“Never Trump. This time Harris. Always Jesus.” These were the words not of Taylor Swift or Pete Buttigieg but of Ray Ortlund, a card-carrying member of “Big Eva,” in a recent Threads post.
In his opinion, following Jesus means rejecting Donald Trump and embracing Kamala Harris this election.
Ortlund is the founder of and pastor at Immanuel Church in Nashville, where Christianity Today editor-in-chief and outspoken ex-Southern Baptist Russell Moore is coincidentally the minister in residence. Ortlund recently joined a webinar from the left-wing Bible resource organization The After Party, a project of Moore, Curtis Chang, and their Never Trump buddy David French. So it was no surprise when French popped into Ortlund’s comments to say, “This is the way.”
When the post didn’t go over well, Ortlund deleted it but didn’t apologize. Instead of Sorry, I regret what I said, Ortlund opted for My critics “misinterpreted” me and I should have known they would. In fact, he even responded with a hearty “you are most welcome” to a commenter who thanked him for his original message.
Ortlund isn’t the first of his ilk to endorse Harris. French wrote an entire article from his perch at The New York Times titled “To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris,” in which he twisted in knots both the truth and himself to explain his impending vote for Kamala. Of course, every attack he hurls against Trump — lying, violence, cruelty, sexual sin, support for abortion, and suboptimal foreign policy — is either false or far worse under Democrats, specifically the current administration in which Kamala Harris is second-in-command.
Thus the so-called Christian Trump denouncements and Kamala endorsements aren’t new. But attaching them to a love for Jesus — as if the answer to “WWJD?” is “elect Kamala Harris” — is particularly egregious. After all, it doesn’t take a seminary degree to understand that when Jesus implored the little children to come to Him, it wasn’t an invitation to abort them. Yet while the Biden-Harris administration was busy last week imprisoning pro-lifers who pray at abortion mills and peacefully protest the killing of unborn human lives, Ray Ortlund thinks the best way to love those neighbors is by cheering their inquisitors.
But the disdain for Donald Trump and his supporters is so deeply ingrained among Never Trump evangelicals like French and Ortlund that it’s become inextricable from their identities, ideas, and even theology. Like the lawyer challenging Jesus, they ask, “Who is my neighbor?” but conclude it must not be Trump-supporting Christians. Like the Pharisees, they proclaim that at least they aren’t like those white, election-denying conspiracy theorists.
And don’t let French’s newfound “Can’t we all just be friends?” posture fool you. He’s like the child who punches his sibling and runs away before they can punch back. He’s spent years smearing the faithful and now wants a truce without repenting.
What self-styled progressive Christians know but won’t admit when it comes to Trump is that presidents aren’t pastors or role models or even Christians necessarily. They’re tools and proxies for policies. This means that even if Donald Trump isn’t as pro-life as I’d like him to be, a vote for him is a vote for a party that protects life far better than the radical alternative, represented by the extreme pro-abortion candidate Kamala Harris.
We know French knows this because he tries to apply the “tool” logic to Harris, writing, “I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 and — ironically enough — I’m doing it in part to try to save conservatism.” In other words, he argues Harris is the instrument to accomplish the purification of conservatism (however absurd that argument is).
The problem is that the policies for which Harris is the proxy are evil — far more evil than the alternative candidate.
Overtly Anti-Christian Platform
Harris believes in zero protections for unborn children — or even for born children who survive attempts to kill them while they’re still in the womb, no matter how hard the ABC debate moderators lied to the contrary. Harris cosigns on abortions at any time in pregnancy for any reason whatsoever, including eugenic motives such as birth defects.
Harris also believes it’s moral to tell children, created in God’s image, that they were born into the wrong body and that irreversibly sterilizing themselves will make them happy. This often includes emotionally blackmailing parents with threats of suicide or even hiding children’s transgender delusions from parents, as her home state of California now does. Just days after a transgender-identifying shooter killed six Christians, including several children, at a Nashville school, Harris tweeted to “celebrate trans and non-binary Americans. We see you and will never stop fighting for you.”
Harris inflames the kind of rhetoric that inspired not one but two assassination attempts on her No. 1 political enemy’s life, and she personally supported the Minnesota Freedom Fund during the fiery George Floyd riots to bail out violent demonstrators.
The Biden-Harris administration forfeited America’s national security and sovereignty by permitting an invasion at the southern border, which has resulted in preventable crimes against innocent Americans. She believes in “equity,” which is just shorthand for ensuring the same outcomes through government-sanctioned stealing, hard work be damned.
And not only did Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff cheat on his former wife with their nanny, which reportedly resulted in her subsequent pregnancy and his abandoning the baby, but Kamala Harris herself famously slept her way to the top.
In other words, Harris is a sexual deviant, a liar, a supporter of child murder, a promoter of violence and division, and a proud woman. “Always Jesus”?
Ortlund and French know all this. They read the news and are not stupid. They just don’t care. No amount of facts or appeals to justice and truth will persuade “progressive Christians” — because they hate Donald Trump, and they love the prestige and power and paychecks that accompany that hatred.
Kamala Harris could have an affair and abortion, transition to “Kevin,” and needlessly start World War III tomorrow, and the leaders of “progressive” Big Eva would still pontificate about how voting for her (sorry, “him/them”) is necessary to be faithful to Jesus and “save conservatism.”
The Lesser of Two Evils
Here’s the thing. I don’t care about “conservatism” or returning to “Reagan Republicanism” if it means a Christianity of consequentialism, or “the ends justify the means,” to which French and Ortlund apparently subscribe. Scripture commands that Christ’s disciples be “wise as serpents and harmless as doves” — which is pretty much the opposite of unwisely denouncing one candidate over his so-called “cult of personality” while harmfully downplaying another candidate’s culture of death.
[READ: Voting For Trump Is The Clear Moral Choice For Pro-Lifers]
In 2020, “Big Eva” theologian John Piper said he was “baffled that so many Christians consider the sins of unrepentant sexual immorality (porneia), unrepentant boastfulness (alazoneia), unrepentant vulgarity (aischrologia), unrepentant factiousness (dichostasiai), and the like, to be only toxic for our nation, while policies that endorse baby-killing, sex-switching, freedom-limiting, and socialistic overreach are viewed as deadly.” But Piper erred in the same way Ortlund and French do: Instead of juxtaposing Trump’s character with Biden’s character and Trump’s policies with Biden’s, he compared Trump’s immoral character with Biden’s immoral policies.
The Christian voter’s choice, however, is not between one candidate of bad character, Trump, and another of bad policy, Harris. It is a choice between one candidate with poor character and another candidate with both poor character and deadly policies.
Thus while French would likely say that Trump supporters are engaging in consequentialism, that’s incorrect. There’s a difference between endorsing or engaging in evil to achieve your own purposes (see Abraham and Hagar and the “approvers” and “applauders” in Romans 1) and exercising discernment to avoid the most evil outcome. In the “lesser of two evils” calculation, that award goes to Trump, whose policies are undoubtedly more life-giving even if his character is as corrupt as his opponent’s.
As Father Chad Ripperger explains, “When you’re voting for a lesser evil, you’re not voting for the person’s evil or for the evil that the [legislation] is doing. What you’re voting to do is to preserve the good that would be lost if the other opponent got in who’s more evil or if the legislation got passed and which was actually even worse.”
That’s not consequentialism. It’s wisdom.
Christians should reject the backward theology of teachers who twist the character of Christ to punish their political enemies. If you endorse Kamala Harris in the same breath as “Always Jesus,” perhaps yours is the Christianity that’s been infected by politics.