ERLC reverses course, now says Brent Leatherwood was not fired

Obviously I wasn't there, but if indeed people campaigned to have him ousted (successfully or not) because he praised Biden for bowing to reality, these guys need to be told "back off, take a deep breath, and let's get some perspective."

Looking through Leatherwood's history, the main thing that I disagree with is his apparent support for more gun control. I simply don't think it would do what he thinks. But when he says "don't prosecute women who seek abortion", absolutely--you'd be penalizing people who are generally coming in with a great fear of the future, and compounding that fear. No, thanks--punish the abortionists instead.

Agree.

There doesn’t seem to be anything in his views to warrant a move to oust him.

Meanwhile, two updates from Baptist Press…

• Smith resigns from ERLC board, issues apology for removal of Leatherwood ‘without a formal vote’
• ERLC executive committee releases statement on leadership confusion

From the latter…

Members of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission’s executive committee acknowledge the events of the last 24 hours have brought confusion and frustration as conflicting press releases have tried to clarify that Brent Leatherwood is still at the helm of the SBC entity.

“We know that these events have shaken trust in the executive committee, the trustee board, and the organization especially. It is imperative that we commit ourselves as trustees to ensuring that trust is rebuilt,” they said in statement released late Tuesday (July 23) evening.

Odd case.
I read one of those articles. I don’t know what Smith’s motive was, which is ok; I don’t need to know.

I’m not even sure if “praising Biden” for stepping down from reelection is a pro-Biden or anti-Biden statement.

I struggle greatly with what SharperIron tends to become during election season. I feel (word chosen carefully) like there is a great deal of promotion of anti-Christian ideology.

I have to remind myself over and over that it’s possible to be a democrat and a Christian. And that it’s okay for Christians to apply biblical principles differently and arrive at different convictions.

Maybe those sorts of feelings are involved? Ironically, this group has “Christian Liberty” in their title.

Certainly don’t want to beat a dead horse but I don’t know if there are many (any?) Christian democrats on SI. I have seen a lot of assumption that not voting for Trump=voting for Biden.

Christians should value principles over parties. A party is a means to an end—or maybe more accurately, a means to other means to an end.

For my part, I’d love to see both parties lose this fall, if there was some way to make that happen. As it is, whichever party wins, I’ll be unhappy that they won. But on the other hand, whichever party loses, I’ll be glad they lost.

>>For my part, I’d love to see both parties lose this fall, if there was some way to make that happen.<<

The only way for that to happen would be a revolution, with installation of a new leader, one that would most likely truly be autocratic (unlike the “dictator” accusations flying about both parties’ candidates). Seeing as I don’t want to live through a revolution in the next 4 months (over the years I’ve been alive, I’ve seen the results of this happening in 3rd-world countries), I’m going to live with whoever gets in, just as I have the past 8 years. One choice will make me temporarily more unhappy than the other, but knowing that what comes to pass is God’s will, I’ll come to terms with the results either way.

For my part, I’d love to see both parties lose this fall, if there was some way to make that happen. As it is, whichever party wins, I’ll be unhappy that they won. But on the other hand, whichever party loses, I’ll be glad they lost.

Giant Meteor 2024

I understand (and welcome) a degree of the populism that Mr. Trump has brought into politics, but on the flip side, it seems that both parties have forgotten that you don't take anything coming out of the Kremlin, or any Communist regime, at face value. Reagan's stance against totalitarianism is on hard times these days.

Are both parties bad? Yes, in the same way that all people are bad because all are sinners. But that doesn't mean that everyone's "badness" is equally detrimental to society, does it? I'd rather have a church member who is trying to get to heaven by good works as a neighbor than a thief, murderer, or sex offender, wouldn't you?

One party is more militant in it's anti-Christian agenda than the other. That party will take us further down the slope of abolishing the Bible, destroying the Constitution, promoting transgenderism, promoting abortion etc. than the other party. The only way to reduce the speed of societal decline, other than a genuine revival, is for the least "bad" party to beat the other one at the polls. That isn't hard to understand, is it?

If we keep voting for crummy candidates, we will keep getting crummy candidates.

The “least bad” party is no longer all that obvious to me. The GOP no longer cares much about pro-family policy, cares less and less about abortion, increasingly doesn’t care about reining in communism (i.e. Ukraine), doesn’t care about shrinking the size of the federal government, doesn’t care about character, doesn’t care about basic things like honesty and truth (i.e., the ‘stolen election’ hoax and much, much more), increasingly doesn’t care much about antisemitism and various evolving alt-right nationalisms.

