New Warhorn Media post by Tim Bayly:
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You used my all-time favorite knock-knock joke.
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While I agree for the most part about voting for Trump, I’m still considering a third party because of his promotion of homosexuality. I see this as an equal abomination to abortion. The only Christian I’ve seen address this is Michael Brown, so I don’t yet see where I’m wrong. Thoughts? Am I missing a larger perspective?
As you read about the kings of Judah, it’s interesting how many of them are described as good but without having removed the high places. I just read about good King Hezekiah’s son, bad King Manasseh (who then humbled himself in exile and was able to return) with my family. It struck me that after he repented it said that the people still worshipped in the high places, but only the Lord their God.
But isn’t that the same idolatry that the Israelites fell into with Aaron?
It’s odd the degrees of good and bad that we see in the kings while still having an ultimate good or evil label assigned to them in the Bible.
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I see your point and agree with it, but Trump has also stood in defense of religious liberty against the relentless attacks on the First Amendment by the sexual perversion lobby.
I expected him to govern like a New York City liberal, and we know what New York values are. He has not done that - not because he is a conservative but because he is at his core a transactional politician.
I strongly dislike Trump as a person, because he is a moral reprobate. But as President, he has given us good policy, especially on abortion and religious liberty. And the 2020 general election isn’t about who we wish the choices were, but about the two choices we have in front of us.
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Our family just finished spending a few months through 1/2 Kings and 1/2 Chronicles. We spent no small amount of time on these themes.
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Among the many criticisms of Trump, I find this one the most puzzling. Politicians have been notorious liars for my whole life. I am old enough to remember “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Somehow they want to tally Trump’s “lies,” many of which are mere hyperbole and puffery? Please.
Perhaps you saw her looks as “compassionate.” I find her an extraordinarily unlikeable personality, much of which seems to come down to the various looks on her face. Perhaps she is just a worse actor than the rest.
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A British joke from the 1960s:
Q. How do you know when a politician is lying?
A. Their lips move.
On a separate note, each candidate’s choice of Veep also matters.
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But did Manasseh tweet, “Happy High Places Pride Month” and then promote Asherah decriminalization at the UN? There’s a difference in ignoring evil and promoting evil.
I do see Trump standing up for religious liberty, and I do agree that we’re not condoning his character by voting for him. So, I’m looking for an excuse to vote for him rather than going third party or abstaining, but I’m really struggling to get over this hump.
Looking back, I’m ashamed that I voted for the cult member Romney (worse than a pagan) because of my fear of Obama. It was like doing evil that good may come.
I didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, because I thought he’d be liberal. Instead, by God’s mercy, he has been maybe the most conservative president since Reagan. But dang if he doesn’t have to throw the proverbial turd in the punch bowl by self-promoting as “most gay-friendly president ever”.
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I strongly dislike Trump as a person, because he is a moral reprobate.
Would it be fair to say that he is our reprobate?!
I know you will find it shocking that I strongly disagreed with this piece (sorry Pastor Tim).
So I agree that President Trump, as a transactional politician, has done a better job of fulfilling some of his promises than many who have come before him. However, it isn’t at all difficult to find why he is seen as a liar.
- President Trump told lawyers in a deposition that his personal wealth fluctuates based on how he feels.
- He once used money from his own charity, to anonymously purchase a portrait of himself, which he then got on Twitter to brag about how high the purchase price was.
- He once had a scam going where he pretended to be his own PR rep so he could call up newspaper reporters and brag on himself.
- He says in an interview in 2016 that he can promise that Putin will not go into Ukraine. The interviewer incredulously responds that Putin is in Russia at that moment. Then candidate Trump didn’t even bat an eye. “Well, he is in one way but not in another”.
- He has publicly denied ever calling John McCain a “loser”, while it is quite easy to find the videos of him saying exactly that.
These are just the childishly simple lies that I can recall off the top of my head, without resorting to google. Are political class are full of liars. Pence lies, Harris lies, Obama lied, Bush lied. But I find it staggering for someone to believe that the used car salesman and reality star of our national discourse, who’s history is one long string of cons, is now “restoring truth and honesty to our national discourse”.
We have reason to thank God for the SCOTUS appointments, the abortion restrictions, the defunding of PP, and other victories for conservatives. We have reason to mourn at the unqualified support that so many have given to man who has been a paragon of immorality for decades. The accusations of hypocrisy by our enemies take on far more credibility and it appears we are willing to disregard virtue and morality as requisites for support when they cease to be useful.
