Were the elections a win or a disaster for evangelicals? Welcome to the Case for Life podcast. We’ll take that question up in a moment. Meanwhile, glad to have you with us today and I hope you’ll join our social media sites, like us there, share them with friends, and get the word out about this podcast. Well, there’s a lot of buzz, as everybody knows, about what happened last Tuesday. Donald Trump will be returning to the White House. The Republicans will have a clear majority in the Senate and may hold on to their majority in the House. There’s a handful of races still being determined. But one thing is clear. This was a devastating defeat for Democrats. There’s no getting around that. even though it was a devastating defeat for Democrats, there are some people claiming this was not a win for evangelicals. And I’ll get into that in a moment. Let me give you just my informal take on the whole night. I’m just going to kind of talk here about it. I think there was good, and there’s some other things that aren’t so good that we have to look at. Let’s talk first about the good. The first thing I would point to is that evangelical voters did not listen to their theological betters who scorned them for supporting a guy like Donald Trump. People like Russell Moore, David French, Curtis Chang, Tim Alberta and others, who incessantly lectured us and said, you are defying your witness for Christ if you support the GOP and Donald Trump. You are giving the world the wrong message. There will be people who leave the faith because you support this man. His character disqualifies him, and all you’re doing is hurting the cause of Christ. And you’re not helping advance anything good. The vast majority of evangelicals saw right through that nonsense. In fact, what was the net result of all the condemnation and scorn hurled at evangelical voters by guys like French Moore, Tim Alberta, and others I mentioned a moment ago? The net result was support from evangelicals for Donald Trump went up, not down. Their efforts failed miserably. And quite frankly, that’s the thing I’m happiest about, that these elite evangelicals who want to scorn us and lecture us about what’s right and what’s wrong, and yet they don’t have it in them to roundly criticize a Democrat candidate for president who was sworn to promote evil wholesale. And what most evangelicals realized, and I think this is very good news, Is that they had a duty to limit evil and promote good insofar as possible. That there would be no kingdom of God on earth. We aren’t gonna get that until the new earth, okay? Let’s just settle that one. There will never be a time where Christ is embodied as the perfect head of state until the new earth, okay? Until then, we are always going to have sinful men and women who are in leadership politically. And they will, to one degree or another, promote good or promote evil. And as Christians, we have an obligation to limit evil and promote good as much as we can given current political realities. The vast majority of evangelicals understood that. And what they did is they went to the polls last Tuesday and they said, okay, I don’t have a choice for perfection here, but I do have an option to limit evil. And they realized something else as well. They really weren’t voting for a king. In a constitutional republic like ours, the sovereign is the people. Which means God is going to hold us responsible, like he does in Scripture, for how we help the poor, the vulnerable, and those most at risk for being exterminated. I can’t think of any group more at risk, of course, than unborn human beings. Well, in a constitutional republic where people are the sovereign, the scriptures that apply to God saying to leaders, I’m holding you responsible for upholding justice, apply to us more than they do Donald Trump. So evangelicals recognized that they had a moral obligation To promote good insofar as possible, and they took that up, and they showed up on election day. Now, if you listen to a lot of these evangelical elites, they will make the claim, oh, this was just a bunch of angry nationalists going out there and trying to prove that they love Donald Trump more than they love Jesus, or they love America more than they love heaven. That’s all nonsense. No, what they realized was they’re tired of their kids being told in school that they have to embrace a woke worldview or a trans worldview. They were tired of the left shoving this ideology down their throat, and they knew that a Harris presidency would make it even more so that way, and they rejected it. They were tired of paying through the nose for simple things like groceries and gasoline and being lectured about the kinds of cars that they drive. And they decided, you know what? We don’t have to listen to a bunch of academic elites and political elites and popular Uh, entertainers telling us how we ought to live. We can make these choices for ourselves in a free nation where liberty is one of the primary values we recognize. And they did that. They went to the polls, they exercised their right to vote, and if people have their nose been out of shape because of the result, I say too bad. Some of the things I heard