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Friday, August 31, 2018

Toward a Philosophy (Theology) of Christian Voting

The Scandal of the NeverTrump Evangelical Mind

This is an excellent analysis by Thomas Bradstreet, who examines some recent articles on why “NeverTrump” should be the default position for Christians, and shows clearly why this kind of thinking is so vacuous.

One of the things about politics (vs theology, I suppose), is that in theology we can often cite chapter and verse, or we can cite some prior theologian who said such-and-such, and that can be used as real evidence to support a position.

In the realm of politics, everyone has an opinion, but there are no chapters-and-verses (which aren’t taken out of context, or which aren’t subjected to the kind of rigorous thinking that you’re doing here). Rather:

What’s striking about the writing of [many of the] NeverTrump evangelicals generally is the utter absence of any theoretical discussion of what would seem to be a foundational issue, namely, how one would go about determining how one should vote. Why would a movement, one that so values truth and honesty, give so little attention to what is most necessary to prove their conclusions? The answer is this: NeverTrump evangelicals exist in a sea of rhetorical devices, tricks, moralisms, and pithy lines. The moment that they get precise they disclose their vacuous reasoning and the emotive foundations of their unthought and, in consequence, lose their cheering crowd.

It’s that same thing that we see a lot and have described in the past ... someone may be a competent scholar in one field, but that almost never seems to translate to being particularly insightful in a field that’s not that person’s field of scholarship.

This article, on the other hand, is a model of clear thinking that will benefit many evangelicals (I hope) as we move into the 2018 and 2020 election cycles.

(Thomas Bradstreet is a Ph. D. candidate in political science and teaches at a university in the southern United States.)

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