Why Settle for the Lesser Evil? (Sample Chapter from “Stupid Elephant Tricks – The Other Progressive Party’s War on Christianity”)

WHY SETTLE FOR THE LESSER EVIL?

THE SLAVERY AND STUPIDITY OF SECULAR STANDARDS

“No candidate should become the spokesman for his faith, for if he becomes President, he will need the prayers of the people of all faiths. [Loud applause] I believe that every faith that I’ve encountered draws its adherents closer to god.”[1]

Mitt Romney

(bold emphasis added)

 .    

“Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.”

Dark Helmet, Spaceballs

                              .

“Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?”

Now there’s a campaign slogan you don’t see every day, at least not yet. But there it was, all decked out in red, white, and blue; proudly planted on the bobbing back bumper of the little Nissan pickup in front of me. “Cthulhu for President” was the headlining banner above the peculiarly provocative tagline.

   Cthulhu (pronounced: kuh-THOO-loo…I think), for those of you (no doubt happily) unaware of the name, is the moniker given to a dark, malevolent force of supernatural terror in a series of horror stories first penned by H.P. Lovecraft back in the late ’20s. Often described along the lines of “…an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature…. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque scaly body with rudimentary wings”[2], Mr. Cthulhu certainly had the look to go with the bad attitude and mission.

Somewhere between his intro in 1928 and the 2000 presidential campaign, enthusiastic Lovecraft and/or Cthulhu fans took (what can only be hoped to be) a tongue-in-cheek approach to the “pulpy, tentacle headed” doom-bringer in question and did what Americans do so well so naturally: They happily (and profitably) took on the mission of marketing their favorite force of darkness in every way imaginable and then some.

There were “funny” Cthulhu t-shirts. There were tasty Cthulhu candies. There were even adorable(?) little Cthulhu Beanie Baby style plushies. And then there was the ongoing “presidential campaign”, with shirts, slogans, and…bumper stickers. Bumper stickers like the one rolling along ahead of me a few cycles back.

While I’ve not bothered to check on the latest incarnation of Cthulhu for President in the present election cycle, one can only assume that he and his handlers are at it again, and happily so. Whatever terrible thing that may or may not say about our culture’s condition, now, more than ever, the “Why Settle for the Lesser Evil?” line seems worthy of serious consideration, even if its tentacle-headed advocate does not.

Incredibly, sadly, and incredibly sadly, professing Christians in America have not only managed to validate at least a substantial portion of something as idiotic as the Cthulhu campaign for high office, they have also managed to confirm the strategic observations of another pop-culture bad guy wannabe. When the Dark Helmet character (a Darth Vader knock-off) in Mel Brook’s Spaceballs flick (a Star Wars knock-off) announced confidently that, “Evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.”, he hit the nail on the head…so long as “good” is described by secular standards…which is exactly how most politically active professing Christians define it in practice these days. It is this shift toward secular pragmatism and secular standards of goodness in American Christendom that has made the question “Why settle for the lesser evil?” so sadly relevant today.

   In agreeing to measure the goodness or rightness of anything, much less the political leadership of our nation, by any standard other than God’s, we have made a compelling case for “choosing the lesser evil” and have, in doing so, proven that our “good” is, in fact, dumb. Frighteningly dumb. As Christians, we are supposed to know and advocate explicitly God-centered goodness as the only true sort of goodness to be found, but, in practice – particularly political practice – we simply do not believe this to be true.

We. Are. Dumb.

And unlike the kind of dumb that you might be able to laugh at in Spaceballs or a Cthulhu presidential campaign (not that I necessarily recommend either, mind you), ours is a form of willful stupidity that is far more dangerous and far more destructive, in part  because it is God’s own people who are often perpetuating this decidedly ungodly approach to life in His name.

We’ve become “politically savvy” Christians who know how to play the game to win! And just look at all of the “winning” we’ve experienced with this approach: We murder roughly a million innocent children each year, mostly for convenience; we tax young workers to support the Ponzi scheme of all Ponzi schemes in the form of ever expanding and long-known-to-be-unsustainable entitlement programs; we are on the cusp of formally exalting homosexuality – which God hates – as a legitimate and honorable “lifestyle”, and we are witnessing at this very moment  our comically unbiblical and unconstitutional statist system make its final, lumbering lunge toward much more formally tyrannical approaches in every realm given up to its dominion.

