What Are Evangelicals Afraid of Losing?

….or a lot of us simply pulled the lever for a guy we thought might be a crook because we knew that the other candidate was a crook, and would bring a lot more crooks into government. And because we thought that there was at least a chance that likely crook could be removed from office if he really misbehaved, but we were confident that the definite crook would be kept in office by her party pretty much no matter what she did.

It’s called “triage”, I guess.

Yes… triage. A.k.a., short term, smalll-picture thinking.

Horton’s argument is that for Christians who are thinking biblically, winning and losing have an entirely different meaning.

The election of one crook would have been a political loss; the election of the child has undermined an entire political philosophy.

When someone says “we are one election away from losing everything,” here is what they mean. Hypothetically consider that Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, and who replaced Justice Scalia, and who was now picking Justice Kennedy’s replacement. You could kiss a lot of gun rights goodbye. You would likely lose a lot of religious expression rights. For example, while churches proper would likely still be protected by the First Amendment, religious people themselves would not be able to have the “free exercise of religion” in their daily lives. LGBTQ rights would be extended. The borders and immigration would be increasingly porous and open. Abortion rights would be expanded as many state restrictions on it would be overturned by a progressive court. On and on. That is what is meant by “everything.” Those are political things, and “rights.” Obviously, no man can take away our right to believe, but they can make persecution a daily practice.

So, if you want to welcome governmental persecution under the guise that it will make Christianity better, be my guest. If you want to pretend that the Progressive agenda is anything other than the wholesale resetting of American culture, go ahead and pretend that and stick your head in the ground like an ostrich.

Aaron, I’m going to have to disagree with you that pulling the lever for Trump undermines conservatism as a whole, and the reason is simple; you had the choice of one probable crook for 4-8 years, or the choice of the other crook and her cronies for an entire generation. Sometimes life doesn’t give us easy choices, a good example being WWII—yes, it was right to fight against fascism, but in doing so, we enabled communism. Tens of millions died as we waited for the Cold War to work.

Now does that impugn the whole American experiment? Of course not. It simply means that in life, you don’t always have easy choices.

[Aaron Blumer]

The election of one crook would have been a political loss; the election of the child has undermined an entire political philosophy.

Not sure what you mean, but I can see the pendulum swinging hard in reaction against Trump so that we end up with not just a Hillary-type of president in a couple years, but multiple Hillary-types and worse all over Congress. So, electing Trump may have saved a few conservative causes for a few years, but the left will win their agenda in the end because they are hell bent on doing whatever it takes to destroy the opposition to their agenda. What will be lost eventually is the “American Way”, but never the kingdom of God.

There was a quote from K.A. Ellis a couple years ago, that summed up the differences between a Clinton and a Trump Presidency.

“A Clinton Presidency will ensure a rise in anti-Christian hostility by opposing Christianity. A Trump Presidency will ensure a rise in cultural anti-Christian hostility by misrepresenting Christianity. Either way, the Church will be sifted. Either way, She’ll persevere.”

I love that quote. Thanks for sharing it.