As I see it, your argument has two main points: 1) we’re better off with Trump than with Hillary, and 2) Trump is merely imperfect, just like all the other great leaders of history. I disagree with both.

You might be surprised that I would disagree with the first, since what passes for conservative media have taught us that Hillary would have been worse than anyone, including the Devil himself. No doubt Hillary would have been a very bad president, another entrant in the crowded field of contestants for the distinction of being our worst president ever. She would probably have done some bad things Trump has not. She would have worked with Congressional Democrats, amnestied the Dreamers, continued funding Planned Parenthood, and made Diane Feinstein’s heart glad by denouncing the NRA and coming out in favor of new gun-control measures. Oh . . . wait . . . Trump did all those things. Well, Hillary might have done others.

But do you see the problem here? In comparing Trump’s presidency to an imaginary Hillary presidency, we’re comparing what is now a reality to a picture in our imagination. And we’ve been taught to believe that the imaginary picture, a Hillary presidency, would have been worse than anything else that could happen. No matter how bad Trump is, we’re taught to imagine that Hillary would have been worse. We were told, “The country can’t take four more years of a Democratic president.” But we’d been told that before, every time a Democratic president was up for reelection, and it turned out not to be true. Notably in recent history we were told that very thing about Obama in 2012, but he was reelected, and the country is still here. It’s time for us to stop letting ourselves be stampeded by propaganda.

In fact, Trump has done some bad things that Hillary probably would not have done. His imposition of protective tariffs is an anti-free market, anti-prosperity, corporate welfare project that taxes the American people in order to prop up inefficient businesses and corrupt labor unions. The track record of Democratic presidents like Bill Clinton and Obama suggests Hillary would not have done that. Also, Trump has been remarkably favorable to the vicious dictator Vladimir Putin. Trump has now even gone so far as to fire his secretary of state for speaking out against Putin’s latest attempt to murder a political opponent on British soil. Barack Obama, despite his rhetorical cheap shot about the 80s wanting their foreign policy back, actually did better than that. Presumably, Hillary would have been a continuation of the Obama policy, though, again, we don’t really know.

But I’m serious in saying Hillary would probably have done some bad things Trump has not. Christians, not having voted for her, would not be responsible for those things. It’s also true that, because Trump chose to gain the presidency by hoodwinking Republicans, and has therefore stocked his administration with Republicans (mostly), some good things have come out of it that would almost certainly never have occurred under a Democratic administration. The Gorsuch appointment appears to be one of them, although we won’t know for sure until we see how he votes on future Supreme Court legislation. Some slight improvements have been made on immigration (at the same time Trump flirts with outright amnesty). On abortion, I’ve seen nothing from the Trump administration except rhetoric, and not very much of that.

So why would I say we might not be better off with Trump in the White House than we would with Hillary? The answer is that the Republican Party, the conservative movement, and most of all evangelical Christianity have barely started to pay the price for backing Trump. It’s like one of those deals where you buy a huge, extravagant item for Christmas and don’t make any payments until July — but then you pay with a vengeance and for years to come. The first of the big payments on the Trump presidency hasn’t even come due yet.

If Christians had stood on principle and supported a good third-party candidate, Hillary would probably have been elected and would have done bad things in office, but Christians would not have been responsible for those bad things. No, they really wouldn’t. The responsibility would have rested where it belonged: on the foolish and wicked voters who supported Trump during the primaries and on the Republican establishment that decided it would rather work with Trump than with a principled conservative (Cruz) and therefore rigged the convention in order to nominate Trump, despite the fact that a strong majority of delegates did not want him. Trump’s defeat would have showed the establishment they couldn’t get away with that. Instead, by supporting Trump, Christians and other constitutional conservatives have demonstrated to the Republican establishment that they will vote for any candidate, absolutely ANY candidate, the establishment sees fit to shove down their throats, even if he is a man of utterly debauched character who openly supports the homosexual movement’s persecution of Christians. They can now expect more of the same and worse.

