Bart Stinson
Our president, unfortunately, says a lot of things that aren’t true. Some of his misrepresentations are unintentional, because this is his first government job, and he just hasn’t given some of the issues much thought. But some are intentional and self-serving. Sometimes he’s obviously more interested in a snappy comeback to detractors than in self-criticism and painful disclosures.
His moral résumé isn’t the greatest although, at age 72, his sexual scandals are probably well behind him. (Only Joe Biden was still creeping young women out at that age.) But leftist churchmen and their atheist comrades consider stubborn Evangelical support for Trump the real scandal.
After all, the libertine arc of Trump’s sexual conduct bears some resemblance to Bill Clinton’s, minus the Democrat’s outright sexual assaults. Are we hypocritical to support a president who boasted in the Billy Bush tapes 13 years ago of kissing young women uninvited? (He never said he grabbed their private parts. Go back and listen carefully.)
Well, some of us are hypocrites, but most of us aren’t.
Some writers on the Left and the Right have observed the similarity of our public discourse to the scripted story lines of professional wrestling. In that line of business, the sympathetic characters are called “faces,” and the antagonistic, contentious bad-guy characters are called “heels.”
When businessman Donald Trump played a “face” role opposite World Wrestling Entertainment billionaire Vince McMahon several years ago, he must have noticed that “heels” have more fun. They don’t have to filter their comments, they don’t have to observe the conventional courtesies, and their incentives are to provoke controversy and outrage. Heels aren’t diplomats.
Heels have their fans, too. A sociologist writing in the New York Times described the role of the heel as emotional work. Wrestling fans aren’t idiots, any more than movie fans are. They know the experience is contrived, but they value the work that went into the representation and catharsis. They suspend disbelief in order to enter into the performer’s journey.
That’s fine for romantic comedies and fake wrestling grudge matches but, in policy and politics, innocent people get hurt when we stop caring about literal truth. The Kavanaugh hearings were the most recent demonstration of that. Honest people care about the truth, and all Evangelicals ought to be honest people. It’s hypocritical for an Evangelical to embrace falsehood.
However, nobody’s perfect. We live in a republic in which we have to select representatives most likely to implement our public policy views. We shouldn’t confuse elections with popularity contests, which are decided by other criteria.
We may coincidentally vote for the person we most admire, or the person who represents something we believe in, but that’s not how we should decide our vote. We are responsible for the policies that result from our vote.
It’s not hypocritical for an Evangelical to consider the likelihood that a candidate’s personal faults will or will not lead to harmful public policies. We do not have the luxury of holding out for a perfect exemplar of all the Christian virtues. We are obligated to focus on policy that is informed by Christian values, and which flawed candidate will best advance such policy.
I concede that Donald Trump fudges the truth. I met his second wife, a very nice woman, and I don’t admire what I’ve read about his conduct as a husband. But I recall two solid husbands – Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama – who were true to their wives but treacherous to their country. My hat’s off to them in their marital role, but I don’t get a vote on that. I only get to vote for presidents, not husbands.
Part of the reason I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976 was his rebuke to President Gerald Ford for flirting with negotiations to relinquish the Canal Zone to Panama. Candidate Carter said he would “never give up complete control or practical control” of the Canal Zone.
Then, promptly upon inauguration, he appointed Sol Linowitz and Ellsworth Bunker to negotiate a treaty to give the Canal Zone to Panama quickly, with a six-month deadline. That is an example of a lie about public policy, not personal matters. Today a Communist Chinese company has the management contract for the Panama Canal and its ports.
Jimmy Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, signed an immigration amnesty in 1986. It was part of a grand bargain that we were promised would include tighter border security and strict enforcement against employers of illegal aliens. That was a lie about policy.
Americans opposed amnesty for the invading illegal aliens, so the Senate renamed it. “We used the word ‘legalization,'” former Sen. Alan Simpson told National Public Radio, “and everybody fell asleep lightly for awhile, and we were able to do legalization.”
Americans (including National Farm Workers Association co-founder Cesar Chavez) complained about illegal aliens driving our wages down, but high-and-mighty elites like John McCain disparaged the work ethic of American labor and said we would not pick lettuce for fifty dollars an hour. Think tanks and academic faculties trotted out speakers to tell us we were imagining it and scapegoating, and that illegal aliens don’t deprive American workers of job opportunity. That was a lie about policy.
When President George H.W. Bush opened our market to the Chinese, we were told it would be reciprocal, that the Chinese would open their market to us. We were told it would inevitably corrode the Communist dictatorship and lead the Chinese into democracy. I’m not sure that was a lie, but it was definitely a disastrous falsehood.
The Chinese are still under a dictatorship, that is dictating terms to Google, to countries that depend on Chinese tourism, and to the Catholic Church. They are stealing our intellectual property and the government is preventing American penetration of the Chinese market. They manipulate the value of their currency to advantage their exports and to make our exports unaffordable in China. We have lost millions of manufacturing jobs to them and we’ll never get them back.
When candidate Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency, he said he was opposed to gay marriage. That was a lie about public policy. When he got into office his Department of Justice refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), although it is the role of the department to defend federal laws that are challenged in court.
When the Supreme Court overturned DOMA, a rainbow light show bathed the White House, the people’s house, to celebrate the Sodomite victory. President Obama called it a “victory for America.”
He said the Affordable Care Act (ACA) wouldn’t fund abortions. That was a lie about policy. Obamacare required insurers to contract with at least 588 Planned Parenthood and other providers who do abortions. It charged federal enrollees a mandatory surcharge to subsidize other women’s abortions. It paid Planned Parenthood directly to provide “navigators” to assist women who wanted to enroll in Obamacare.
Evangelicals don’t like being lied to, but we’re capable of distinguishing between lies that are personal and lies that result in policy. Donald Trump fares better in this analysis. Ironically, though, he gets in more trouble for telling the truth about policy (immigration, abortion, NATO, transgenders in the military, Chinese trade, etc.) than for lying.
Donald Trump is the best pro-life president in my lifetime, and I was still a teenager when the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade. He is better, in that respect, than Ronald Reagan. We have waited a long time for a president as committed to the unborn as Evangelicals are.
Several Republican presidents have let us down: Reagan appointed Kennedy and O’Connor to the Supreme Court; George H.W. Bush appointed Souter. Only George W. Bush rivals Donald Trump’s pro-life bona fides. I don’t intend to repudiate Donald Trump now.
Evangelicals are capable of keeping our eyes on the ball. We can disapprove of poor personal conduct without abandoning our own urgent agenda. We recognize Democrats’ attempts to distract and disrupt our support for an elected official who supports our policies, which they oppose. We can resist that, without hypocrisy.