I’m not saying the other party is better. My point is that there is no conservative party in the US right now. There is a right wing party, sure. This is not the same thing.

So the situation is like—a bunch of analogies come to mind.

• When you wanted a friend to sit next to you, but you can’t because that seat is taken
• When you are trying to grow carrots, but you can’t because that patch of ground is weed infested
• When you have someone in your department who would make a great boss, but they can’t be because someone else is occupying that box in the org chart

What America needs is healthy, vibrant conservatism. It can’t have that as long as as this cheap substitute is occupying that space. If it even can recover, the sooner the better, but things may have to get worse before they can get better.

This is also not hard to understand: Sometimes in life things have to get worse before they can get better. Sometimes you have to lose in order to get wise and start winning better.

Edit: Just thought of a better analogy for that bullet list: The fire trucks can’t reach the burning building because a bunch of idiots have parked in the fire lane. (They did this so they could yell a lot at the fire.)

Your parents are driving towards a cliff and they keep fighting. One wants to [lightly] press the brakes and the other wants to floor it.

Your parents are driving towards a cliff and they keep fighting. One wants to [lightly] press the brakes and the other wants to floor it.

Then why stay in the car?

Since slippery slope and cliff analogies in this thread have been used to explain why Christians should vote for Trump, let me sort of combine the two with a more detailed parable to explain why my conscience won't let me vote for him and some comments afterwords.

Imagine a steep road with winding curves around a mountain is lacking guardrails. It's had guardrails since cars and truck used to travel the road, but the vast majority of them corroded and are now gone. Cars and Trucks that speed down this road tumble off the cliff on a regular basis, which has devastated the population of the town nearby. About half of the town wants guardrails put on the cliff again, but the other half, led by a smaller group of educated elite, don't want the guardrails. In fact, they celebrate the freedom they have to speed down the road with no guardrails. They control much of the media and use their influence to shame others to have the same beliefs about the guardrails.

One of the wealthy elites of the town switches sides and runs for the Mayor of the town. Part of his promise is to build guardrails to keep people from falling off the cliff. He wins the election, convincing the people that because he used to be one of them, only he can stop the elites from destroying the town. During the first few years, the mayor delivered on his promise to build a guard rail. The problem is the guard rail was made of cheap imitation steel bolted to an imitation foundation. Several outside studies concluded that this guardrail would fall apart after a decade and cause a significant sinkhole in the ground on the highway that might take 20 to 40 years to repair.

The Mayor and all of their followers dismiss all these outside studies as a web of conspiracies and propaganda against the elites (these same elites happen to be using other conspiracies and propaganda to undermine the Mayor) even though the outside studies have no connection to the elites of the town. 8 years brought many changes. Halfway through, the elites came into power again with a elderly puppet leader, and now the former Mayor is about to win the election over the puppet because the elites didn't expect their puppet leader to mentally deteriorate so quickly. Meanwhile, the cheap guardrail constructed by the former Mayor’s administration is showing signs of deterioration, with a slight depression in the ground underneath the guardrail.

Of course it's pretty obvious that the Mayor represents Trump and the townspeople who support him are his MAGA followers, the educated elites represent the far-left cultural elites that control most of the cultural spheres of America, including the old puppet ruler president Joe Biden.

The guardrails represent America's moral foundations, such as Natural Law, Natural Rights, the Rule of Law, etc., all of which are derived from God.

The outside studies represent Scripture and, to a lesser degree, 1900 years of wisdom from church sources such as Augustine, Benedict, Aquinas, Luther, CS Lewis, MLK, Carl FH Henry, etc...who attempted to utilize a Christian ethic to judge and influence the society they were part of.

Here is the conundrum: the political battle that is being fought right now in America is a battle between secular progressives and secular conservatives. The autonomous, expressive individualism combined with a push towards state collectivism from the cultural elites and the far-left progressives has chipped away at the moral foundations of our country for over 100 years now. But what the last 8 years have shown is that today's conservatism is not about conserving the best of the virtues and traditions from past generations; rather, it's about winning at all costs. As bad as the far-left has been and is, with its lies, misinformation, and slandering about Trump (especially at the beginning of his presidency), Trump and his brand of "conservatism" fought back with all of his own set of lies, misinformation, and slandering and has perpetuated the deceptive, evil falsehood that the only way to overcome evil is to get your hands dirty by abandoning virtue and abandoning pillar aspects of its platform for the past 40 years such as opposing abortion and gay marriage.

