In my latest book, Christianity and the World: Essays Philosophical, Historical, and Cultural, I attempt to dispel several misunderstandings of Christianity, misunderstandings advanced by both Christians and non-Christians alike.
Unfortunately, Cal Thomas wrote his most recent essay before he read my book. In all truthfulness, however, unless he supplemented my work with a basic textbook on elementary logic, his screed against Roy Moore’s Christian supporters would have remained as bad as it is.
The gist of Thomas’s argument is as follows:
Christians that support Roy Moore for “political” reasons against those who accuse him of having engaged in sexually illicit relations with young women and teenagers over 40 years ago are guilty of loving “the world” more than they love God.
The Alabama race is now over. This, however, is not to the point. The point is Cal Thomas’s argument inasmuch as it depends upon a distinction that is doubtless well-known to the legions of Alabaman Christians who backed Roy Moore. This distinction has been characterized variously by Christian thinkers over the millennia, but it boils down to this:
Christians are in the world, but they are not to be of the world.
Yet Thomas, a conventional Republican and one-time NeverTrumper, argues in bad faith.
For starters, consider the premise upon which Thomas’s argument is grounded. As Thomas would have us believe, Moore’s supporters ultimately didn’t care whether he was guilty or innocent of the allegations against him. For them, since “maintaining a 52-seat Republican majority is critical to advancing President Trump’s agenda, which includes seating more conservative judges on federal benches,” his election “supersedes what Moore may or may not have done 40 years ago.”
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This is patently false. Most Moore supporters continued to back him precisely because they did not believe the allegations against him.
Nor is it just for anyone to indict these Alabaman Christians for their skepticism. For decades, they have been derided, mocked, and taken for granted by both left-leaning Democrats as well as “conservative” Republicans. Suddenly, when and only when one of their own is on the cusp of obtaining a national office, women—some of whom have already been discredited—came forward to accuse him of sexual improprieties that supposedly occurred four decades ago.
And they were expected to automatically believe the accusers?!
Allegations are not evidence of wrongdoing. This is rudimentary logic. The allegation of wrongdoing is the conclusion. The evidence for allegations consists in premises. Inasmuch as allegations are not self-evident, they can’t be used to prove their own truth! To argue in this way, is to reason in a circle. This is the logical fallacy known as “begging the question,” the fallacy committed repeatedly by Moore’s critics.
Those Alabaman Christians who Thomas takes to task continue to suspect, all too plausibly, that the Establishment in D.C., with the help of its apologists in the media, has done against Moore exactly what it does whenever it feels threatened: It lies and smears—by whichever means necessary.
So Thomas sets up at least one straw man when he suggests that Moore’s supporters have been motivated by nothing more or less than a desire to maintain or increase raw political power. This is a dishonest, inaccurate, and unjust depiction of a demographic whose law-abidingness and love for America is second to none. It is these Southern Christians, mostly white, who have voted reliably for Thomas’ party over the years and whose sons have provided the bulk of the cannon fodder for America’s wars from her beginnings to the present.
Secondly, the distinction that Christianity has always drawn—and that Thomas disingenuously invokes—between the domains of temporal and eternal power is meant as a warning against the blasphemous folly of those who would attempt to hasten the Eschaton by attempting to create a Heaven-on-Earth, those who would aspire to create utopia. Only a scandalous ignorance of history and Christian theology could confuse it for a commandment of indifference toward all politics, all of those institutional arrangements that compose a society.
“Politics” is a moral enterprise, the morality of attending to the socio-cultural order. This is why the branch of philosophy known as political philosophy is recognized as an extension of moral philosophy. Interestingly, Thomas both denies this in attributing base motives to Moore’s supporters and affirms it in likening the current situation in Alabama to that of slavery.
Lincoln, Thomas says, recognized “good men” on both sides of the slavery issue. However, he also realized that slavery was evil. Thus, even though a bloody war would be bad for the nation, i.e. bad “politics,” Lincoln was willing to transcend political self-interest and do the right thing by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and, eventually, ending slavery.
Thomas’s is a highly dubious characterization of Lincoln. But even on the assumption that it’s the strong analogy that Thomas sees, the appeal to Lincoln actually strengthens the position in which Moore’s supporters find themselves.
Roy Moore has proven himself to be a tenacious fighter for the causes in which Christians of various sorts, particularly evangelical Christians, believe passionately. One of these causes is the sacredness of all human life, from conception until natural death, as Roman Catholics say.
Moore, you see, is staunchly opposed to the deliberate killing of the most defenseless and innocent among us, millions of children that are still developing in their mothers’ wombs.
In dramatic contrast, Doug Jones, his competitor, is on record as favoring this reprehensible act. Jones, being the conventional Democrat that he is, has even advocated on behalf of so-called “late-term abortions.”
Perhaps those who backed Moore—Christians who have also backed the Republican Party over the decades because it too has repeatedly affirmed, at least rhetorically, its commitment to protect the unborn—believe that the end of stopping or at least diminishing the destruction of innocent human beings transcends the GOP Establishment’s desire to advance its agenda.
Perhaps they are convinced that shielding developing children from death transcends the Establishment’s desire for better optics with the prevailing leftist press, or the optics of resisting the #MeToo campaign.
Hell, perhaps Moore’s supporters think, as Thomas tells us Lincoln thought about slavery, that abortion is such an evil that even if the nation must suffer bloody divisions in order for it to be brought to an end, then this will be a price worth paying.
Maybe this is why Christ’s disciples in Alabama were in Roy Moore’s corner.
They may even have been willing to brave Cal Thomas’s logical fallacies if they thought it meant taking a step toward restructuring their country in a way that will spare the lives of untold numbers of children that would otherwise be slaughtered in their mothers’ wombs.