Furthermore, Christians and other constitutional conservatives have betrayed themselves into a pattern of excusing and supporting evil. As you rightly point out, it was one thing to vote for Trump as a mere strategic expedient to defeat Hillary, but it’s another thing to excuse and support his evil-doing at every step of the way. Strategically, one might be like Napoleon, who defeated the Austrians and Russians and then turned and defeated the Prussians. One might politically destroy Hillary and then turn and politically destroy Trump. That would have made a degree of sense, though to me it still looked too much like doing evil that good might come. But that’s not what the overwhelming majority of Christians and other constitutional conservatives have done. Instead of turning after the election to bring Trump down, they’ve prostrated themselves before him.

Whether because the cognitive dissonance of having voted for someone as obviously evil as Trump was unbearable, or because “Christian leaders” could not bring their flocks to vote for such a candidate without creating the fiction that he was a fine, upstanding man, a “baby Christian,” falsely slandered by “fake news” — or maybe for both these reasons — Christians and other constitutional conservatives have now embraced him completely. He gets “Mulligans” for his continuing constant lies and vile behavior. His bad policy actions are ignored, while he is celebrated for doing good things he hasn’t actually done. Meanwhile we see in social media utterly appalling images depicting Jesus directing or embracing Trump. You can view some of these via the links provided, but I won’t reproduce them here because I find them blasphemous.

By doing these things, Christians and other constitutional conservatives who support Trump have ruined their reputations and their testimonies. They have given up their standing to speak on issues of right and wrong. Oh, they’ll still speak on such issues, but they’ve fatally undermined the basis of their right to a hearing on such topics.

If Hillary were the Democratic candidate in 2020, would evangelicals even bother to say she is corrupt, dishonest, vicious, and utterly unscrupulous? She’s all of those, but what would be the use in saying so if evangelicals had recently been, and presumably still were, supporting a candidate who was obviously also corrupt, dishonest, vicious, and utterly unscrupulous? And if they did say so, who would listen?

Yes, I know the leftists and atheists have always said evangelicals are hypocrites. The problem is now it’s true. Yes, I know the Democrats are just as hypocritical on a regular basis. I know they behaved just as badly in supporting Bill Clinton during the ‘90s, and they’ve been behaving just as badly in a number of ways right up to the present. What of that? We’re supposed to behave better than that. We’re supposed to be trying to do what is morally right. We’re supposed to believe there are absolute, eternal standards of right and wrong, good and evil, defined by God, and not by our own passing preferences. That’s why people ought to listen to us. That’s why we have grounds to believe our principles, based on God’s eternal truth, will prove best for our country.

Much more importantly, that’s why we can hope God will see fit to intervene on our behalf.

But now evangelical Christians don’t have that any more. Why should our fellow citizens listen any longer to our claims about what is morally right or wrong to do in politics? Why should a holy God hear our prayers for mercy and blessing on our country?

The new irrelevance of Christianity to American government was recently admitted by the son of the founder of the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, Jr., president of the world’s largest online evangelical university and Trump sycophant. He tweeted that Jesus “never told Caesar how to run Rome.” Apparently his brand of Christianity has nothing to say to how a government ought to operate. If so, what’s the point of the Christian Right, and why should anyone care whom Jerry Falwell might endorse for the presidency?

As I mentioned before, the payments on all this are going to be coming due regularly for a long time. Twenty years from now, those of us who may still be alive are going to hear frequently how evangelical Christians showed themselves to be hypocrites and don’t have any right to speak on moral issues. What’s more, open persecution of Christians has been brought closer now by their embrace of Trump. The atheists will have little difficulty persuading our fellow citizens that we have no deeply and sincerely held religious convictions. The majority of evangelicals have demonstrated that by supporting Trump. The atheists will believe we’re just another faction contending for its way, and if the question of eternal moral principles is now dismissed, there will be no reason we should not suffer the usual fate of a minority faction whose views are offensive to the majority.

All that is left to American evangelicals is to repent and hope for God’s mercy.

To Part 2 of Response to a Christian Friend Who Supports Donald Trump