was deemed to have been “implausible” by the prosecution. As for the packet of cocaine on the tub, the three men maintained that it was there as the result of “human error.”

As Thoreau once put it, in a situation that must have been very similar to this one, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

First, What Cultural Repentance Does Not Look Like

I am going to be basing a lot of what follows down below on my understanding of what cultural repentance looks like. That being the case, I need to begin by freely acknowledging right at the front end that it does not look like this. This is not what I am talking about. Virtually every moral nerve ending that was insulted in Dreher’s soul would no doubt have been insulted in mine, had my spiritual condition been up to watching the whole thing as Dreher did. So to say it again, right out front, this is not what I am talking about. But because I am convinced that the election was in fact a fraud, this is what I am going to be lumped in with. Very well. But not without my objection, so there’s that.

The most jarring juxtaposition described by Dreher was the split screen advertisements for My Pillow on one side, and denunciations of the pending tyrannical takeover of America on the other side. Got it. Whatever else happens, the American entrepreneur will never be suppressed. So yeah, that event was lame, and wrong, and sinful, and demented. I will only point out that this Jericho march represented a lunacy that we have not yet gotten used to, as opposed to the lunacy that governs us now, which we have gotten used to.

Suppose the split screen showed these denunciations of tyranny on the one side, and the dismemberment of young babies on the other—legal in all fifty states. And suppose this lunacy of child murder was supported by all the respectable types, who would never share a stage with the likes of Alex Jones, and suppose every last nutjob on that stage would support outlawing the slaughter. This is how people with any sense get conflicted.

So in what follows, when I talk about repentance, I am not talking about the kind of rally hysterics that Dreher describes. But neither am I talking about the church Dreher attends, where he worries about a split between those who voted for Biden and those who didn’t. Well, if that happened, it would be about time.

If It Was Not an Honest Election

Let us set aside for a moment all the reasons why Trump is personally distasteful to so many believers. This is certainly true of those who loathe him, but it is also true of many who voted for him. So why did they vote for him then?

The main reason was judges, and the main reason judges were the main reason is the right-to-life issue.

So let us assume that Trump won the election decisively and that it was stolen from him by fraud. This means that millions of evangelicals voted for him the first time, and got 3 Supreme Court justices out of it, and over 300 judges. If Trump had had a second term given to him, again by these same evangelicals, the effects on the American judicial system were likely to have been even more dramatic. There would have been heavy pressure to undo Roe.

Now there are some who argue that such a possibility was not ever really a possibility, and that the establishment would never allow Roe to be undone. Not going to happen, and all these chump evangelicals were going to be double-crossed. Again.

Okay. Let me not argue that point, which I do think debatable, and just move on to point out that whether Roe was struck down or not, the desire to strike it down was the central reason why Trump got elected (in this scenario, both times). In other words, it was the expressed intention of the American people to see our way through to a juridical repentance. That is what we wanted, and that is what we voted for.

Now if this election was a fraud, whether or not we know it, God knows it. God not only knows the number of ballots lost, changed, or added, He knows the number of atoms in each paper ballot, and the number of ones and zeros in every electronic ballot. He knows it all, from start to finish.

And so here is a place to stand in your prayers. “God, you know what we were seeking to do, and you know what a fair election would have done. Look down on us with favor, and prosper this turnaround that we were seeking to accomplish. Don’t let the wicked steal our repentance from us.”

Now someone will complain at this point, and say that I am substituting our (very inadequate) repentance for the name of Christ. If we want God to look down on us with any kind of favor, we must approach Him through Jesus Christ, and in His name alone. This is absolutely correct, and I am assuming it to be foundational. We pray to God in the name of Jesus, and on the basis of His finished work on the cross. Apart from that, we have nothing else to say. But with that, standing on that, we can have plenty to say.