just after the election, I tuned into some of the podcasts and some of the writings of people on the evangelical left, and they were saying things like this. Oh, if you’re happy about what happened in the election, you’ve just proven that you’ve made politics an idol. Okay, that is complete garbage. It is not making something an idol to rejoice that evil was lessened and good was promoted to some degree. That’s biblically appropriate, to be glad that evil took a hit. That’s not a bad thing. We were told that we were going to harm our witness for Christ by voting for Trump. And therefore, if we’re happy that he won, we’re really going to give a bad cultural witness. This is what just puzzles me about this. And again, I’m just free talking here today, kind of off script. Why is it that Donald Trump’s character is an impediment to the gospel, but not Kamala Harris’s character that is sworn to kill unborn human beings, sworn to promote gay marriage and transgenderism wholesale? That’s not a character problem, but Donald Trump’s mean tweets are. Look, I get it. I’m fine if you want to criticize Donald Trump and say, look, don’t confuse him As a believer who’s walking in a sanctified state. I get that. I don’t rejoice that Donald Trump got elected. I’m not rejoicing that we now have a believer in the White House. We don’t. I don’t think Donald Trump is a believer. In fact, I have pretty good reason to suspect he is not. However, I do think we have someone who at some level will lessen evil. And I’m not wholesale on board with him. His evolved position on abortion is deplorable, and I’ve been very public about that and even taken heat from some Trump supporters because I was honest enough to say, look, this guy does not have a pro-life worldview, and I don’t think he could argue for the pro-life position if put on the spot. He still has a functionally pro-choice worldview, but he will do things that will limit the evil of abortion, and here’s how. Number one, I suspect that day one in office, he will cut federal overseas funding for abortion. This is something that happens every time a Republican takes the office. Overseas funding for abortion is cut immediately, which I’ll say saves millions of lives overseas. I still think President Trump will appoint the same kind of judges he did in his first term, and his advisors will encourage him to do that. So that means we’ll get justices who are strict constructionists, who look at the Constitution and say, what does it say, not what do we want it to say. So that’s a good thing. That’s a good thing for the Republic, and I think we can rejoice at that. I also think that President Trump will stop and veto any attempt by Congress, should the Democrats get control of it again, to have a federal abortion law that mirrors Roe v. Wade. I think he is sworn to Let the states hammer this out, and I’ve talked in previous podcasts about why abortion really should be a federal level. We should have a federal law protecting the unborn because the unborn have a natural right to life, and natural rights are something the federal government ought to recognize and protect. They are pre-political. They arise from our nature as humans, not from the creation of statutory law by the state. However, I do think Donald Trump will respect states that want to ban abortion. He’s not going to try to override that with a federal law that makes abortion permissible. So that’s a way he will limit evil. Uh, Yeah, I’m troubled. He’s wrong on IVF. He’s wrong on saying, look, this just needs to be a state issue. But I do think it’s better than Kamala Harris, who would have promoted the evil of abortion wholesale. And I’m sorry, groups like Evangelicals for Harris and others who tried to make this phony argument that she’s the true pro-life candidate, because if you look at all these other issues, helping poor families with tax increases on the rich, Promoting more aid overseas to developing nations. All the other things they listed there as somehow being morally equivalent to the issue of abortion. And their argument was, well, Kamala’s pro-life on all these other issues, we can overlook the fact that she’s going to promote killing babies wholesale. As we have said many times on this podcast, not all issues are morally equivalent. There is a difference in the kind of evil being done. The United States choosing not to invest in a developing nation may in fact be a good thing. If anything, it’s a contingent evil for the U.S. not to give money to a developing poor country, meaning it may be wrong to do so if our reasons are spiteful or vindictive. But it may be right if there’s a decision made that this really won’t help that country in the long term. So there can be a good faith debate about foreign aid to developing countries. But what good faith debate is there about intentionally killing an innocent human being? And this is where a lot of the leftist evangelicals got it wrong. They lumped all these issues together into one moral stew of equivalency and said, well, you know, we can support Kamala because after all, she’s good on all these other so-called pro-life issues. That’s just bogus. Intrinsic evils are wrong