Putting the Protest in Protestant
Recent protests along with some of the demands of protesters, no matter how peaceful, may make look Joe Biden look much more attractive than say those on the Left who don’t seem capable of providing order and stability.
Consider Al Mohler’s willingness to defend support for President Trump in a recent New Yorker interview:
Yes. President Trump is a huge embarrassment. And it’s an embarrassment to evangelical Christianity that there appear to be so many who will celebrate precisely the aspects that I see Biblically as most lamentable and embarrassing. So I have to make a distinction between voting for a candidate and rationalizing for a candidate, much less being enthusiastic about what I would see as the character faults of a candidate. I intend to vote for Donald Trump in 2020, but my shift is from reluctantly not voting for him in 2016 to what you might call reluctantly voting for him in 2020, and hoping for his reëlection, because the alternative is increasingly unthinkable. But I will not become an apologist for the misbehavior of the President and for what I see as glaring deficiencies in his private and public character.
What stands out in that response is the idea that a political candidate is unthinkable. The Capital Hill Autonomous Zone has perhaps redefined the unthinkable, as in the new normal for unthinkable. If so, then Biden becomes thinkable, especially when you compare him to Black Lives Matter, the activist organization. Here’s how Mohler recently parsed the difference between supporting the statement, “black lives matter,” with the institution, Black Lives Matter:
Because of the link between the Movement for Black Lives and critical race theory, as well as intersectionality, it is not hard to understand why the movement is connected to the sexual and gender revolutions. What binds them all together is the pursuit of liberation. As its leaders stated, the movement seeks liberation from the “Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” In fact, Western civilization as a whole, according to the leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, represents an oppressive system that must be destroyed. The language of its affirmations and beliefs—from “cisgender” and “Black trans folk” to “transgender brothers and sisters”—points to just how comprehensively the movement is governed by identity politics, grounded in a worldview contrary to the convictions that guided the Civil Rights Movement.
That same sort of argument cannot be made against either Biden or the Democratic Party. As hostile as Democrats may be to certain conservative or Christian convictions, simply by being part of a political process and following the norms of the political (trigger warning) system, Democrats are not in favor of destroying the American nation or its institutions.
Which could mean that is as possible to think as pragmatically about Biden as Mohler is willing to go with Trump. Back to the New Yorker interview:
It seems to me that your argument for Trump is essentially a utilitarian one. You’re saying, I don’t like this guy. He’s not a good person. He’s really bad. But the issues before us are too important to vote for someone else.
Well, there is certainly a pragmatic, utilitarian dimension to it, but that’s not how I approach moral questions fundamentally. A political question is a bit different in that I’m presented with a binary choice between two candidates, and, even if there are third-party candidates, or you can write in your cat, the reality is that, given the Electoral College, the result is going to be one of those two candidates elected as President of the United States. So, in that situation, we’re forced into a calculus of greater loss, greater gain in the measurements of making a political decision. And, in that sense, once you’re into procedural democracy, you have to enter into some kind of utilitarian calculus, but you have to do so in such a way you keep your soul.
In the context of vandalism and calls for abrogating police forces, never before has the Democratic presidential nominee looked so reassuring.
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