A buddy disagreed with my last post and said that I was too smart to fall for the idea that Christians should vote for Trump. I smilingly replied that one should avoid the term “too smart” when disagreeing with the likes of theologian Wayne Grudem, whom I’d mentioned as an advocate of the position I was taking. Grudem is scary smart.
At the end of last July, Grudem published his now-famous article “Why Voting for Donald Trump Is a Morally Good Choice.” He stated the essence of the article in an early paragraph:
I did not support Trump in the primary season. I even spoke against him at a pastors’ conference in February. But now I plan to vote for him. I do not think it is right to call him an “evil candidate.” I think rather he is a good candidate with flaws.
This article provoked a firestorm of opposing articles, blog posts, etc. in the Christian cybersphere. After reading about ten of them, I saw that I could dispense with the other two hundred; they all said the same things. A major objection was that Trump is bad in a way that the world doesn’t like rather than, for instance, Hillary Clinton, who is bad in ways that the world celebrates. For nigh on seventy years, by my reckoning, Christian leaders have repeatedly been exclaiming “Oh, horrors! We can’t do/say/think that! Why, what would Satan say if we did that???” Subsequently, Christianity has become so conformed to the world now that its major distinguishing point seems to be how cheesy its rock & roll is. So everybody jumped on Grudem (who, by the way, has a long history of standing against the decline of Christianity).
This presidential election campaign season has been the most entertaining carnival that has ever come to town. Repeatedly, when you think the show is over and you’ve seen it all, another act comes dancing across the stage and the frolics resume. Last week the nation was shocked, shocked! to discover that Trump has lived as a sexual libertine who uses vulgar language as though he were a common plumbing contractor. True, he bragged about his behavior in his books and broadcast media appearances for decades, but the Democrat-media confederacy has somehow managed to republish the data with enough fanfare now to trick the booboisie into thinking it’s a game-changing revelation.
On cue, a swarm of Republicans called for Trump to withdraw from the race. Among them was Wayne Grudem. His explanation is here.
I’ve never called Trump a good candidate with flaws (as Grudem did); I’ve consistently called him a bad man who doesn’t know much and isn’t very smart. Despite that, my position is essentially the same as was Grudem’s. He went to great lengths to demonstrate why a Trump administration would be preferable to a Clinton one. The voter is faced with the choice of favoring the better option or not favoring the better option. If he chooses to favor the better option, it will entail certain actions, although individuals might disagree over exactly what those actions are. (Ordinarily, the entailed action would be to support Trump.)
This brings me to the accusation I make in this post’s title. With his recent article, Grudem has adopted an incoherent position.
He begins with a condemnation of Trump’s 2005 remarks about sexual aggressiveness, and similar vulgarities on–who would believe it?–Howard Stern’s radio show. Grudem states that such behavior is “hateful in God’s eyes” and that it “turned my stomach.” On these bases, he calls for Trump to withdraw.
So far, Grudem’s position is coherent. Trump is, indeed, deplorable; and if a voter realizes that he no longer favors a candidate (be the epiphany ever so tardy), he is at liberty to favor a different outcome.
However, for the remainder of the article, Grudem restates the patently obvious fact that a Trump presidency is seriously preferable to its alternative. (And readers, please keep clearly in your logic the fact that Eggan McMuffin is not a third possibility.) He asserts that he cannot and will not vote for Clinton. In other words, Grudem as much as admits that his upset stomach hasn’t changed anything.
Grudem himself, though, has indeed changed something: he has changed the vote of thousands of Christian fence-sitters who were looking for a leader to confirm their gut instinct that Trump is preferable to the alternative. Headlines immediately peppered the landscape announcing Grudem’s great reversal, part of a much grander narrative that the Dems have pushed for four months–that Trump is losing his support. In fact, Trump has gone up and down in the polls and the recent trends were upward, apparently because Ted Cruz and others were finally admitting that someone they deplored was, sad to say, their only hope for avoiding a Clinton presidency. Grudem’s move served only to decelerate any momentum that the idea was gaining among Christians.
That’s what is incoherent about Grudem’s present position. He avers (still) that a Trump presidency is a better option than its alternative, but his actions favor the alternative. To call upon Trump to withdraw is not an option because (1) obviously Trump will not and (2) if he did, his successor couldn’t possibly fare as well; so such a call is substantially a move to favor what he claims not to favor. Even with the publishing of the vulgar recordings, and with the even more recent unsubstantiated (and highly suspicious) accusations of assaultive behavior, Grudem, I, and everyone else are left with the same choice we always had. We may favor one of only two outcomes (any third outcomes are imaginary). For weighty reasons (see Grudem’s original article) the preferable outcome is a Trump election.