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I view this as an almost definitional/textbook deal with the devil. “What’s the harm,” evangelicals say, “if we grant power to an entity that we think we can control, who is evil, if it grants us short term wins?” I’ve seen this reasoning before. “We can control the Devil, and avoid his temptations, and look at all the power it will grant us!” Trump’s amoral and even explicitly anti-Christian character is well known and most evangelicals - the ones aside from a minority that fell into the personality cult (idol worship) - seemed to have concluded exactly this: who cares if he is personally odious if he gives them what they want (a potential champion VP, SC dominance, generalized right wing laws)?
If for some reason it wasn’t clear, this will backfire, like it always does. The shortcut to power and respect and moral victory is always a shortcut. It’s built on a foundation of sand.
If Christians want greater respect in society, they need to live more Christlike lives and support more Christlike behavior. It is truly baffling that so many have deluded themselves from the plain teachings of the New Testament. They need to be servants. They need to offer help to the poor, associate with the downtrodden, praise and seek humility and virtue, resist the temptations of domination, pride, vanity, wrath, cover-ups, revenge, and immorality. To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily imply unqualified meekness; you can be zealous to some extent if your own house is in order and if it comes from a place of love. You can make bold stands, as long as at least you’re occasionally demonstrating forgiveness. There’s a reason even Jewish law had periodic jubilees, granting debt relief and freedom, and that was the lesser law.
This is the only way an increasingly secular America will be tempted back towards a Christian path. The communities need to be strong and “so good they can’t ignore you”. Revenge is not a Christian concept. In fact the opposite. Yet some evangelicals have embraced the doctrine of revenge. And as you say, some Catholics have embraced a doctrine of domination, equally as antithetical.
Along those lines, your comment about winning respect in both fields. I think that said respect should be idealized as happening in spite of differing opinions. You know, “disagree better”, which maybe sounds short term foolish but long term is way better at persuadability. The cardinal sin of modern woke-style liberals has been burning bridges, carrying out moral purges, and claiming that differing values means exclusion and shaming is correct. In the short term they had their decade of power, but as we now see in the medium term it’s limited their coalition significantly. Conservatives and Christians alike should not make the same mistake. No-contact means no future persuadability due to decreased interaction surfaces. To be clear, exclusion can be an important Christian tool, and with good scriptural basis too; it’s just that said tool is one to be used with extreme caution.
"Do not call up that which you can not put down."
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Remember that the standard for right-wing support in the 2016 general election was “better than Hillary Clinton.” I don’t think that anyone really expected to control him. He was occasionally analogized to Cyrus, king of Persia, who freed the Jews from exile – a pagan whose actions benefit the people of God, whether from benevolence or from reasons of his own.
In the gospels, Christ is not nearly so understated as this implies. But, in any case, Christians in general and evangelicals in particular do quite a lot of charity. We mostly don’t do it for influence, which is good because we do not win much influence from it.
Many people are in social circles or media bubbles where they get told over and over again that socially conservative takes are acts of hatred. My personal experience is that high decouplers who know you well can sometimes overcome this to see that you are coming from a place of love. But low decouplers struggle with this; if they live in one of those bubbles, they will most often reject their past experience of your love in order to conform to the social norm that regards people like you as haters. This has been a source of frustration and sadness for me.
That applies to politics as well. We don’t support socially conservative policies because we want you to eat your Brussels sprouts or whatever; we support them because they are conducive to human flourishing. Gender transitioning children is a sin, yes; but it’s also profoundly bad for the children, and we should reject it for that reason. That is in fact a politics of love.
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This is probably the biggest barrier separating me from evangelicals at this point. I understand the temptation to burn down all the institutions, or to have our guy who hits back, or however you want to frame it, but I can't help but see that as strikingly inconsistent with the Christian behaviour, especially that of the early church, that we aspire to. Nowhere in scripture do I find anything that seems to support making pragmatic deals with villains for temporary benefit - on the contrary, the advice we are given is as follows.
Does this mean to give into every single progressive cultural issue? No, of course not. But I think it does rule out a certain kind of means-end pragmatism, where we do evil so that good may come. As you say, this does not demand total and unqualified meekness. We don't have to be doormats. But we should show moral integrity, forgiveness, and mercy, even in the face of persecution. "Never avenge yourselves" is pretty darn black and white.
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