For my British friends attempting to assess the American political situation from a distance, let it be known that, for some time now and the foreseeable future, I consider voting for Democrat candidates or even failing to vote for the Republican candidate who alone can defeat the Democrat candidate to be a sin against God. Not the unpardonable sin or a loss of salvation but nevertheless a foolish and grievous sin that spells disaster for the US.
There used to be a time some decades ago when Democrats were not so extreme as they are now, and not nearly so great a danger to the nation. Those days are long since gone. Whatever defects exist in Republican candidates (even in the case of Trump), these don't remotely approach the dire outcomes facing us if Democrats regain rule.
The biblical argument
The biblical argument for asserting that it is a sin to enable the election of Democrats is transparent and obvious:
1. The Democrat Party is a wicked political institution whose two greatest idols are LGBTQ immorality and abortion, a rejection of the most important facets of creation (humans created in God's image and as male and female). The sinister means that it uses to advance these objectives and the dire consequences that result from the pursuit are spelled out below.
2. God requires Christians to vote for the greater good and lesser evil, and thus to rule well in the shared rule of a republic.
3. Making it possible for Democrats to win in elections, who advance the extreme evils of the Party by extreme means in order to attain one-party rule, is not an instance of ruling well.
4. Therefore, enabling Democrats to attain political office is a self-evident departure from the will of God, a misuse of the responsibility of voting, bringing about far greater evil and far less (if not non-existent) good. That's clearly a sin.
Scales of significance when deciding how to vote
Determining how to vote as a faithful Christian is all about scales of significance regarding the defects of a candidate. Typical complaints by faithful Christians regarding the current Republican Party and the Trump administration have to be stacked up against the massive problems with policy positions advocated by candidates from the Democrat Party.
Democrat candidates today stand for most, nearly all, or all of the following catastrophic positions (in no particular order of significance or category), any one of which (let alone the shocking aggregate) should disqualify them from holding office:
1. Promoting chemical castration and surgical mutilation of minors, including passing legislation to remove LGBTQ-identified children from the home of parents who will not promote this identity, including those parents who refuse to consent to transgender transitioning, on the grounds of “child abuse.”
2. Requiring churches to teach all their employees that questioning LGBTQ ideology (including addressing and treating female-identified males as females) is hate speech and sex discrimination (already the law in California).
3. Blocking all conservative judges and pushing for the confirmation of hard-left judges that will determine judicial decisions not just for the upcoming election cycle but for decades to come, upholding the advancement of oppressive LGBTQ tyranny (including trans tyranny) and abortion.
4. Allowing female-identified males in female sports and private spaces (including naked males exposing their genitals to girls in locker rooms; also dressing rooms, restrooms, shelters, prisons), thereby humiliating and endangering females everywhere.
5. Working for a national law (and, if possible, a priority amendment to the Constitution) that enshrines an absolute right to all abortions at any stage of pregnancy.
6. Jailing peaceful pro-life protesters in order to put fear into any who refuse to worship at the altar of abortion.
7. Enlarging the mandatory indoctrination of children into LGBTQ ideology and immorality in our schools and passing laws that require the firing of teachers who won’t promote this brainwashing.
8. Increasing LGBTQ terror in the workplace by passing legislation that terminates the employment of any who do not submit to the use of transgender pronouns or affirm “gay marriage.”
9. Pushing to pack the Supreme Court and thereby increasing the number of hard-left justices.
10. Enacting legislation that will turn leftist District of Columbia and Puerto Rico into states, thus increasing not only the number of hard-left Democrat US Representatives in the House but also, crucially, adding four hard-left Democrat US senators that would bring about permanent Democrat control of the Senate.
11. Eliminating the Electoral College to swamp conservative rural states with Democrat-controlled leftist urban states that are fed a steady diet of hard-left propaganda by “news” media.
12. Spreading the nefarious exaltation of drag queens in public venues, with special attention to corrupting minors from the earliest age on.
13. Destroying faithful Christian education by making federal student loans and research grants (and then accreditation) dependent on promoting LGBTQ ideology.
14. Removing conscience exemptions for medical staff who don’t want to perform abortions or assist in the abomination of transitioning persons from one sex to another.
15. Outlawing therapy that assists persons in wanting to leave a "trans" or "gay" life, overriding even client determination so that oppressive LGBTQ ideology will reign supreme.
16. Prosecuting at the federal level any states that attempt to impose any restrictions on abortion.
17. Continuing unbridled deficit spending even greater than that of the Republicans that puts future generations in greater debt and burdens them with ever higher payments of just the annual interest (let alone principal) on the national debt, because Democrats can win only with such bribery at the expense of taxpayers.
18. Nominating and appointing judges who let people off easily for major criminal offenses.
19. Accelerating efforts at restricting First Amendment rights of speech and religion.
20. Advocating for the replacement of three independent branches of government with a ruling House of Representatives (eliminating the Senate, having the President elected by the House, making the Supreme Court’s decisions subject to House approval).
21. Pushing for the abolition of ICE, the defunding of police, and the elimination of prisons.
22. Ramping up massive lawfare against Trump, including immediate impeachment, and of Trump supporters, including law firms that helped the Trump administration litigate and anyone who works for the Trump administration.
Oh, and this is not an exhaustive list.