   And many of these progressive wonders have been won by us in His name as we have done everything we can see (and have been told) to do by the forces of secularly defined progress within conservative, libertarian, and Republican political circles. Where once we would at least pretend to seek God enough to insist that our candidates profess to be actual, orthodox Christians, we now find that to be more than negotiable.

After all, we have to win, right? We must beat Obama! That is our supreme goal…our ultimate challenge…our clear and present idol.

It is this idol, in various incarnations, that has been used very effectively and for a very long time by the enemy. In our embrace of this idol, we have abandoned our duty to truth and its Author and we have surrendered our one and only supernatural hope of actually winning “the culture war” or any other conflict of consequence. In agreeing with a godless culture that God is not the necessary explicit center for all good things, we have joined, in a very real sense, something even worse the “Cthulhu for President” campaign.

American Christians now fiercely believe and vigorously campaign for the “lesser” evil, and, in doing so, we do exactly that for which the greatest evil hopes. After all, if it’s not hard to imagine how pleased a Cthulhu or a Dark Helmet type might be at the prospect of directing his enemy’s future by simply presenting multiple evils from which that supposed “good guy” preemptively agrees to choose, then how much more so should we understand the very real delight of Satan at the prospect of manipulating America’s professing Christians in precisely the same manner?

Apparently, all the devil need do is hold out an Obama or a Clinton or a Carter in his left hand whenever he desires for American Christians to select whatever and whomever he chooses to offer up in his right. And professing Christians in America have, for quite some time now, been all too happy to play along. We just seem to love dancing to the “less evil” tune, no matter how obviously unbiblical it is or how much wreckage accumulates in its ever-lengthening, ever-widening, and ever-deepening wake.

   The Christian response to the political question, “Why choose the lesser evil?” should not be an explanation as to why said lesser evil should be chosen. The Christian response to this biblically ridiculous question should be something along the lines of:

Why choose any evil?

Or, as Charles Spurgeon famously and wisely recommended: “Of two evils, choose neither.”

Those of us who are Christians have been bought with a price. We are His slaves where once we were slaves to sin. Our breaths, our heartbeats, our actions and our votes are His property. We will answer to Him for how we spend every one of them.

This is the blessed reality that should inform our every thought and action, and this is the only hope that we have as we consider our calling and placement in a culture so vividly aligned with that described in the book of Romans:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

   Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served thecreature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

   For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

   And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. [3]

In response to such clear and present realities, we will often see and hear our brothers and sisters in Christ cite promises and verses from elsewhere in the Word, including, quite frequently, the matchlessly comforting and inspiring words of 2 Chronicles 7:14:

if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

But what if the God who has made this perfect promise has also clearly defined the humility mentioned in the passage? What if He has made plain that we are to be humble by submitting to His will completely? What if He has also made plain that anything less than complete submission to Him in such a manner is not humility at all, no matter how much we might like to imagine or spin or pretend otherwise. What if He has lovingly warned His children that failure to submit to His clearly revealed will is always the precise opposite of God-glorifying personal humility. It is always God-hating, self-centered pride.

Pride is the fuel of all man-centered pragmatism, and man-centered pragmatism has most certainly come to define, in many ways and on every front, the prevailing political attitudes of the vast majority of professing Christians in America.

But take heart!

There is hope.

Perfect hope.

Supernatural hope.

But do we want that hope? Will we humble ourselves as He defines humility and requires it of His people?

Or will we continue to pragmatically play the game  and dance to the tune that His enemy (and ours) has so happily arranged and offered up to us? Will we work and fight and pray for the sock puppet on the right simply because he is soooooo much “less evil” than the one on the left?  Or will we finally come to the place of agreement with Scripture and Spurgeon, who both exhort, “Of two evils, choose neither.”

While Cthulhu is a fiction, the perils of this age are anything but. In the hills of modern progressive America, there be dragons…real dragons…home grown, pragmatically nurtured, and ultimately lethal creatures bent on the pursuit of anything and everything but the explicit will of God…all in the name of progress, of course.

Our only real hope to slay these dragons lies on the other side of our proper understanding and application of what He describes as “the Sword of Truth” – His perfect Word.