on the face of it. Things like rape, murder, abortion, intentionally killing the innocent. These are things that can never be justified. And yet we’re being told to view other issues as morally equivalent to those intrinsic evils, and that just didn’t fly with the American public, and I’m glad. Evangelicals were able to see through that, and I’m grateful for that. So if you’re an evangelical and you’re happy about the election results, you should be. Go ahead and take a victory lap. It’s okay to celebrate. Now, don’t go mock your neighbors. Don’t go mock your friends who voted differently than you did. I would not, for example, walk across the street to a neighbor of mine who I know is a Democrat. He had his signs out for Harrison Waltz. I had mine out for Trump. We get along. We will continue to get along. And he is my neighbor, and I have a duty to seek his welfare and to seek his flourishing by loving him the way God would have me love my neighbor. And I will do that, which means I’m not going to rub his nose in this, but Just because I won’t rub his nose in it does not mean I can’t be happy personally that the election turned out the way it did. Evil was limited. I think America was spared. And quite honestly, my own take, God was merciful to us. We didn’t deserve his mercy in limiting the evil that will be limited with a Trump presidency. But God nevertheless extended that mercy. But isn’t that what he always does? Extends grace and mercy to us who are so, Undeserving. We are. That’s the gospel, and I think we saw a reflection of God’s mercy in this election result. Okay, so that’s the good news, that we saw some evil limited, and for me, again, seeing evangelical voters reject evangelical elite leftists who’ve been lecturing them nonstop for 4 years about how awful they are because they support limiting the evil done insofar as possible. That’s good news. But I am concerned about some things, and I want to talk about that now. I was wrong on how the election was going to turn out. I was convinced that the culture, by and large, had adopted or absorbed, if you will, a leftist worldview on everything from abortion to gay marriage to wokeness to economics. And I was wrong about that. In fact, I will owe a couple of friends a steak dinner who we had a friendly gentleman’s bet about this. And I’m glad to be wrong, but here’s what I think I was right about. While I was wrong that the culture as a whole has, in wholesale fashion, adopted a leftist worldview. I was right that our primary problem on abortion is worldview. And here’s why. Even in states where Donald Trump won convincingly—Ohio, Missouri, Montana, and others— When the issue of abortion has been put to the people for a vote, we have lost. Here’s the standing right now. We are 3 for 14. We’ve won 3 times when it’s been put to the public for a vote, and lost 14 times, and many of those times it was in deep red states. Uh, so, we have a worldview problem. Now people say, well, we won in Florida, and I’m glad we did. We had to win in Florida. If we had lost the referendum there, where there’s a sixty percent threshold you have to cross to get something approved on the ballot, I think the pro-life movement would have despaired beyond repair. Thankfully, we held off that challenge, but here’s the bad news in Florida. 57 percent of voters in Florida Voted for a constitutional right to abort. Now, what’s interesting about this, Florida has been turning redder and redder in every successive election. In fact, I saw some numbers that in this election, Republican voters increased by eight hundred thousand over the last election. That’s just unbelievable. Florida is no longer a battleground state. It is reliably Republican. And yet, even in a state that is growing more and more red, 57 percent of voters who also voted for Donald Trump en masse voted for abortion to be a constitutional right. That’s a big problem. Now, I’ll tell you why we won in Florida, in part. One of the reasons we were able to hold off that challenge was we had that 60 percent threshold. That was helpful. But in addition to that, our organization produced some great videos that were used and shared widely in churches and online. We had people like Tony Dungy, the great NFL coach, come forward with a great video he did for us telling people why he was voting against Amendment 4 in Florida. And I think we had some pastors step up in ways we hadn’t seen before. That was very helpful to us. that and other groups did some great work down there. I think of my friend Mark Harrington at Created Equal, my friend Jason Storms. These guys were working in Florida for weeks, doing all they could, knocking on doors, getting out the vote. And that made a difference. They understood that we had to make Florida ground 0. We had to win there, and we did, and for that I’m grateful. But we lost in Missouri, we lost in Arizona, we lost in other states where abortion was put to the public, and these states went red, but they voted to have abortion written into their state constitutions. That’s a worldview problem, men and women, and we’re not going to solve that with slick marketing, Or getting people to like us more. I