” Not Trump. This day Harris. Generally Jesus”. In a new Threads article, Ray Ortlund, a card-carrying part of” Big Eva,” used these terms rather than Taylor Swift or Pete Buttigieg.
Following Jesus, in his mind, would mean rejecting Donald Trump and supporting Kamala Harris in this election.
Ortlund founded Immanuel Church in Nashville, where Christianity Today’s editor-in-chief and vocal ex-Southern Baptist Russell Moore are a guest secretary. Ortlund just enrolled in a conference with Moore, Curtis Chang, and their Never Trump friend David French from the left-wing Bible source group The After Party. So it was no surprise when French popped into Ortlund’s remarks to say,” This is the way”.
When the post did n’t go over well, Ortlund deleted it but did n’t apologize. Instead of Sorry, I regret what I said, Ortlund opted for My reviewers “misinterpreted” me and I may have known they would. In truth, he even addressed a warm-hearted “you are most pleasant” to a writer who thanked him for his unique message.
Ortlund is n’t the first of his ilk to endorse Harris. French twisted in twists both the facts and himself to clarify his impending voting for Kamala in an overall article titled” To Keep Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris” from his seat at The New York Times. Of course, every assault he hurls against Trump — lying, violence, cruelty, physical sin, support for abortion, and suboptimal foreign policy — is either fake or much worse under Democrats, especially the latest administration in which Kamala Harris is second-in-command.
So Kamala testimonials and alleged Christian Trump denunciations are not uncommon. But is it as though putting them in context of a love for Jesus is” WWJD”? is “elect Kamala Harris” — is mainly severe. After all, it does n’t require a seminary degree to realize that Jesus did n’t ask the young children to abort them when He pleaded with them to do so. While the Biden-Harris administration was occupied last month imprisoning pro-life activists who prayed at pregnancy mill and peacefully protested the killing of unborn human life, Ray Ortlund believes that the best way to care for those relatives is by praising their inquisitors.
But Not Trump evangelicals like French and Ortlund have a deep rooted hatred for Donald Trump and his supporters, making it impossible to separate their identities, ideas, and yet religion. Like the prosecutor challenging Jesus, they ask,” Who is my cousin”? but conclude it must not be Trump-supporting Christians. Like the Pharisees, they proclaim that at least they are n’t like those white, election-denying conspiracy theorists.
And do n’t let French’s newfound” Can’t we all just be friends”? tone fool you. He behaves similarly to the child who punches his brother before fleeing. He has been smearing the devout for years, and he now wants a peace without repentance.
[READ :] Professional Polarizer David French Gives a Getting Along Lecture at the Presbyterian Church of America.
What self-declared progressive Christians are aware of but wo n’t admit when it comes to Trump is that presidents are n’t necessarily pastors or role models or even Christians. They’re devices and proxies for guidelines. This implies that a vote for Donald Trump is one for a party that defends life much more than the extreme pro-abortion candidate Kamala Harris, even if he is n’t as pro-life as I’d like him to be.
We know French knows this because he tries to apply the” tool” logic to Harris, writing,” I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 and — ironically enough — I’m doing it in part to try to save conservatism”. In other words, he asserts that Harris is the tool to bring about the cleansing of conservative ( no matter how absurd that argument may be ).
The issue is that Harris ‘ policies are far more terrible than the other candidate’s.
Openly Anti-Christian System
No matter how tough the ABC debate moderators lied about the fact that Harris believes in zero privileges for born babies or even for those who survive attempts to kill them while they’re still in the womb, he believes it. Harris consents to abortions at any point during pregnancy, including for environmentalist reasons like birth defects.
Harris also thinks it’s spiritual to caution babies who were made in God’s picture that they were born into the wrong system and that self-care will make them happy. As her native state of California currently does, she frequently engages in emotional bullying parents by making threats of death or also exposing their children’s transgender delusions to parents. Just weeks after a transgender-identifying gunman killed six Catholics, including many children, at a Nashville class, Harris tweeted to “celebrate transgender and non-binary Americans. We see you, and we’ll not give up fighting for you.
Harris evokes the language that led to not one but two assassination attempt on her No. During the obscene George Floyd unrest to avenge violent protesters, she privately supported the Minnesota Freedom Fund.
By permitting an war at the southern borders, which has resulted in avoidable offences against innocent Americans, the Biden-Harris administration has violated America’s national security and independence. She believes in “equity”, which is just shorthand for ensuring the equal benefits through government-sanctioned stealing, difficult job be damned.
And Kamala Harris herself notably slept her way to the top, not to mention Doug Emhoff’s cheating on his ex-wife with their nanny, which apparently led to his abandonment of the baby and subsequent pregnancy.
In other words, Harris is a physical delinquent, a hypocrite, a follower of child death, a producer of murder and division, and a happy woman. ” Always Jesus”?
Both Ortlund and French are aware of this. They are not foolish, but they read the news. They just do n’t care. Because they despise Donald Trump and enjoy the prestige, power, and paychecks that come with that hatred, no amount of facts or appeals to justice and truth will convince “progressive Christians.”
Kamala Harris could have an affair and abortion, transition to” Kevin”, and needlessly start World War III tomorrow, and the leaders of “progressive” Big Eva would still pontificate about how voting for her ( sorry, “him/them” ) is necessary to be faithful to Jesus and” save conservatism”.
The Lesser of Two Evils
Here’s the thing. I do n’t care about” conservatism” or returning to” Reagan Republicanism” if it means a Christianity of consequentialism, or” the ends justify the means”, to which French and Ortlund apparently subscribe. The Bible dictates that Christ’s disciples be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” which is pretty much the opposite of foolishly criticizing one candidate for his so-called” cult of personality” and downplaying another candidate’s culture of death.
]READ: Voting For Trump Is The Clear Moral Choice For Pro-Lifers ]
In 2020,” Big Eva” theologian John Piper said he was “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“. But Piper erred in the same way Ortlund and French do: Instead of juxtaposing Trump’s character with Biden’s character and Trump’s policies with Biden’s, he compared Trump’s immoral character with Biden’s immoral policies.
The Christian voter’s choice, however, is not between one candidate of bad character, Trump, and another of bad policy, Harris. One candidate has to choose between having bad character and having deadly policies, respectively.
Thus while French would likely say that Trump supporters are engaging in consequentialism, that’s incorrect. There is a distinction between pursuing evil in order to achieve your own goals ( see Abraham and Hagar and the “approvers” and “applauders” in Romans 1 ) and exercising discernment to avoid the worst outcome. In the “lesser of two evils” calculation, that award goes to Trump, whose policies are undoubtedly more life-giving even if his character is as corrupt as his opponent’s.
As Father Chad Ripperger explains,” When you’re voting for a lesser evil, you’re not voting for the person’s evil or for the evil that the]legislation ] is doing. What you’re voting to do is preserve the good that would be lost if the opposing candidate entered a territory where there is more evil or where the legislation was actually even worse.
That’s not consequentialism. It’s wisdom.
Christians should reject the clumsy theology of those who manipulate the nature of Christ to punish their political adversaries. Perhaps yours is the Christianity that has been contaminated by politics if you support Kamala Harris in the same way as” Always Jesus.”