Seems a day late and a dollar short to discuss the travesty of the last presidential election almost three years ago, but one of the reasons for the failure of conservatives and evangelical then, remains now, and is actually a bit of a staple of the conservative mind.
Conservatives and Evangelicals can’t escape contentiousness over minutia, and are poor at making any kind of compromise. (Let’s not confuse Republican with Conservative, though no conservative worth his salt would associate with the Democrats.)
The Democrats however, are great at compromise. A democratic candidate couldn’t shake their devotees if they tried… and some seem to be trying pretty hard. Their constituency will stick with them no matter what they do. Theft, open deceit, tax evasion, drugs, affairs, prostitution scandals, dead secretaries, murdered lovers, association with known terrorists, violation of every oath of office, every campaign promise, dozens of impeachable offenses, inciting riots, outlandish personal spending on the public dime, confiscating billions from the citizenry… not a problem.
Let a conservative scratch his nose wrong with a camera on him, however, and HIS constituency abandons him like he’s a sinking ship. This nose-gate thing has really got them second guessing their support of such a person.
In many places, compromise is a positive term used to describe the process of negotiation in which everyone get’s something and nobody gets nothing. The process by which things progress toward some ultimate goal, even if they don’t progress as fast or in the exact way that any one party involved wishes they would. It is the preference for some gains over stalemate.
To the Evangelical, however, compromise is an insidious term. It strikes of the abandonment of one’s principles and the pollution of one’s pure devotion. To the Evangelical, being between a rock and a hard place means they have not yet discovered a miraculous escape from both and will sit there choosing nothing until an angel from heaven comes and opens that divine gate.
So, on election day in 2012, walking into the polls to vote for a president, the American public had only two real choices if they intended to actually affect this election. They could vote for Barak Obama or Mitt Romney. They could vote for a fiscal nightmare who came into office without experience, undermining separation of powers, being caught in dozens of lies and almost as many political scandals who is the sworn enemy of religious freedom, the lives of the unborn, property rights, the family, free speech, self-protection, the rest of our national constitution in general and our national security oooooooorrrrrrr they could vote for the fiscally more responsible, socially more conservative, worlds more experienced, Mormon.
“I’m sorry, did you just say Mormon?”
Yes, I did. Mitt Romney is a Mormon.
“And you want me to vote for him?”
Well, I did, back in 2012, because you see we really only had two choices and…
“Sorry to interrupt, but I’m a Christian, and I don’t associate with Mormons. I regard them as a false religion.”
I understand that. I do not believe that Mormonism is true religion either; I’m a Christian minister and have studied many non-Christian faiths, like Barak Obama’s seeming atheism with Islamic sympathies and his 20 year association with liberation theology which is little more than theologized Marxism, saturated in Black Liberation theology with more than a touch of racist hate, and…
“Sorry to interrupt again, but I’m not voting for a Mormon.”
Yes, I realize that, because by estimates over 4 million Evangelicals stayed home on election day,[1] basically giving Obama the presidency for another four years[2] which he has used to increase his persecution of Christians, his undermining of all longstanding American values, like family, religious freedom, freedom for self-protection, freedom of the Press, freedom of speech, the separation of powers to prevent the president from becoming a despot… and right now we stand poised to discover if the Supreme Court will rule that we no longer have the religious freedom to object to homosexuality and to do business in these United States, and…
“That’s not my problem. I refuse to compromise my faith by voting for a Mormon. God will have to take care of the rest. I’ll do right and if the rest of the nation elects, Obama I have nothing to do with that… besides my citizenship is in heaven. If you have to choose the lesser of two evils you still get evil and I won’t vote for evil. I’ll choose God and let God worry about the consequences.”[3]
Yeah, I know, you and more than 4 millions others felt the same way and by doing so, sold away their own religious freedom. Now, Obama is trying to use amnesty to purchase over 12 million votes from illegal aliens, which will tip the scales of power heavily into the democrats’ hands, making it all the harder to defeat them later. The 2012 election was pivotal and Evangelicals alone could have affected a change, but chose to stay home because they refused to vote for either candidate… which was actually paramount to a vote for Obama.
“Not my problem. I refuse to compromise my faith.”
And so, my dear friends, this is where we stand.
We could have made a difference. We could have affected a change. We could have gotten involved in the messy world around us with wisdom rather than toggle switch rules, and done the best we could with what we had to work with… but we didn’t… and we won’t… and when we are no longer allowed to worship freely in this country and we all sit around bemoaning our lot in life, grieving over the unfairness of it all, wondering how this could have happened to us, we can all look ourselves in the mirror’s eye and say… “We are partially responsible for this; we could have done something, but chose to do nothing, because doing nothing was easier and theologically more lazy than doing something, and actually thinking about the consequences of our actions.”
There is a saying that goes, “The good is often the enemy of the best.”
Well, that goes another way as well, and this too is wisdom in a dark world—The best is sometimes the enemy of the good.
[1] http://www.redstate.com/diary/griffinelection/2012/11/14/what-went-wrong-in-2012-the-case-of-the-4-million-missing-voters/; see also http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/11/19/are-christians-at-fault-for-obamas-re-election-win-rev-franklin-graham-says-yes/;
[2] The election could easily have been tipped if the lost 4 million showed up in the right places, but definitely would have been tipped if those who always stay home showed up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2012
[3] Every single one of these was stated boldly by evangelical Christians when they declared pre-election that no Christian should go to the polls.
