John Piper warns Trump's 'deadly' behavior will lead to 'destruction' in blistering post

On the whole, I appreciate Veith’s thoughtfulness, and his counterargument to Piper is better than average also. But it’s simplistic.

• Abortion needs to be opposed on many levels and the Presidential level is not the most important of them.
• A candidate’s anti-abortion stance doesn’t make him more trustworthy or less damaging in other areas that are just as important. Fetal lives matter, but so do adult lives, the lives of the elderly, the lives of the sick.

Abortion monomania has not served evangelicalism well.

I personally don’t see it as “abortion monomania” at all. Through my adult life, I’ve seen Democrats come out on the wrong side of not only abortion, but also health care, gun rights, military spending, welfare programs (and their side effects), immigration, and a lot more.

Now to be sure, at some point, God will have “had his fill” of the United States, and likely also some of the antics of American Christians as well. That noted, it still leaves open the question of whether it’s better to “show our own virtue” by not voting for someone “beyond a certain pale” at all, or whether it’s better to choose the lesser evil. My family did actually just read through the books of the kings, and one thing of note is that a king who did some good—say eliminated Ba’al worship but did not eliminate the high places—is generally commended to a degree.

And so my conclusion is that “moving the ball” is something good, even if we cringe at how we’re working to do it.

Evangelical Elites Try to Demonize Votes for Trump

Notoriously, Baptists supported Hitler at the August 1934 Berlin meeting of the Baptist World Alliance and many maintained a positive assessment of der Führer in succeeding years. The gist of one type of Baptist Hitlerism ran something like, “Well he don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t chew, and don’t run with them that do.” Baptists and many others lauded Hitler’s evocation of a desperately needed new esprit de corps in Germany post-Versailles, improvements in transportation, and his kindness to his beloved German Shepherd Blondi, whom he had raised from a pup. It’s easy today to stand incredulous and appalled at the colossal collective blind spots that accommodated so much support for Hitler for so long from so many. But it was harder to see the truth about his horrible rise to power then, and many Baptists weighed Hitler in the scales of moral rectitude and weighed in with their support. Retired Baptist pastor and evangelical luminary John Piper has weighed in, at least for now, for supporting neither Biden nor Trump — though, too clever by half, without mentioning the candidates’ names or the names of any political party. But Piper’s oblique references to Biden, Trump, Democrats, and Republicans are crystal clear to every reader of his blog post, and my analysis shall treat them as such.

Elite Evangelical Goose Step

By legitimizing a vote for a third-party candidate or for sitting the election out, Piper separates himself somewhat from perhaps the most urgent and unifying public priority of many elite evangelicals who also stand accused of being woke by a growing number among their constituencies and erstwhile followers. These elites mean to sanctify votes for Democrats by evangelicals in spite of that party’s aggressive support of abortion on demand. Southern Baptist ethicist Russell Moore did his part four years ago when he insisted that evangelicals who support Trump would have to “repudiate everything they believe.” Pastor Mark Dever of Capitol Hill Baptist Church made his contribution by contrasting the sophisticated multi-issue voting of African Americans with the straw-man stereotype of simpleton, single-issue (read: anti-abortion) voting by white Christians. Pastor David Platt arrives at the shared destination of the elites in his new book, Before You Vote. Now Piper pipes in on the eve of the election with what amounts to a cop-out response that helps Joe Biden and abandons murder-marked babies.

Reductio ad Hitlerum

To hastily invoke Hitler is to invoke Godwin’s Law, that the first person in an argument to bring up Hitler loses. Now I cannot go that far, but I can point out that this is the kind of rhetoric Herr Schicklgruber actually used. The link also has quite a bit more about what he did well before he attained power.

I’d put Godwin’s Law this way; whoever introduces Hitler in an argument without justifying the similarity between Hitler’s rhetoric and deeds and the rhetoric/deeds in question, automatically loses the argument. And that noted, Trump is not a Hitler, and I am praying that the Democrats, carriers of that slander, lose next week in a big way.