News and opinion for the intentional conservative
“This election was not a race to the top on matters of personal integrity; as Al Mohler, the vocally anti-Trump president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, said during the campaign, if he were to support Trump, he would have to apologize to Bill Clinton, who he called out for sexual immorality in the ’90s.”
photo credit: Center for Investigative Reporting
Longer answer: I am going to do exactly what I would have done if Hillary Clinton had won, which is to keep writing my own material and posting articles from other solid sources. To keep trying to advance ideas of reasonableness, conservatism, and, most importantly, faith. To not give in to the thought that no one wants to hear those ideas. To not feel, as one journalist said last week, that I’m just “screaming into the void.” I know that I have been an encouragement to some of my readers, and I want to continue to have that role. I hope that I have helped at least a few people to think rather than just react. And it’s important to me personally to write about my thoughts and feelings, even if no one else reads what I say.
There seems to be an idea with some that winning the election automatically sanctifies Trump, but praying blindly is no better than voting blindly. “Oh God, open Donald Trump’s eyes to his own ignorance” would seem to me to be a good place to start. (And by the way–that horrible Barack Obama, who supposedly has waked up every morning for the past eight years wondering what he could do that day to bring about America’s ruin, is planning to meet more often with Trump than is usually the case with an outgoing and an incoming President, because he has realized how clueless Trump is.)
The election is not the Super Bowl.
Unlike that event, after which everybody goes home and no one’s life is particularly changed except for team members and those who won or lost money, we will be living with the consequences of Tuesday’s vote for many years to come.
So I thought, well, Trump started out his whole path to the Presidency by talking trash about Mexicans, so the Latino vote will come out strong against him. And he told African-Americans they had nothing to lose by voting for him, so they’ll tell him “yes, we do.” And he has insulted and degraded women, so they’ll hand him his hat. I’ll be able to say some variation of “the chickens have come home to roost.”
A couple of days ago a dear friend sent me a link to a sermon titled “The Continental Divide” by a Texas pastor named Tommy Nelson. I think he’s a committed Christian, and I paid him the compliment of listening to most of what he had to say. (I got through about 40 minutes of a 58-minute presentation.)
The article is by Ross Douthat, a young conservative writer whose books I now plan to read. Here’s a good representative section:
I’ll repeat here what I said in my e-mail (which went mostly to people who don’t read my publicly-posted stuff): Invest 20 minutes or so in reading this article, even if you’ve already voted or are completely committed to voting for Trump.