A ballot of deplorables

With just a few days left before the most disconcerting, perplexing, and gut-wrenching presidential election in the last several generations, take comfort in this: A sovereign God is not at a loss to do now what He has done so often in other confusing times. He uses bad people.

It would be nice to think otherwise. Or, at least, it would be nice to think it’s only when despots use force to ensure their rule that ordinary people have to put up with evil leaders. But now we know that even when millions of seemingly “good” citizens are handed the high privilege of selecting their own leaders, they still choose bad people.

You hear everyone expressing the same bewilderment. The media are full of dismay. How could so great a nation be reduced to two such miserable candidates? In casual conversations, at the watercooler at the office, or at church, people are asking the same question with disbelief: Are we really investing a billion dollars in a process that even now has failed to tell us who is the lesser of two evils? Or, as analyst Charles Krauthammer described it so vividly, to watch a wild race to the bottom of the barrel in which the second to arrive is the winner?

If you have any doubts about whether God’s purposes include such people, think about Joseph’s brothers. “You meant it for evil,” Joseph told them, “but God meant it for good.” Or how could Pharaoh ever have dreamed (he did have dreams, you know!) that his strong-arm tactics would end up freeing half a million Jewish slaves, wrecking the Egyptian economy for centuries? With those two examples, we’ve touched on only two books of the Bible. God’s pattern of using bad people rolls all the way through.

Nobody likes to be lied to—but both Clinton and Trump lie with impunity.

But is it really appropriate to apply a label like “bad people” to a couple of folks like Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? Are they really any more to be feared and deplored and dismissed than the traditional candidates the two big political parties have typically rolled out every four years? I suggest, with the increasing evidence of October semi-surprises, that the answer is yes.

The simple statistical fact is that roughly two-thirds of the U.S. citizenry thinks in severely negative terms about one or the other of the two; and over half of all likely voters have a distinctly downbeat view of both Clinton and Trump. These are not just casual prejudices against both Clinton and Trump; they are sharp expressions of angry disapproval. Again and again, the public has used the word “corrupt” to describe two candidates they can barely tolerate.

These aren’t just casual disagreements. It’s not just that Clinton has fanciful but unworkable ideas about Obamacare, or that Trump still talks about building a wall across northern Mexico. Differences like those are out there year after year, debate after debate, election after election. They are the stuff of traditional American politics.

I suggest, on the other hand, that even in our highly secularized and increasingly irreligious age, a whole lot of folks are grasping desperately for a little bit of discretion, sanity, and order. Nobody likes to be lied to—but both Clinton and Trump lie with impunity. The general public may not consider themselves to be pro-lifers, but they’re not ready either for Clinton’s full-throttle embrace of the abortion lobby. We live in an age that is hardly genteel, but folks may not be ready either for the embarrassing sexual crudities that Trump can’t seem to shake.

Those crudities appear to have sunk the Trump candidacy. Maybe his 2005 videotape reminds all of us to stop, take stock, and listen to the admonition of the Apostle James: Look often in the mirror, he says, and take time for an inventory. We can apply that to individuals, political parties, nations, and WORLD itself.

The inventory of this presidential campaign is not pretty. Read “Unfit for power” to see one way it could become better, but we know that’s unlikely. We are all likely to face severe handicaps next month in the voting booth, as God tends to see to it that we get the leaders we deserve.

Email jbelz@wng.org