Dear Friends,
It is the twenty-third anniversary of 9/11. I still can’t think about it without tearing up.
If you are looking for Presidential debate reactions from me, you’ve come to the wrong place. I suppose somebody could make an offer to pay me to watch such a thing, but I won’t do it voluntarily. I enjoyed the Twins having a nice bounce back game against the Angels instead.
If I were to have made a prediction, it would have gone something like this: Republicans will rant and rave at the bias of the moderators, but nevertheless insist that their candidate destroyed Kamala Harris. Democrats will insist Kamala wiped the floor with Trump and go on and on about all of his lies. When I checked social media after the event, that’s how it went.
I won’t leave you without any commentary. I’ll just share David Bahnsen’s because it has the obvious signs of being truthful:
Now, you know why I can be so sanguine about all of this. One of these two entirely unfit persons is, barring some strange divine intervention, going to be the President next January. Because I have “priced in the pain” it frankly makes very little difference to me. I am immune to the anxieties and passions that seem to animate so many on both sides of this election. It is the least important presidential election of my lifetime. The important race is for Montana senator, and the rest of it bores me.
But perhaps you share those anxieties and passions, and are looking for resources to help you figure out how to vote. You certainly aren’t obligated to join me in abstention. Levi Secord argues that it is your moral duty to vote and, more than that, your moral duty to vote for one of these two candidates. I will link that essay for your consideration even though I disagree. He does not succeed in showing even the baseline moral obligation to vote at all; he is dead-wrong to say that abstention or third-party or write-ins assume that voting is “morally neutral”—not voting for the party you’re expected to vote for is morally charged as a prophetic rebuke; and if his view is correct, and there exists a moral obligation to vote for a party that mouths certain platitudes, then said party can never be held to account for those words being mere platitudes. There is no moral suicide pact between Christians and the Republican Party.
I recommend, by contrast, this excellent essay by my longtime former pastor now seminary professor, Alfred Poirier. I hope it helps you think through your vote.
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