The problems with the Republican Party do not compare
I regularly see Evangelicals and conservative Catholics and Orthodox expressing greater outrage at uncouth things that Trump says than at this litany of horrors affecting the entire nation for generations to come - and often no outrage at all to this hard-left Democrat horror show. Nothing that the Republican Party stands for comes even remotely close to this series of dangers to our republic and the church. Certainly not the war against Iran, which has resulted in fewer American deaths than the number of Americans murdered in Chicago in a three-week span.
I personally think this was an appropriate move given Iran’s half-century, radical-Islamist terrorist threat to the world, their efforts at developing defensive and offensive missile capability, and their desire for nuclear weapons. Yet even faithful Christians who disagree with the efforts of the Trump administration to neutralize Iran as a global evil cannot reasonably compare the Iran war to the array of structural evils that Democrats are promoting (and don’t even try to compare the relative insignificance of temporarily elevated gas prices).
Nor can a faithful Christian use the excuse of voting Democrat to increase governmental aid to the poor that is already at a level that no ancient Jew or Christian ever advocated, and which decreases the incentive to work, burdens with high taxes those who do work, and borrows against the interests of future generations. And, no, the Republicans are not promoting racism but asking that merit or need (not race) determine qualifications.
Is it theological hubris to declare that a vote for Democrats is a sin?
Some Christians will be outraged that I should call it a sin to enable a Democrat victory. They will declare that there is no biblical text that says, “Vote for the Republican candidate in order to prevent the far worse evil of Democrat rule.”
Requiring that I produce such a text is unreasonable. My list of evil Democrat policies - and they are truly evil - supports my view that Democrat candidates are perpetrators of far greater evil who bring about little if any good.
Saying that it is theological hubris to declare certain voter preferences a sin cannot be sustained historically. Obviously in the US 1860 election, failing to cast a vote for the one candidate of the one Party seeking to stop the advance of African-American slavery (Lincoln and the Republican Party) was a sin. The same applies to any German Christians in the 1932 presidential election who failed to vote for Paul von Hindenburg (whatever his defects) over Adolf Hitler or over a third-party candidate with no chance of defeating Hitler.
The biblical text doesn't treat the issue of voting by the whole adult (or adult male) population. For the most part Jews and Christians were not in that situation. But the biblical text does tell us that the destruction of innocent human life and the promotion of homosexual and transgender immorality are great evils. We know these are first-order idols of the Democrat Party promoted by evil means.
We know that Democrat one-party hegemony would produce great evils for the nation in general and faithful Christians in particular for generations to come. We also know that a vote by a conservative Christian for a candidate who has no chance of winning contributes to the victory of the Democrat candidate. Therefore, it is a vote that contributes to the greater evil and lesser good, and thus a sinful decision.
What about the argument that we must teach the Republican Party a lesson?
Some conservative Christians argue that Christians should not cast a vote for an unsatisfactory Republican candidate but should vote for the Democrat or for a third-party candidate who has no chance of winning because it is the only way to teach the Republican Party a lesson. “We won’t vote for you unless you give us better candidates.”
In principle I can imagine a circumstance where I would not vote for a RINO (Republican in Name Only), especially one who was little different than a Democrat on the key issues of both abortion and LGBTQ immorality as well as related dangerous policies to achieve these wicked ends. The LGBTQ issue is arguably the greatest concern because it touches nearly every significant concern in daily life (including the safety of children and women, employment, education, free speech, and free exercise of religion) by eviscerating the core understanding of sexuality central to civilization.
The bottom line is that there simply isn’t enough time to “teach the Republican Party a lesson” over selecting candidates who, while deficient in some respects, are still infinitely superior candidates to the Democrat option. Democrat candidates are only getting more and more hard-left, now even accommodating to the hyper-extremists in the Democratic Socialists of America (a socialist political organisation in the United States).
Concerted efforts as outlined above are underway that could, if the Democrats take control of Congress and win the presidency, result in a one-Party leftist state within a few years. Then our Republic and its liberties would be significantly destroyed.
The lesser of two evils?
Increasingly the “not voting for the lesser of two evils” argument is thankfully falling into disfavour for five obvious reasons, which I briefly outline here:
1. God himself chose the lesser-of-two-evils throughout the pages of salvation history (even Jehu and Cyrus, but the list is endless).
2. All candidates are deficient in one respect or another because “all have sinned and are lacking in the glory of God” prior to the resurrection from the dead. Jesus Christ is not on the ballot.
3. Christians who don’t exercise a choice between a candidate who represents a far greater evil and a candidate who represents a far lesser evil will be subjected to the choice of pagans for a candidate who will bring far greater evil. Christians who behave in this way are acting like masochists who enjoy pain and sadists who enjoy seeing others suffer grievously, including their own children and fellow Christians. That is grossly irresponsible.
4. Voting for a deficient Republican candidate over an evil Democrat candidate is not a case of voting for a lesser evil but a case of voting for a greater good. People aren’t stimulated to vote for a candidate because of that candidate’s deficiencies but rather because of the strengths of the candidate relative to his opponent.
5. Past failings in a candidate's personal character have to be considered but, unless they affect performance of one's official duties or continue during office holding, should weigh less heavily in the mind of the voters than advocacy for damaging policies and court appointments affecting all Americans for generations to come. (Some Christians mistakenly fail to treat advocacy for harmful policies and court appointments as a character issue.) By way of analogy, if I need surgery, my foremost consideration is the competency of the surgeon in the performance of his duties, not the conduct of his personal life.
Professor Robert AJ Gagnon is a Visiting Scholar of the Bible at Wesley Biblical Seminary. He is the author of The Bible and Homosexual Practice.
