I'm not ignorant of the very public exodus Bible teacher Beth Moore conducted when leaving the Southern Baptist Convention last year. Though not a follower of Moore, and not a Southern Baptist, I don't think I was the only Christian that cringed watching the doctrinal and political squabbles that became a salacious social-media spectacle.
(Count that as exhibit 862,199 as to why social media is the devil's playpen.)
Even though I am fully aware of last year's gratuitous acrimony between Moore and many of the conservative voices within the Convention, I always hope that discretion will prove the better part of valor and Christian people will learn not to continue stirring the pot just for the sake of riling up rivals.
Against those very hopes, the aforementioned Beth Moore trotted out onto the streets of social media after the Iowa caucuses to express her moral disdain for Republicans who support Trump. She wrote,
Despite my agreements with some of what Moore said, there was something that was breathtakingly absent from her remarks. I searched everywhere in her statement and it wasn't there. I even went into her timeline a bit to make sure I hadn't overlooked it, and it doesn't appear I'll find it there either.
What was missing from her post was any balance between a bad Republican candidate and a morally-stunted opposition party. I am totally supportive of Christians who are ethically opposed to their brethren's embrace of Donald J. Trump, but I am bewildered by Christians who are not even more vehemently opposed to their brethren's potential embrace of any Democrat-Party alternative.
Perhaps Beth Moore thinks it goes without saying. It doesn't.
In a two-party system, the majority of politically engaged Americans will assume that if you're telling them that one party's de facto nominee should be morally disqualified, you are telling them to support the other party's de facto nominee. Any Christian of conscience must provide clarity.
Christian commentator Allie Beth Stuckey did precisely that in rebuking Moore's oversight:
Where is your lament for our current political leadership? The Biden administration is objectively wicked. Destructive. Oppressive. Idolatrous. Bloodthirsty. Foolish. It actively promotes the butchering of children both in and outside the womb. Its support of abortion and genital mutilation are sufficient reasons to publicly condemn Biden and his cohort, and yet, at least from what I've seen, you haven't. The faults in the White House go beyond bullying. The policies it pushes cause chaos, death, and decay.
Every single city dominated by these progressive policies has been destroyed, Beth. Violence, drugs, inescapable poverty - all enabled and exacerbated by laws enacted in the name of progressive compassion.
As I wrote not long ago, there is no justification for "a cowardice or compromise that suggests a moral equivalence in all candidates, causes, and parties because, ‘Well, they're all corrupt.'"
Criticize Trump until the cows come home, but if you're doing so on the basis of your Christian convictions, save nothing short of equivalent righteous anger for a more overt evil - policies that deliberately push chaos, death, and decay - being facilitated by the Left.
