Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Part I

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We Live in Trying Times for the Christian Conscience — How Should Christians Think About the 2024 Presidential Election?

Well, no one’s going to be able to say we lived in boring political times, but these are also times that test the Christian conscience. As we look at the 2024 presidential election, we understand there are big tests here for the Christian conscience. As we look at elections at various levels all across the United States, and we’re talking not only about where you have candidates facing off, but you also have referenda, you have citizen initiatives, the issue of abortion is on some statewide ballots, we really are talking about a very, very contested political terrain. And this is where we have to think through several issues in the Christian conscience. So some people are asking openly, is it perhaps the best Christian option not to vote, or to write in a candidate, or not to vote for either the two major party candidates?

That’s a legitimate question and it’s a question that does test the Christian conscience and how we think through Christian worldview issues. And I’m going to get to that question in just a moment. But another question is being raised. Sometimes questions come up simply because of developments, for instance, in the national conversation, and that’s what happened over the weekend. And this particular twist and turn in the national conversation was at least catalyzed in part by an article by New York Times columnist, David French, the headline on the article, “How to Save Conservatism From Itself.” The main thrust of his argument is that he is going to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket, the Democratic ticket in the presidential race, in order to perhaps save conservatism from itself. And that means, of course, saving conservatism or saving the Republican Party for conservatism through the defeat of Donald Trump. That is the basic argument.

And so there is no doubt–and anyone who’s followed David French understands this and it is implicit in the background of this article, it’s explicit in the logic of the article–he believes that Donald Trump is such a menace, such a threat to America’s political health that he says he is going to not only not vote for Trump, but he’s going to vote for the Democratic ticket in order to perhaps force the Republican Party if Trump should lose into a reset which might regain, at least according to his argument, an opportunity for some form of conservatism to be reestablished in the Republican Party. Now just to be honest, David French and I do not see eye to eye on many if not most of these issues, but I want to depersonalize this as much as possible. He’s an influential voice at The New York Times, one of the most influential media sources in the world.

And honestly, what he has done in this article is to accelerate a conversation that needed to take place. And I disagree with David French. I want to make that very clear, but I also think this is now a twist in the national conversation that demands our attention and our thinking, and thus our response today on The Briefing. Is it a legitimate argument to say, I’m going to support the Democratic ticket in order to cause the Republican Party to collapse in a sense in the defeat of Donald Trump, now in his third presidential election, in order that the Republican Party might return to some form of what David French here would define as conservatism? Now we’re going to have to define a lot of terms in this conversation just to be honest and helpful. But one of the most important terms we need to recover and think about clearly is the word conservative.

So I want to be very honest with you about how I believe conservative is and must be defined. Now in an address I gave at the National Conservatism Conference just a matter of weeks ago, I argued on the impotence of a secular conservatism. So I want to put my argument right before you. I do not believe that there is any lasting binding authoritative conservatism that is not deeply rooted in theism and in the Western experience, our entire tradition is explicitly rooted in the inherited tradition of biblical Christianity. But the other point I want to make is that true conservatism isn’t just rooted in conservative principles or conservative logic. It must also be rooted in ontology, which means that which is truly real. And that’s really crucial these days precisely because I believe the Democratic Party, and ideological progressives, and secularists are denying ontology. They’re denying, for example, ontological sex or gender.

They’re denying ontological understandings of the family. They’re denying reality. And this gets to larger issues of how we define beauty, how we define truth, how we define justice, how we define a human being. And I believe the only way to sustain any kind of plausible affirmation of human dignity is in the doctrine of creation, the fact that God has created every single human being in his image. So I’m going to argue that the flight from ontology, the denial of ontology means that there can be no conservatism, which doesn’t return to an affirmation of that ontological reality and frankly, the theistic framework that is the superstructure of the whole thing. And so you can have some form of conservatism which may continue in some secular form, but that’s when an ideology on the left or the right turns dangerous because the secular means, guess what? No one’s watching.

Now in David French’s article, he wants to argue that his purpose is to save conservatism from itself. I want to turn back and say the election of Kamala Harris as president and Tim Walz as vice president of the United States, the establishment of yet another democratic administration is absolutely incompatible with anything coming out of the other side, which can be defined as an opportunity or gain for conservatism. And that is because we have reached the point in our political structure that we’re not just looking at two different candidates, two different parties, two different arguments. We are looking at two different understandings of the overarching reality, and we are looking at the fact that the Democratic Party is becoming more and more unhinged from that reality.

