Gonna Make You Mad This Morning

I come neither to defend John Piper nor attack him. If you have not read his piece that has all sorts of people up in arm, you should read it here.

I voted straight Republican this year except for my local sheriff and district attorney, two positions I do not think should be partisan anyway. I would not vote for a politician who supports abortion rights. Abortion is a euphemism for legally sanctioned murder. I would not vote for Joe Biden, a man who I think actually is nice, but whose policies are terrible and will wreck our recovering economy.

And now, having set all that out, I need to perhaps burn bridges with some of you unintentionally. A prophet is not welcome in his hometown and I may not be welcome among my readers after this. I leave open the comments for subscribers so they can complain.

In John Piper’s piece, he never says he is voting for Joe Biden or Donald Trump. What he says is this:

Actually, this is a long-overdue article attempting to explain why I remain baffled that so many Christians consider the sins of unrepentant sexual immorality (porneia), unrepentant boastfulness (alazoneia), unrepentant vulgarity (aischrologia), unrepentant factiousness (dichostasiai), and the like, to be only toxic for our nation, while policies that endorse baby-killing, sex-switching, freedom-limiting, and socialistic overreach are viewed as deadly.

Guess what? He is not wrong. He is not telling you how to vote, but he is pointing out that many of you are rationalizing a vote for one sinner whose policies you like over another sinner whose policies you don’t like and trying to conform it to your faith by saying the one leads to death, not the other.

Spare me your outrage.

I had good Christian church-going men show up on my front porch in 2016 to threaten my family for me not supporting the President then. My children were harassed by a church-going man while we were out shopping because of my opposition. At our children’s Christian school run by the church we attend right now, my children were so bullied because of my political position that we had to move them to another school. My wife had a woman in her Bible study at our church tell my wife the woman wanted to hit me all because of not supporting a politician. For a time, we had to stop going to church altogether because we couldn’t get from our Sunday School class to the sanctuary without someone wanting to give me a piece of their mind. I had sweet little church ladies writing to me that their husbands were church elders and I needed to think about what I was doing.

Don’t tell me voting for a morally corrupt person does not have consequences on your own soul or the character of a nation.

The number of white Christians in the United States who have decided President Trump’s behavior gives them a license to let out their inner asshole is astounding and it is even happening with pastors. See e.g. Robert Jeffries or non-pastor Jerry Falwell, Jr. And I say white Christians because overwhelmingly we suddenly have a bunch of white Christians who think if they dare say anything about ongoing racial issues in this country they’re somehow conceding arguments against their preferred politician.

If you can’t talk about an issue truthfully because it might seem like you’re betraying your political side, you are an idol worshipper.

The history of mankind reflected in the Bible and out of the Bible shows that morally corrupt leaders corrupt the character of their nations.

Stop nodding and agreeing, Democrats. Your morally corrupt, atheistic precious Obama did the same thing. He persecuted nuns and gave license to local authorities persecuting Christian bakers and florists and also gave license to sympathetic Christians and “Christians” to claim it isn’t really persecution because no one got shot in the back of the head.

Your side is burning down America with an American press blaming Donald Trump when it’s your activists and leaders encouraging it. And your last guy played with cigars and interns in the Oval Office and you made so many excuses for him that you incentivized a whole lot of the present President’s supporters making excuses now. But God forbid we point that out and make you confront it or point out some of you only apologized for it as an expedient way to now move on to criticizing the present President’s flaws.

If you want to vote for Trump, vote for Trump.

If you want to vote for Biden, vote for Biden.

If you want to vote third party or refuse, God bless you too.

But spare me your outrage over excusing bad character because the other guy has bad policy because **NEWS FLASH** bad character will inevitably lead to bad policy and if you don’t believe me you better go back and read 1 and 2 Kings or look at our national debt right now.

The bottom line is this — America is not God’s kingdom and a whole lot of you have confused it and are now justifying your preferred political choices by twisting your faith to conform to your politics and getting mad at anyone who points out what you’re doing.

When your guy loses on Tuesday, whoever that is, you’re going to curl up in the fetal position and believe the United States is over and everyone who voted against your guy is terrible. It won’t be true, but you will believe it because you’ve sought salvation in a ballot box and twisted your soul to fit in there. I don’t care who you vote for, but stop preening about it with overwrought mostly moral justifications.

You’ve got two old geezers who act like they’re fighting over the last chicken wing at an all you can eat buffet early bird special who the American public has concluded are the best we can do in a nation of over 350 million people and that is a damning indictment on the whole nation. Part of me thinks your excitement and enthusiasm for your particular candidate is just to cover the shame of these two candidates being the best we could do.

If me pointing that out upsets you, cancel your own damn subscription.

And repent, you idol worshippers.

PS — while you were out on your boat parade or car parade or in your socially distanced circle of jerks bragging that your side was all masked up unlike the other side, you weren’t phone banking, you weren’t knocking on doors, and you weren’t getting out the vote in the closest presidential election in our lifetime. Now you can get off my lawn.