Would #NeverTrumpers Sit Out An Election Between Castro and Batista?
And must Christians everywhere disenfranchise themselves as a matter of principle?
by Rod D. Martin
August 3, 2016
I very much understand the discomfort some Evangelicals feel with regard to Donald Trump. I too would prefer a Southern Baptist candidate for President, and I supported one — Ted Cruz — to the bitter end, something many of our most vocal Southern Baptist leaders did not do (where were you when it counted, guys? Maybe you should have been #NeverKasich).
I too am uncomfortable. And there’s no telling what we may learn tomorrow.
But “never” is a long time. And the case that supporting Trump against Clinton is somehow evil raises questions for Christians everywhere, questions none of our vocal virtue signalers have contemplated or addressed.
To greatly simplify an essay I'm close to publishing on the principles of general election voting and endorsements, the real bottom line is that we are responsible for the likely outcome of our actions, not just for ourselves but for our neighbors, and that we have a duty to judge which of these people is likely to do the most good or, at worst, the least harm.
Would these leaders also tell us to sit out a hypothetical or actual election between Pol Pot vs. Lon Nol, Castro vs. Batista, or Hitler vs. Hindenburg? The idea is absurd. Hindenburg would certainly not have passed any test now being applied to Donald Trump. But the difference, and the choice, was pretty clear.
Hillary may not be Pol Pot, but she is certainly Hugo Chavez. We're just stupid if we can't see this. I find the case for Trump as Chavez uncompelling, both as to his desire to be Chavez and as to his comparative ability (vis-a-vis Hillary) to carry it out (if I'm wrong).
I'll expand on this later, as promised. But if there's an intruder breaking into my house with a gun, and there's another guy walking past the house who looks like he might join in but also looks like he might not, it's pretty clear on whom I need to focus fire.
Yes, this is a defensive argument, and as Americans we're used to the luxury of not having to think that way. But when Christians surrendered the culture, we should not have been so naive as to assume we wouldn't become what is in fact (wait for it) a normal country. And normal countries face this almost every single election, to the degree they have any elections at all.
I don't think that's sunk in with our people. Hence the cognitive dissonance. And it need not stay this way. But it is this way this year, and could well be again, maybe many times again.
For my #NeverTrump friends, let me put this another way. Be honest with yourself and tell me that you can't vote for Trump but you could vote for the best viable option in the last election in most of the countries of the world: Nicholas Sarkozy, or Angela Merkel, or Silvio Berlusconi, or Shinzo Abe, or Kemal Kilicdaroglu, or Narendra Modi.
Most countries don't get our options, or at least our options up to now: we've been awfully blessed (and pampered) for an awfully long time, and now we've run out of the accumulated capital stored up by previous generations of believers, just as these countries (Japan aside) did long ago. So would you recommend that all citizens of all those countries abandon any participation in self-government and allow their enemies to rule them?
Because that's the crux of the #NeverTrump argument.
We lost in the primary. There will be more primaries in the future, and we will have a chance to be more persuasive. I'm actually pretty encouraged about that: if 2016 was about anything, it was about rejecting an Establishment that has repeatedly betrayed us, and indeed, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump — who were supposed to finish 16th and 17th — won nearly all the delegates in a massive repudiation of the powers that be. That's highly positive, and bodes well for the future, regardless of our unhappiness with which of those men won this time.
But it is not other people's duty to agree with us: it is our duty to persuade them. Self-government is about persuasion, and we were unpersuasive, or at least less persuasive than we should have been. Perhaps we should reflect more on how bad a job we did, and less on how mad we are that other people did their jobs better than we.
But in the meantime, shouldn't we stop Saul Alinsky's favorite student from taking irrevocable control of the Supreme Court and banning all non-leftist preaching in our churches? Because that's what is going to happen if we do not.
Sometimes defense is the only option available.
