A Parable for the Election

I present the following parable to promote understanding and grace. I composed it for that purpose and that purpose alone.

• I did not compose it to direct, shape, inform, or change anyone's planned vote in the upcoming election.
• I did not compose it to tell you how I will vote in the upcoming election, although I can tell you that I will not be voting for either of the pro-choice candidates.
• I did not compose it to stir up controversy, although I resign myself to the fact that controversy will inexorably come as day follows night.
• I did not even compose it to defend the rationales, ideas, and characterizations that will appear below as accurate or helpful (nor to malign them as inaccurate or unhelpful).

Rather, knowing that large numbers of self-styled Evangelicals will vote for Donald Trump in November, I anticipate the think-pieces that will be written in the aftermath (no matter the election's outcome) lambasting or lampooning those believers who will do so, accusing them of never having really cared about the lives of babies murdered by abortion, etc. Many of these jeremiads will display little willingness to try to understand why, even when he stabs Evangelicals in the back, Donald Trump remains the most appealing candidate for many of my friends who are Evangelicals.

And so, I offer you a parable of a married couple with three children.

They were married in 1942, just before he shipped off to war. Their first child—a son— was born while Dad was fighting at El Guettar in North Africa. America won, and Dad returned home. The firstborn son grew up, excelled in school, was the catcher for the high school baseball team, and fell in love with a high school sweetheart. His parents loved him and were proud of him. Following in his dad's footsteps, he enlisted in the Army straight out of high school. He went missing in action in Vietnam, and they never heard from him again.

Back in 1945, when Dad came home from Europe at the end of World War II, the family soon welcomed a second son. To be honest, he found it difficult to live in the shadows of his older brother. His grades weren't quite as good; his athleticism wasn't quite as exceptional. It all became worse when his older brother went missing, presumably dead, as a war hero. How could he possibly measure up to a shrine—a martyr. So, maturing in the early 1970s, he fell into alcohol, marijuana, womanizing, and a life of wanton abandon. He never finished college. He held some jobs, but never any plan so grandiose as to be called a career. He eventually came to a balance where he earned just enough and drank just little enough to survive.

But he loved his parents, this second son. The line between love and manipulation was difficult to discern sometimes, to be sure. But he showed up. He apologized after fights and failures. He needed them, and they loved to be needed. He was, in many ways, the repudiation of all of the values they had taught him, but he never explicitly repudiated those values all the way. He just never quite lived out those values. Nevertheless, they could not help but love him.

Just a year younger than him was the final child—a daughter. She was the apple of her Daddy's eye and the spitting image of her mother. Studious and hardworking, she excelled at school. She saw first-hand how her parents grieved over the misbehavior that their middle child so enthusiastically pursued, and she was, by firm resolve, nothing like him. She was chaste. She never drank to excess and never experimented with drugs. She was studious and hardworking, and her classes readily succumbed to her academic regimen.

This youngest daughter became the first in the family to earn a college degree, having earned a scholarship at the state university. She made the Dean's List. She dated a promising college peer who was as level-headed and responsible as she was. This was truly an exemplary child.

While in school in the late 1970s, this daughter took a required class in Sociology from a professor who was enamored with the Frankfort School's early Critical Theory. The moment was ripe to convince students to be suspicious of power structures—the Vietnam War had just ended and Watergate had been the biggest story in the newspaper during the formative years of these college students. And so, the couple's youngest child excelled at the University and became a thoroughgoing critic of American military power, white racism in the 1960s, and the general way (she came to believe) in which her parents' generation had ruined the world.

Here you have them: The three children of this couple. One is dead but forever alive in their memories, one is a perennially self-absorbed screw-up they could justifiably have disowned years ago, and the third is a successful, moral, hardworking success story who just happens to think that her parents and her deceased brother are basically Hitler.

From which child will they feel the greatest betrayal? The one who misbehaves, or the one who repudiates the things for which they have sacrificed the most? To which child will they give the most of their time, their hearts, their money, and their support?

The Republican Party has manipulated Evangelicals for years and has failed to deliver on their promises time after time. Many Republican leaders live a lifestyle that is antithetical to the lifestyle prescribed by Evangelical Christianity. And yet, even with all of that being true, they have never told Evangelicals that Evangelicals were the source of all of the problems in American life.

On the other hand, the Democratic Party has, in the minds of many Evangelicals, called Evangelicals deplorables, racists, ignoramuses, fascists, and hypocrites. Many Evangelicals get the feeling that Democrats view Evangelicals as The Enemy. They have repeatedly threatened, by way of things like the curiously (mis)named "Do No Harm Act," the very liberty of Evangelicals to preach and practice their faith whenever it comes into conflict with their radical sexual agenda.

Some Evangelicals will practice some "tough love" this November and will withhold their vote from a now-pro-choice National GOP. Very few Evangelicals will vote for Vice-President Harris (although they few may make a lot of noise), but some will vote third-party or not at all. Others, even if they feel like they ought to be tough-love conservatives, will not be able to find the strength within themselves to keep from pulling the lever for Republican candidates. After all, the Texas GOP's party platform is not pro-choice at all, so it is technically inaccurate to declare that the Republican Party en masse has abandoned the Pro-Life cause. So, some genuinely Pro-Life Evangelicals will stick with the Republican Party in the hope that the party will come around to Evangelical sensibilities eventually.

Even if you think the Evangelicals who still vote for President Trump are foolish, I hope you'll show them a little sympathy. These are matters of the heart, and life sometimes forces difficult choices upon us.