want to tell you something. We’ve got to get past this idea that if we’re just nice enough, we’ll be okay and people will come around to our view. No, they won’t. In fact, I love to ask people when they say, well, you know why, when they say to me, I don’t like pro-lifers, and I say, why not? Well, you’re too mean. You only care about one group, the unborn. You don’t care about people that are already here. Now, there’s all kinds of logical fallacies with that claim that we’ve dealt with before, but I always ask a follow-up question. I say, tell me, pro-lifers do everything you want, we take on every social cause under the sun, We care for the poor, we care for immigrants, we help refugees, and we devote our resources equally to those problems as we do saving the unborn. Will you become pro-life on abortion? One hundred percent of the time, the answer is no. They love abortion, and this is just an ad hominem attack they’re launching against us. We could be as likable as the Paddington Bear, and it isn’t going to mean a hill of beans to people in the culture that don’t agree with us on abortion. They are set in their worldview way of thinking, and we are going to have to challenge them at the worldview level, and we’re going to have to convince people that are more in the middle that those that are hardcore pro-abortion are wrong. That’s a task we’re going to have to take on. So I was right that the culture is not with us on the issue of abortion, but I was wrong that in general they’ve largely absorbed the leftist worldview. It’s obvious they have not. I was convinced that people would not vote their pocketbook. They would vote their worldview. But you know what? At the end of the day, apparently it was true. When you’re paying way more for your groceries than you used to, when you can’t afford gas for your car, when you can’t afford insurance, when you’re not making enough money to keep up with inflation, and the party in power has done nothing to address these issues other than gaslight you and tell you that it’s not as bad as you think it is, It’s not surprising the public revolted, and I’m glad they did, because economically, I think we will flourish better under the incoming administration rather than the one that we’ve just had. And by the way, that should be a concern of Christians. We should want an economy that lifts the most people out of poverty, and I’m going to tell you what does that. Government programs are not what lifts the majority of people out of poverty. In fact, I would argue it keeps a lot of people in poverty. What lifts people out of poverty more than any charity, more than any government program, are market economies that rise the tide of all boats. You know the old saying, a rising tide lifts all boats? When you allow for wealth creation, everyone benefits. It’s simply not true that when people profit, they only do so on the backs of the poor. That is a Marxist view, not a biblical view. A biblical view says we should want everyone to flourish, and we should be committed to human flourishing at every level, including the economic level. I want poor people to succeed, but I want them to succeed in the best way possible, Not through a government handout, not by stealing from one group that produced it and arbitrarily forcing them to give it to someone else that the government deems more worthy of it. I don’t think that’s a Christian worldview, and Christians are right to question the Marxist premise that the only way we show concern for the poor is to support big government programs. I love what J. Wesley Richards says. It’s one thing to have a heart for the poor, but do we have a mind for the poor? That is, do we really want to think intelligently about lifting them out of poverty, or do we just want to feel good that, boy, we soaked it to the rich. That’s a good thing. Now the poor will be better. Oh, really? How many social problems have gotten better with government spending? You might want to take a look at that. The answer is pretty dismal, and I think you know that. So, this has been a good election cycle. I’m happy, but we as Christians still have a duty to hold government to moral account. That’s our job as Christians. And guess what? When this new administration does things that do not line up with biblical truth, yes, we’re going to criticize them. We’re not going to just look the other way. that doesn’t mean we can’t be happy that good has been advanced and evil has receded as a result of this election. We’re still going to do our job being watchmen on the wall and keeping an eye out for things that go against a biblical worldview. But it’s okay to be happy, Christian, that evil was limited and good was promoted insofar as was possible. Again, please visit us on social media. Like our site, share this podcast with others so the word can get out, and if you have not yet gotten a copy of my new edition of The Case for Life, the second edition, I encourage you to do so. A lot of what we talk about in here is laid out in even more detail in the book. I encourage you to get a copy if you haven’t already. Thanks for joining us today. Let’s pray that our nation moves forward with good.