Have we forgotten that morals, honesty, and virtue always place a man at a disadvantage when confronted with those who do not have the same scruples? This reality didn’t start in 2016, or 2008, or 1992. It has always been true. “He that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey”. But I don’t see how things have suddenly gotten so bad that we no longer need to hold to God’s standard, and I certainly don’t understand why silencing our voice of warning when our nation is led by a man who publicly supports sodomy, and “homosexual mirage”, and is a living paragon of all we mourn in our culture.
Disregarding a consistent standard may seem to pay off in the short term. It’s certainly worked well for the Republican Party and many of our most cherished policy objectives over the past four years. But unless I am misunderstanding the times and scriptures warnings about the folly of pride, and the danger of trusting “Egypt the broken reed”, the conservative movement is headed for a reckoning of biblical proportions. In one sense, I sincerely hope I’m wrong. Pastor Tim, I have every reason to believe from what I have read and seen of your ministry, that your wisdom is greater than I mine, and if I am mistaken to a comical degree, I will take my medicine. Humble pie is spiritually healthy.
But if not, payday is coming, and it won’t be pretty.
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What we need to do in order to get over the hump is deepen our commitment to transactional politics.
We have already decided that President’s profoundly disgusting and immoral behavior is fine, so long as he doesn’t do it while currently in the Oval Office. No issue with making incestuous comments about his daughter, as long as it was a few years ago. No problems hanging out and defending a man later found to be a pedophile, so long as it was long ago and now he is supporting the right policy objectives.
But now we must decide that it is fine for him loudly support homosexuality and perversion, so long as he is an outspoken (if deeply hypocritical) opponent of abortion. No need for him to actually live in a way that his opposition is framed by a lifestyle that rebukes the evils of the sexual revolution, as Mike Pence has.
We must understand the transaction in such a way that we will surrender nearly any issue of Biblical morality, so long as we win on abortion. Winning will require a singleminded focus, such that we are willing to give up all we hold dear, so long as we get this one victory.
Victory of that sort looks a lot like defeat.
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I don’t really understand the grief that President Trump is getting on the issue of homosexuality. It’s precisely because the man is deeply hypocritical.
I look at his record on issues related to sexuality and say with confidence that he has not only been better than the Democrats that are the “other choice,“ but that he has been better than any Republican who held the office during my lifetime. And this, in spite of the fact that he says the opposite.
This was a deep surprise to me. Like another commenter here, I also fully expected him to be a liberal New Yorker in office. He has done anything but that.
As a matter of fact, it is not because of any hope I have that he will get the win on abortion—I have none—but rather because of the broadness of his work against liberalism that I fully intend to vote for him for the first time this year.
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The only specific response I can think of in this context is his pressure on the UN to decriminalize homosexuality in other nations. I will look into it more.
Beyond President Trump’s many personal moral failings, it seems that he is his own worst enemy and foolishly shoots himself in the foot countless times. Despite the Establishment opposition, I have the impression that if Trump had more discipline, he could have been more effective in accomplishing his goals and ensuring his re-election. Moreover, it seems clear that the majority of his supporters do so in spite of the man rather than because of the man.
The fact that a man of such character and lack of political connections could rise to the highest office in the nation indicates to me that there is a gigantic constituency that has not been served by either the establishment Democrats or Republicans. It’s been an electoral gold mine waiting to be tapped, but no one did so until a joke candidate descended an elevator in NYC. Think about what could have happened if a more disciplined and connected Republican had spoken and acted as Trump has, without all of the own-goals. It would have lit fire to a winning coalition, and yet no Republican before Trump did so, and it appears unlikely that any Republican after Trump will do so, either. But why? This has been the biggest mystery of the past four years for me.
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I think that the President got much of his support out of the “politics of resentment”, analogous to what led to the UK exiting the European Union. There were and are a huge number of voters who felt isolated from the political process, especially in the Democrat white blue-collar constituency; who then voted for President Trump because he connected with them where Hillary did not. A similar example would be Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” where he picked up the South by appealing to that part of the Democratic vote which felt left behind by the changes in that party at that time.
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I can see the Christian support for President Trump backfiring, and in a number of ways.
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I suspect that if the current president had more discipline, or any other of the positive character traits we desire in a leader, he’d be less likely to accomplish the good things he’s already done.
I wish Luther were a more tactful theologian, but I suspect a more tactful man wouldn’t have broken with Rome as he did. John Calvins are relatively rare.
And Ted Cruz seemed to be a pretty good candidate in the run up to 2016 (at least from my vantage point). No such coalition materialised around him.
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George Bernard Shaw, if not with Luther directly in mind:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man”.
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