I’ll put the matter as bluntly as I can, and again, I want to depersonalize this as much as I can.
This is an argument that’s out there in the public, but I want to say that the argument that you can save conservatism by making any future conservative recovery nearly impossible. I think that is not only a wrong argument, I think it’s a very dangerous argument, and I think it also offers a form of a political illusion. And that is the illusion that somehow we can be conservative in some things and not conservative in other things as a lasting platform. I don’t believe that’s going to work. And so as I think about David French writing this article, it’s very clear that he affirms his anti-abortion position, a pro-life position. It’s also clear that he turns around and says he wants IVF to be legal for couples who are looking for advanced reproductive technologies and need them in order to have babies. But he turns around and also says, “I do not believe that unused embryos should simply be discarded, thrown away is no longer useful.”

Well, I actually think that’s a morally sensitive argument. The problem is the election of the Democratic ticket is light years from accomplishing anything like that goal period. Furthermore, Mr. French has actually come to the place where he affirms something like same-sex marriage. And so you look at this and you recognize, okay, well ontological marriage is now out of the picture certainly in the Democratic Party, and in any reality the leadership of the Democratic Party under Kamala Harris and Tim Walz would envision, that’s just out. So what in the world would we think we would have on the other side of four or shudder the thought eight years of a Kamala Harris-Tim Walz administration.

But there’s an inescapable part of the argument that David French brings forward here, and that is the fact that he sees Donald Trump as such a menace to the political structure and our constitutional system that he believes and to the point of endorsing saying he’s going to vote for the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket. He’s saying that the menace of Donald Trump is so great, the moral questions related to Donald Trump are so great that they would make for him voting for the Republican ticket incomprehensible or simply wrong. And so he is again openly arguing that to save conservatism from itself, Donald Trump must lose. He is indicating that he’s going to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket for the Democratic ticket as a way of responding to the challenge of Donald Trump. And he’s also arguing that this is the only way to “save conservatism itself.” I want to dignify the question he raises. In other words, could there be a point at which it’s impossible to vote for a candidate? Now throughout the entire political process for the 2024 election, I said at the very beginning, I would hope for two candidates in both parties better than President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, I would wish for better candidates representing both parties.

But what we have are the two candidates that we have. And by the way, that Democratic candidate is not going to be Joe Biden. It’s going to be Kamala Harris. And by the way, the situation in terms of political positions of policy just gets worse. Let’s be very clear. A Biden administration is totally beholden to the left. The Harris administration is the left. I’m not going to come close to dealing with everything in the article. It’s the main argument that is the point. And I’ve asked the same question, is it conceivable that we reach the point where you simply can’t vote for a candidate? And the answer is, of course, that point could come, it certainly could come.

Part II

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The Moral Conundrums of Voting for Any President: The Complicated Moral Questions of Voting for Many Past U.S. Presidents

But in order to frame this, we’d have to go not just to this election, we’d have to look at previous elections as well. And quite honestly, what voters know at any point in an election is what they know at that time, what they can know.

They cannot know future developments. And so what we know about Donald Trump is a lot of mess. It’s a lot of mess. I am not going to deny that for a second. As a Christian, I simply have to say that much of Donald Trump’s life and lifestyle, his life story is incomprehensible to me. I also want to say that it’s implausible for me to think that I can read Donald Trump’s heart and even on say a question like abortion know exactly what he believes about the issue. What I have to deal with is what he has said he would do what he did during the time he was president, what he says he will do now, there’s just no option around that. When it comes to moral credibility, I just want to say very clearly looking at American presidential history, this is not an easy question.

It’s nowhere near as easy as some people would think. You can always point to someone like Donald Trump and say, “Well, no one’s done that before.” And yet when you do look honestly at presidential history, most things have been done before, at least somewhere, sometime. Now, combining them all, well, now you’re looking at a different picture. But there are a number of candidates who have combined all kinds of these things. Just think about the period 1960, 1964, 1968, the election of three different presidents. 1960, John F. Kennedy. Looking at sexual morality, frankly, it is hard to come up with anyone who was more at war in his personal behavior with Christian sexual morality than John Fitzgerald Kennedy. You don’t hear much talk about that, although here and there you do see even Hollywood give that a little more than a wink and a nod.

And then the next president elected was Lyndon Baines Johnson. And you’re looking there at all kinds of political and financial corruption. How in the world did he get all those radio licenses in his wife’s name when he was majority leader in the Senate and then spent the time in the White House? And then the third president in that cycle, ’60, ’64, ’68, is Richard M. Nixon. And looking at the constitutional questions, there really were never many accusations of sexual immorality about Richard Nixon, but about corruption of power? Well, all kinds of accusations. And of course, he is the only president of the United States to resign rather than to face impeachment. Those three were in a row and we’re talking I was a year old when John Kennedy was elected. You can do the math, but I’ll just tell you it wasn’t yesterday. And then you look also at the next election, 1972, George McGovern versus Richard Nixon. And you’re looking at the fact that in terms of personal character, George McGovern was far superior to Richard Nixon.

