I’ve never voted for a pro-choice candidate in any election in my lifetime.
For a long time, evangelicals like me were known as single-issue voters. That label wasn’t exactly fair, for abortion has never been the only important issue for me — just the one issue that would automatically lose my vote. As a Christian I believe that God endows every human being with dignity from conception until death, because every human life is created in his image. I repudiate the backwards logic that places one person’s right to choose over another person’s right to live. Alongside these convictions, I have belonged to a church that adopts unwanted children, serves downtrodden mothers and advocates for life from the womb to the tomb.
I’ve been eligible to vote for presidents since 2000. In 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush was a clear pro-life candidate. The next two elections featured Barack Obama against first John McCain and then Mitt Romney. McCain and Romney lost, but they each gave pro-life voters a viable choice.
In 2016, Donald Trump won the Republican primary and eventually the presidency largely by courting the evangelical vote. Evangelicals, many of whom had argued for Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 over his affair with a White House intern, embraced Trump, a brazenly immoral serial adulterer, as their only chance to defeat the progressive Hillary Clinton. The old arguments about the necessity of character for public office were conveniently discarded in favor of lesser-of-two-evils reasoning and comparisons to King David, whose only point of contact with Trump was that he too committed adultery.
Trump, for his part, adeptly learned how to cater to his evangelical base, promised to appoint pro-life Supreme Court justices — a promise he fulfilled — and angered the left enough to keep Republicans excited. However, at no point did he give evangelicals reason to believe he was sincere about his newfound evangelical convictions. He infamously told one interviewer that he had never asked God for forgiveness, a remark that should have shut down any further King David analogies. What has been clear from 2016 until this day is that Donald Trump will say or do whatever he needs to say or do to keep himself in office.
In 2016 and again in 2020, Trump supporters argued for policy over character. “We know he’s far from perfect,” they reasoned, “but at least he has the right policies.” What I believed then and what has become evident for all to see now is that you can’t trust anyone’s policies if they don’t have character to back those policies up.
Last week, Donald Trump was asked about abortion. In case you haven’t noticed, since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, public opinion on abortion has swung in the pro-choice direction. So, true to form for someone who will do or say anything to get elected and knows which way the political winds are blowing, Trump, when asked, failed to support a federal abortion ban and said that the issue should be left to the states. Just so we’re clear, Donald Trump believes that states should decide whether children have a right to live if they’re in their mother’s womb.
Based on his own most recent statements, Donald Trump is a pro-choice presidential candidate, and, unless something unexpected happens between now and Nov. 5, Americans will choose between two openly pro-choice candidates for the first time in my lifetime. Will evangelicals continue to support Donald Trump knowing that he does not share their convictions on the most consequential moral issue of our generation?
There’s a reason that character matters alongside policy. Without character, you have no reason to trust policy. Character ensures that when a candidate speaks, he or she is speaking honestly from personal conviction. Character ensures that words matter. When a known liar makes a promise, we all know to take it with a grain of salt. Donald Trump is a known liar. You can’t bank on his policies, because his character disqualifies his trustworthiness.
So here we are, America. The choice is yours. On one side you have an aging progressive who supports abortion and recently labeled Easter Sunday — Christianity’s highest holy day — “Trans-Visibility Day.” On the other side, you have an insurrection-causing, pro-choice candidate who recently went online to hawk “God Bless America” Bibles to fawning admirers in spite of the fact that he’s never provided any indication that he believes a word of it.
I’m not writing this because I have answers. I don’t. I guess my motive is this … stop pretending like there’s a clear Christian choice. There’s not. And there wasn’t one in 2016 or 2020 either. To celebrate Trump as God’s provision for America is to exalt tribe over truth, convenience over conviction.
You can pick the lesser of two evils if you’d like, but pray long and hard over whether you’re willing to vote, maybe for the first time in your life, for an openly pro-choice candidate. Given the choice between two evils, I’ll pick neither. I’ll honor my God-given convictions, come what may.