Daffey Thoughts
Attorney David French at The National Review explains. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one who thinks that Christians in America are suffering as much as their counterparts in China or the Islamic world. Far from it. And yet, the trick is to not wait until it becomes that bad to care. Many are rightly shocked at the number of Evangelicals who threw standards out the window to support Trump. And yet, be careful. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If you were worried about the erosion of public displays of non-progressive religious practice a year ago, you still should be.
As a dear priest friend from West Africa asked our parish one Sunday: ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Don’t we know how precious is our religious freedom, and yet we’re feeling the need to either change and modify our beliefs to fit the culture, or accept being shoved into the closets and the catacombs. Those who shrug and say Americans don’t have anything to worry about, especially if only a few years ago they were yelling ‘Resist the Tyranny’ in response to such developments as the HHS mandate, might need to be the ones we suspect.
Perhaps those Evangelicals flocked to Trump only because the choice wasn’t between religious tolerance and religious bigotry, but between which religion deserves the bigotry. And rather than embrace the modern tendency to trash our own demographics, they decided that if push comes to shove, it will be their own they protect. Rejecting the philosophy of modern martyrdom, where by the degree to which I’ll tolerate the suffering of others for my opinions have I displayed my righteousness, they chose to take a stand, however flawed, for the well being of their posterity in faith and practice.
Who knows. There are probably so many reasons the worst candidate in history lost to Donald Trump, you can’t narrow it down to one. But this probably isn’t too far off the mark.
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