Among the politically homeless

Donald Trump’s election to a second term as president has sparked all manner of spirited discourse, not least among evangelical Christians. Many are celebrating the fact that we’ve been spared from another four years of naked hostility toward everything Christians hold dear. An older Trump campaign video is circulating in which the now president-elect promises an aggressive housecleaning on transgender insanity. We can also anticipate that a Trump Justice Department will not hound and persecute pro-life protesters. These are just a couple of the reasons Christians have offered to justify their calculation that Trump was the lesser of two evils.

Even still, I couldn’t support either candidate, though it wasn’t because I think all pre-Trump candidates have been spotless. On the contrary, as I explained in this essay, I’m well-practiced in withholding my vote from Republicans who can’t meet a few simple standards of policy and character. However, my philosophy is not exactly popular. Many conservatives will argue that I am among those now “free riding” on a Trump victory. If there’s a meaningful sense in which we third-party voters can still say we preferred a Trump outcome, then (so goes the argument) it was morally wrong not to put our votes where our mouth was.

In First Things, Matthew Mehan forcefully makes the case that choosing one viable candidate or the other is a duty. In National Review, Michael Brendan Dougherty strikes a similar chord, chastising his former self for being too morally fussy to get his hands dirty and do what had to be done. Dougherty isn’t the only conservative I’ve seen frame this as a repudiation of his own past choices. Perhaps this is understandable. As the Democrats spin out ever more inventive forms of insanity, there is increasing pressure to vote for whoever is not the Democrat, even as the Republican Party also tacks farther and farther left. With that pressure comes an increasing discomfort with the feeling of being politically homeless, of not having a tribe to call one’s own. It is certainly a lonely place to be.

And yet, Trump’s win is so decisive and the new Republican coalition so broad that devout Christians now find themselves a less relevant percentage of that coalition than ever. I saw the argument made that if we as pro-lifers withheld our votes as a protest of Trump’s weak stance on abortion and he won anyway, this would send the message that he can ignore us. But if his edge is that overwhelming (and in the end it was), then this is precisely the conclusion he can draw with that demographic in hand.

All the more reason for Christian Trump voters not to scold Christians who made another choice, particularly if we did so without descending to the mocking rhetoric of a figure like David French (or other “thought leaders” who might not have gone all-in with the Democratic Party but still made their contempt for Trump voters plain). It is simply false that we are now obligated to feel guilty if relief is among our mixed feelings in the wake of Trump’s victory. Our reasons for voting differently are no less well-articulated now than they were on Nov. 4. Among other things, we can still rightly and soberly consider what it means that pro-lifers no longer have a home in either national party. U.K. pro-life activist Calum Miller offers insightful commentary from the other side of the pond, where abortion has long been considered a “non-issue.”

The other day, pastor John Piper was flooded with irritated replies when he tweeted that God had delivered us from one evil but now “tests us with another,” quoting Deuteronomy 13:3. This was predictable, given the tweet’s brevity and failure to tease out all the nuances of our present conundrum as conservative Christian voters. It was the sort of tweet that should have been an essay, fleshed out with some acknowledgment of the reasons why people felt unhappily compelled to vote the way they did. Still, he was trying to put a finger on the sort of questions Christians should legitimately wrestle with.

Right now some Christians are excited at the prospect of being “welcome in the halls of power in DC,” because they believe loyalty to Trump will earn them the opportunity to work for the common good at scale. In itself, there is nothing sinful about desiring to do good with the biggest lever possible. And yet, it’s also of the essence of Christianity that we needn’t constantly worry about whether our access to that lever is blocked, because we know there’s always a chance we could lose that invitation, that seat at the table. In some sense, we already have.

This may be discouraging, but it can also be freeing. There is only the same old work to do that there ever was. So it was this election year, and so it will be for every election year to come.