And if you were going to have someone and you needed them to say save you from a difficult predicament, you would want George McGovern rather than Richard Nixon. But when it comes to policy, George McGovern was so far on the left that traditional liberal constituencies left him to vote for Richard Nixon, the Republican. Later the McGovern campaign, and even more directly the transformation of the Democratic Party that took place at the time, it was described as the era of “acid, amnesty, and abortion.” Well, you look at that and you recognize we really are talking about a great moral clash. But again, I want to make very clear, I think that George McGovern, just in terms of being a neighbor, was probably a better neighbor than Richard Nixon would have been. But when it comes to the big political, the big worldview issues, the big moral issues that were in great conflict in the 1972 election, it was Richard Nixon who was the safe choice, not George McGovern.

And thus Nixon won by an overwhelming and unprecedented landslide in that 1972 election. So there will be some Christians who will come to the conclusion, “I just can’t vote for Donald Trump,” but I just want to say you may have voted for someone more like Donald Trump than you think in terms of previous election cycles. When it comes to say a psychological analysis, Donald Trump is the absolute opposite of restrained. We know in effect what Donald Trump is thinking at any given moment, at any given context, at any given time because he’s going to tell us. And so we are looking here at a question in which I’ll go back, I wish we had a choice between two different candidates. I want to be honest, we do not have that choice.

Part III

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Person, Policy, Party, and the Effect of Vote: The Major Factors Christians Hold Together When Considering Where to Cast Their Vote

And that’s where I want to say I want Christians to think about three issues. And as you think about these, let’s just understand that all three of them are at stake in every election.

Number one, person, number two, policy, number three, party. And all of this is of course related because you’re voting for one candidate, you’re voting for one party, for one ticket when it comes to a presidential election. You can’t separate party and policy and person, but at least in terms of moral analysis, we need to separate those things. Person, I have spoken to the issue of person. Personal integrity is absolutely important, but we also recognize that we are not electing choir boys as president of the United States, and we just need some honest presidential history here, even honest presidential history about the background of Joe Biden. And just to understand, we are looking at very conflicted persons who’ve been involved in everything from plagiarism to questionable readings of the Constitution. You go down the list, and this doesn’t even get to issues like abortion, which we’re going to get to.

So I want to be clear, I’m putting person on that list, but there are two other words on that list. The second one is policy. What would this candidate do if elected? And in this case, you have dramatic differences between, first of all, any Democrat who could get the Democratic nomination these days and Donald Trump or any Republican who could get the nomination. Now on issues like policy, I want to come back and say that would include foreign policy, defense policy, would include economic policy, fiscal policy, taxation policy, education policy, and of course policies related to an entire range of issues including abortion, sexuality, you just go down the list, human dignity, religious liberty. And when it comes to the policy side, I don’t believe the Republicans are in perfect shape. As a matter of fact, I think the Republican platform adopted before Donald Trump is superior to the one adopted by him certainly on the question of abortion.

On the other hand, I also understand the distinction just on the issue of abortion between the Democrat and in this case, it’s not just Kamala Harris, the vice president of the United States, who ran on a radical pro-abortion position. And even though she’s talking now insofar as she’s talking at all openly about details, she’s speaking as if she wants to continue what the Biden administration called the legislation of Roe. As I said, that’s intellectually dishonest. That’s not going to happen. And just to make that point clear, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, chosen as her running mate is an absolute radical on the issue of abortion. And that’s another very clear indication of where Kamala Harris is. And when it comes to policy, even on the issue of abortion, especially on the issue of abortion, there are still light years difference between the Democratic and the Republican parties on this between Vice President Harris and former President Trump on this question.

And you also have of course an entire operation behind them. I mean the executive branch, but I also mean the party. So the three words, person, policy, and party. Where are the three parties on this issue? No one has been able to run on a Democratic ticket who wasn’t pro-abortion in some sense for most of my lifetime. And yet you look at this and you recognize now we are talking about something that’s unprecedented. In effect, Joe Biden has been the most pro-abortion president in American history, but when it comes to Kamala Harris, she is even more radical and has been through the entirety of her political career, and she just chose as a running mate, someone who is radical beyond that. And you have the arguments of the entire party, and this is where I want to remind Christians that when we think about an election, we’re not just electing a candidate, we’re electing a government.

That’s the way it works. Now, there are a lot of permanent employees or a lot of permanent treaties, permanent legislative realities, but the larger reality is that we have turned the presidency in this country into a form of government in such a sense that when you elect a president, you’re electing policies, you are electing a person. Yes, but you’re electing an entire party apparatus that is whether they’re honest or not on both sides, ready to seize the opportunity to run with their party’s ambitions as far as possible. Evangelical Christians have also not arrived as novices at asking this question. Back in 1972, the late Ron Sider formed an organization known as Evangelicals for McGovern. It was the first time such an entity had been organized among American evangelicals, and clearly it was an uphill battle, and clearly they lost that battle. Most evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Richard Nixon, not for George McGovern, and I would say for good reason.