Talks about law and order from Conservative politicians are laughable nowadays. As much as I have argued against the unethical (but not unlawful) process of convicting Trump with 34 felonies in a court of law, Trump is a corrupt politician who used corrupt means to get himself elected (what he did were a bunch of misdemeanors). What's more, his upcoming tax fraud case is where he committed his felonies, but because he'll win the election in November, he'll avoid his day in court. Despite Trump's corruption, despite Trump's Jan. 6th Stop the Steal campaign that led to a riot at the Capital which he refused to help defuse until 3 hours into the riot, despite Trump calling on terminating "all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution" (which automatically makes hims disqualified for the office of the Presidency) because of his unfounded accusations of widespread election fraud, despite the Trump administration's unlawful dismantling of Legal immigration with refugees and assylum seekers (which contributed in part to the Biden's inept handling of illegal immigration), despite Trump running on a promise to execute drug dealers, give law enforcement even more immunity (how would that affect murder victims such as Sonya Massey by law enforcement), and militarize the police to fight violent crime (even though violent crime has been on a long downswing since the 1990s, except for the COVID years), Republicans/Conservatives have thrown their support behind him en masse. Instead they enable Trump, a Narcissist who's been claiming victimhood the last two decades as the only one who can put a stop to the far-left's cultural insanity. As one church member from one of our supporting church's put it: America's Last Hope.

Not for me. Trump conservatism (which is more of an oxymoron), is built on unholy pragmatism with some Christian symbolic window-dressing. In other words, Trump's guardrail is made of cheap imitation steel bolted to an imitation foundation. It is not made to last like the timeless virtues of goodness, truth, honesty, justice, beauty, etc... In fact, it makes it even more difficult to implement a moral guardrail of these virtues in politics in the future because so many people are embracing such low standards of what is truly good, honest, righteous, etc...

Trump's toxic influence on conservatism has set the pro-life movement back 40 years. Trump has set back debates about the what constitutes a family back 40 years, Trump is setting back criminal justice reform back 40 years, Trump's view on high tariffs and massive illegal immigration deportations will set back free-market policies 40 years and I could go on and on. Those who claim that I am not thinking about our country's future by not voting for Trump refuse to see their own potential complicity of sabotoging conservatism by voting for Trump. He is decimating the foundations of conservatism because it no longer has a solid moral foundation. Because conservatism is so personality and cult driven right now, Trump's morals are conservatism's morals and vice-versa. So the reason why I am a Never Trumper is because after the Trump era is over, it's gonna be even more difficult to build the moral guardrail due to the shaky foundation of Trump Conservatism that will look to Trump as the standard rather than Scripture, Natural Law, etc... Voting for Trump and encouraging others to do the same would be the most short-sighted decision in voting I'd ever make in my life time.

Here is the conundrum: the political battle that is being fought right now in America is a battle between secular progressives and secular conservatives. The autonomous, expressive individualism combined with a push towards state collectivism from the cultural elites and the far-left progressives has chipped away at the moral foundations of our country for over 100 years now. But what the last 8 years have shown is that today’s conservatism is not about conserving the best of the virtues and traditions from past generations; rather, it’s about winning at all costs.

Pretty much sums up how I see it. Mostly.

What seems lost in the ‘fog of war’ these days is that conservatism has some convictions about what winning means and how winning can be achieved built into it. So, we don’t really have secular conservatives on the right, for the most part now. What’s dominant is secular right populists (many of whom are apparently nihilists—they don’t really believe in anything beyond the possession of power). Granted, there are bits and pieces of conservatism in the mix, and that’s a mercy (except where all they are accomplishing is putting their stink on these ideas).

Still… interlopers are in the fire lane and I pray they’ll be out of there soon.

The problem, as I see it, is that some are attempting to solve a spiritual problem with a political solution. I see no evidence that if Christians would stop voting for disappointing candidates we will get better ones. Why? Because poor quality candidates are a spiritual problem more than a political one. The moral decline in America generally produces increasingly poor candidates. The only solution is spiritual renewal. Until then, there is little hope for better candidates.

What we can do politically is try to block the most evil candidates by voting for less evil ones. Having to vote for pool quality candidates is disappointing, but better to have poor representation than evil. There is a sharp distinction between the two parties in regard to evil as defined Scripturally. Incompetence is disappointing, but evil is more dangerous. Unrestricted abortion is evil. Transgenderism is evil. Undermining law and order and refusing to punish criminals is evil. Undermining parental authority is evil. The list goes on.

In my opinion, wasting a God-given vote because we can't have candidates who meet high enough standards is foolish. We should analyze the choices we are given, not those we wished we had, and vote to defeat those who are most detrimental to a just, orderly and peaceful society.