It was bound to happen, but it’s still sad — and ominous — to see.
The right was flirting with going down this road long before Donald Trump ever came down the escalator to announce his presidential run. Remember when government mandates were terrible, provided Barack Obama did them, but then we had to “save America” by electing Mitt Romney?
Mitt Romney
, also known as the guy who gave Obama his worst idea (Romneycare) before he even had it (Obamacare)?
As the whole culture is swallowed in the black hole of a Judges-esque amoral abyss, or maybe even a
Romans 1 judgment
, it is inevitable that an enterprise — politics — that even under the best of cultural conditions can become a hive of scum and villainy wouldn’t be able to hold the line when there is no plumb line.
The Democrats long ago created a political party built not on shared principles but on shared association. If you were a holy fire-breathing black pastor, you voted for the same candidates as the Rainbow Jihad. Not because of any shared principle, mind you, but out of recognition that you needed to share an association to gain the political power and access you believed were necessary to reward the faction you represent.
This explains why the likes of Thomas Sowell stopped being black and Dave Rubin stopped being gay. They both dared to claim identities copyrighted by Democrats without associating with them. Hence, rich white suburban kids are now free to lecture Sowell on institutional racism, and progressive monogamous heterosexuals feel entitled to quote Harvey Milk to Rubin.
But such idolatries tend to swing both ways.
This is also how we got black and brown voters to vote for an amendment in California, of all places, defending the biblical definition of marriage on the same day in 2008 that those same voters gave record support to Obama for president. Proposition 8 received more than 7 million votes — more than any Republican has ever received in Golden State history. That wouldn’t have happened without non-white Democrats crossing over to support the measure.
Never forget, the Lord chastens those He loves. So if there is a level of idolatry being rewarded that God doesn’t seem to be pruning, that is not a blessing.
In other words, we got people who would never vote for John McCain for president to support a ballot initiative that McCain himself thought was too right-wing. Make it make sense.
You can’t. Idolatry makes fools of us all.
And so those voters who overwhelmingly backed traditional marriage ushered into the White House the very same regime that would become the first to ever adorn that once venerable building in the colors of the Rainbow Jihad. Long after their votes for Proposition 8 and the traditional family were vanquished by the U.S. Supreme Court, their contradictory votes for the Sodom and Gomorrah candidate would remain steadfast. Such is life when you succumb to the idolatry of identity politics.
Identity politics, like all other forms of godlessness, is never satiated. It behaves like a swarm of locusts. Once unleashed, it will devour its intended target first. But with the Democrats’ fields now devoid of crops for the locusts to consume, they don’t just fly away content with their gizzards full. These are locusts, after all. All they know is consumption.
So the swarm recognized that there was a whole other field to plow through. And yes, there had been attempts to do so previously. But they were usually met with resistance once noticed. Yet swarms are persistent creatures. They will test your resolve, and nothing weakens one’s resolve more than desperation — whether that desperation’s source be craven (greed/ambition) or sincere (loss of your way of life).
And thus the Republican Party is now on the precipice of becoming an identity-based party itself. Maybe it’s already there.
What did new Speaker of the House Mike “Biblical Worldview” Johnson (R-La.) do just before he betrayed the base on the budget as his first official act? He went on national TV and enthusiastically endorsed Donald Trump for president. Why? Because he’s learned the game. If he affirms Trump, the issues no longer matter. Trump is the
only
issue.
Forever War Inc. globalist Lindsey “Grahamnesty” Graham (R-S.C.) has learned the same lesson. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the only member of House Republican leadership to vote to codify the destruction of marriage into federal law, learned it, too. Female impersonator Bruce Jenner is now a coveted Fox News contributor because he learned it as well.
How can you possibly assemble a coalition of an alleged biblical worldview guy, a psychologically damaged transvestite, a forever-war globalist, and someone who would permit the federal government to declare war on the same white evangelicals that vote for you in droves?
You cannot. Not if you have any shared principles. God’s word is clear: A house divided against itself cannot stand. This can only be done via the abandonment of principle and the adoption of a new paradigm based on shared association.
Otherwise known as identity politics.
So far in the 2024 presidential primary, Trump has told us we can’t be
pro-life
any more, admitted he’s only talking tough on the debt now because he’s not in office, isn’t sure whether
Jeffrey Epstein killed himself
, doesn’t know if
a man can become a woman
, says he’d arm Ukraine even more than Biden already has, and just last week
embraced a Black Lives Matter activist
because he said nice things about him.
Over the years, these were all things we allegedly felt very strongly about as a movement. But according to “
muh polls
,” we don’t feel strongly about anything more than we feel about Trump. Therefore, he is entitled to violate all of our orthodoxies and we are not permitted to hold him accountable should we want to remain in shared association.
Right before I sat down to write this, a pastor of my acquaintance — a man who participated in a closed-door meeting earlier this year with several other Christian leaders concerned about the godless drift in our culture — called me out on social media for pointing out Trump’s mounting heterodoxies. But it wasn’t to thank me for demanding that Trump better represent our principles. It was to scold me for “attacking” Trump by pointing these things out.
“We’re leading a movement back to God,” he told me. Which is what ultimately inspired me to write all of this.
Maybe this is the best we can do in our current sad spiritual state. For certain, the Trump presidency was very good before he permitted COVID-19 to wreck his presidency and our country. As much as his fundamental flaws annoy me, and even more his unwillingness to confront or acknowledge them, I sincerely wish Trump were still president today. The country was better off with him in the White House. If your vote in this primary simply comes down to that, I understand. On that, we agree. We were better off, and we have a shared principle.
But I tremble every time I search the Scriptures for “that’s the best we can do” and come up empty. God doesn’t seem to accept a certain level of idolatry. He hates it, in fact. He will prune it from within us, even painfully so, for the good of His children.
Never forget, the Lord chastens those He loves. So, if there is a level of idolatry being rewarded that God doesn’t seem to be pruning, that is not a blessing. Quite the opposite.