But there’s been an evangelical left pointing in this direction for a very long time. After Evangelicals for McGovern, you could go down the list and that would include even, you could say very classically, the evangelical support for Bill Clinton who was even more open in terms of a pro-abortion position than George McGovern was in 1972. By the time you had Bill Clinton come along in 1992, elected president for two terms, you see a major change in the Democratic Party. And that meant it was a change all the way down. For decades now, it’s virtually incomprehensible that a pro-life candidate could even appear at the Democratic National Convention. Test me on that.

But I not only have to point to person and policy and party, I need to point to two other issues. Number one, the effect of our vote. So what will be the effect of your vote if you are qualified to vote in the presidential election?

If you vote, that vote is going to have some kind of impact. Now, some listeners are in my situation, you’re in a state which is going to go overwhelmingly in one direction, mine’s red, another will be blue. But the reality is your vote still matters. Your vote is an act of conscience. Your vote is a revelation of conviction. Your vote is an image of character. It is very clearly your vote. And that means that when we take responsibility to vote, we understand we’re not able to elect a perfect candidate, nowhere near. And that doesn’t mean they’re all the same either. There are some qualitative issues there certainly to be considered, but we’re electing a government and we’re electing policy and we’re electing a party as the organizing logic of that government, and that makes a huge difference. There is no way out. And that is the second issue.

The effect of our vote is that if we don’t vote, or if we vote for an implausible candidate, that is to say some third party candidate. We write someone in. And I’m not saying that would not be an act of conscience. I am saying that conscience needs to be informed by the fact that you are overweighting the rest of the vote. And that is to say there’s no way out of this. And so it is a way of registering a certain act of conscience, but there are balancing issues to that conscience, and those balancing issues to me are radically underlined on the issues of policy and party. I believe that not voting for one of the two parties means your vote is simply a matter of an extraneous choice that may function as a way that is right for your conscience. But I want that conscience to be informed by the fact that that vote nonetheless is not going to be without responsibility for the impact of the election.

So I can tell you what I think and I can tell you what I think this means. I think that like in 1972, the vast majority of American evangelical Christians, and it’s not just that, I think the vast majority of those who are regular church attenders and are deeply committed to a theistic worldview, I believe the vast majority will be likely to vote for Donald Trump because they’re voting for the Republican Party because they are voting for those policies. And that’s not without concern about some of those policies. It is just to say that concern is certainly clarified when you look at the actual policies which are represented by and I will go so far as to say threatened by the likes of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.

So I believe there will be some evangelical Christians and other conservatives who will write in a name as a presidential candidate, as an act of conscience, believing themselves to be unable to vote even though they would hold some kind of conservative principles. They are unable by conscience to vote for Donald Trump. I want to say that the rest of us will have to respect that, but I’m going to say I do not endorse that, and I believe that our vote will have consequences, and particularly in this kind of election, and we are electing policies and we are in effect electing a party. And there still is a dramatic difference when it comes down to the policies that will be enacted by these two different candidates for president as you look at the Democratic and the Republican tickets.

Part IV

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To Save Conservatism By Voting for the Democratic Ticket? That Argument Might Be the Death Knell of Any Hope for a Conservative Recovery

And thus, I just want to come back to the logic of saving conservatism by voting for the Democratic ticket. I just want to say I think that requires a radical redefinition of conservatism in a way that I don’t believe is authentically conservative. I believe that instead it would make the opportunity for a conservative recovery far more unlikely than likely.

I want to put that also in a larger context in which I believe our culture is in so many ways, so confused over many of these issues that recovery itself is a daunting prospect. But as I look at the result of either four, or again, I say shudder the thought, eight years of a Harris-Walz administration, I simply have to say it is absolutely impossible and impossible for me to say that any kind of conservative recovery on the other side of that administration is in any way likely. It is I think in every way, implausible, unlikely, if not impossible.

I also want to say just candidly, I don’t think this logic is going to be very attractive to many evangelical Christians or to others who are more likely to vote by conviction for conservative policy, but we’re living in strange political times, and that sometimes means we have to take on some strange arguments.

I’m going to do my best to do so honestly, and that’s what we’ve tried to do today. I also want to tell you that I rarely say what we’re going to discuss on The Briefing tomorrow, but unless there is some overwhelming reason in the course of events, we’re going to talk about a new development that has come in terms of Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, and his position on abortion, and we’re going to look at how that is also working out in some very real life and death situations in America’s hospitals.