This is not works-righteousness. Not at all. The psalmist knows perfectly well that if God were to mark iniquities, no one could stand (Ps. 130:3). All He would have to do is look at that Jericho march, for starters. But Psalm 18 is making no absolute claims, but rather relative claims. So in that spirit, it is obviously legitimate for believers, praying in the name of Jesus, to appeal to God and as part of that appeal to ask Him to note what we were doing.

That said, let us set this at the lowest possible thresh hold. We wanted our country to stop killing babies. We voted to stop killing babies, and the answer to our prayer began to take shape over the last four years. We had made great progress. And then we voted to continue down this same road, we really did, and juridical repentance on this point was starting to look like a real possibility. Now the wicked, precisely because they feared that possibility, and because abortion is their blood sacrament, stole the election. They stole it, and the Lord knows every detail of what they did.

With that assumption, we would be in a position to ask God to accept and honor what He knows we did. If we voted to stop the baby-killing, and God knows that we did, we can ask Him to reckon with the fact that we did.

But what is the alternative?

If It Was an Honest Election

The alternative is that America, honestly and with eyes wide open, voted to take an irrevocable road down to the desolations of Charn. Knowing what a Biden administration was likely to do to the courts, including an expansion of the Supreme Court in order to pack it with abortion-supporters forever, we decided, honestly, that this is what we genuinely wanted to do.

Now in saying this I do not mean to minimize the guilt we have already incurred in this matter. Since the Roe decision in 1973, America has been accumulating a massive amount of blood guilt. Many millions of unborn children have been slaughtered. Their small little bodies have been bought and sold in ways far more gruesome than used to happen in the Charleston slave market, and please note below.

Now they may not have articulated it to themselves in this way, but I believe they need to. Christians who believe that Americans honestly chose Biden must also believe that a decisive majority of Americans voted—in a fair election—to make abortion permanent. It is not simply a matter of opting for dunder-headed economics for a presidential term or two. No, it was opting for permanent hostility on the unborn.

Now if we actually did that, then it follows, as night follows day, that God has every right to pick up a giant steel spatula and scrape our continent clean, from Delaware to Oregon. If we actually did this thing, then we deserve everything we are going to get, and we deserve to get it good and hard.

Because those believers who think the election was honest are believers, their prayers must therefore be that God would avert His most holy, and righteous, and pure wrath against us. But this means their prayer must be a steep uphill climb. They are praying that God would grant us a wholesale repentance de novo. And this is because the alternative is judgment.

Citizens who lie. Fraudulent measures. Short weight bushels. False scales. Faked weights. Sound like anybody we know?

But here is the irony. Those Christians who believe the election was honest tend to do so because they believe that our system is still basically healthy. But their position requires them to acknowledge that the American people are hopelessly corrupt, and that they voted for a continuation of the slaughter, steady as she goes.

So Christians who believe the election was honest must also believe, I am arguing, that our country is in far worse shape, spiritually speaking. But their tendency is usually the opposite of this. They tend to believe that there is such a thing as “normal” still going on, when there isn’t. We are killing our children, man. And why would the left, who do not scruple at the slaughter of children, have any trouble in their conscience over stealing an election? Are we letting those people define normal for us?

Christians who believe the election was honest must also believe that America is a goner. But they usually don’t believe that. Christians who believe they election was stolen have to believe that there is far more than a remnant still active, and that they have grounds to ask God to have mercy on them.

And here would be some of those grounds.

Their Own Nets

Now I would like to ask you to follow me closely here, but in order to pray that the wicked would fall into the pit they have dug, you have to believe that they in fact did dig one. See above.

With this in mind, Christians who believe that this election was stolen have a rich biblical theme to draw on as they pray. I don’t mean to be tedious with this chain of verses, but I want you to note how often this comes up in Scripture. Here is a sampling:

The ungodly, in short, are too clever by half. But to repeat, in order to ask God to have the wicked of our generation fall into the pit they have dug, it is necessary to believe that they did in fact dig that pit.

The alternative is to believe that as a nation we have fallen into a pit, the one that is bottomless.