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Stanely Mushava Correspondent
Preachers must not always look for God’s face on the ballot. They risk photoshopping the devil and holding him out to voters, horns cropped, crucifix grafted, tail clipped.Morality wars are to be fought on air, land and sea but flying too close to the ground has its mortal hazards.
Locating God in America’s voting booth today is as easy as shooting a moving target in the rain.
Religious leaders have a better chance of championing moral conservatism in any corner of the public square than desperately compromised pastoral endorsements.
Pastoral endorsements are headline material because Christians, like any other segment of the electorate, have issues to decide and interests to defend on election day.
This election, once again, pastors have options till they choose.
On one hand, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has presented herself as a crusader for abortion and gay rights, and is regarded in hushed, apocalyptic tones as a death-knell to moral conservatism and religious liberty.
On the other hand, Republican candidate Donald Trump stands accused as a misogynist, xenophobe and, like Clinton, gatekeeper of conscience.
Christians, perhaps the most forgiving kind, worry not so much about who you are but what you will do.
But both candidates have provided enough hints of narcissism to suggest whoever wins will blend their portraits with the presidential insignia.
The presidential race merits inverting a famous statement to: Poor America, so close to Mexico, so far from God!
Poor pastors can hardly keep a straight face while pouring oil from their evangelical horns on either candidate.
Pastoral endorsements in this week’s election are either morally equivocal or biblically unsustainable.
Preachers meddling in the corridors of power can only fix one thing by breaking another.
Instead of riding on presidential coattails to moral Nirvana, they may well toughen up and buckle down, prepare to take on whoever comes into power as prophetic adversaries rather than priestly accomplices.
When the glory departs from the voting booth, men and women of God may as well double their spiritual fervour and deploy their cultural saltiness instead of outsourcing their heavenly collars to worldly politicians.
God has been often big in US elections. Sometimes as the device rather than as the divine.
The hem of His garment has filled the hall whenever family values have been up for debate.
In their own tenure, Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush Jnr and other presidents’ crises or campaigns corresponded with the question of God as a point of moral reference and as a mark of identity.
In 2016, God is big on election day, as in previous conventions, on the turf of family values.
Only, this time He is the loud absence in Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s uninspired race to the White House.
America’s Religious Right, mostly conservative evangelical notables, is concerned about Clinton appointing pro-choice judges, curtailing liberty of conscience and extending Obama’s gay crusade into traditional Christian strongholds should she become president.
Clinton has previously declared at a UN convention that religious opinions which oppose abortion “must be changed”.
She has succeeded in turning Christians’ blood to water with these overt claims of omnipotence which undermine not only Christian morality but also Christian liberty.
But then democracy keeps evolving and Christians are at the receiving end of a new American brand of democracy which deploys gatekeepers of conscience against moral conservatism and political incorrectness.
The gatekeepers of conscience include judges hammering heavy-handed sentences on Christian businesses for refusing to affirm gay marriage, never mind religious liberty.
They include ambassadors carrying Washington’s sexual rights message to potential cultural vassals in Africa, including Zimbabwe, although much of the continent is democratically touchy about its conservatism.
In the US, pro-life, mostly Christian, campaigners insist that life begins at conception and call safe abortion a contradiction in terms since abortion always ends in somebody dying. But they have been losing the war, years on end.
More than 54 million babies have been killed in wombs since the Roe vs Wade decision in what Jewish evangelical Ray Comfort calls America’s Holocaust.
In Barack Obama’s America, Planned Parenthood has scaled up the commercialisation of abortion to a horror pitch, having reportedly gone so far as to package aborted baby parts for sale.
Democrats are squarely behind this Sanger-incepted behemoth which is understood to have bankrolled Obama’s re-election campaign.
And the two institutions have been implicated as tenderprenurial bedfellows in recent Zika funding controversy.
But that is not the only headache moral conservatives need painkillers for.
Clinton seems to be saying to Christians in this election, “My little finger will be thicker than Obama’s whole body!
“Nay, not only that, but since Obama loaded you down heavily, I’m going to add to that burden. Obama disciplined you with whips, but I’m going to discipline you with scorpions!”
She has openly declared her liberal preferences for the Supreme Court, a bench whose heavy hammer has become reputed for iconoclastic tendencies in ecclesiastical territory.
For their part, evangelical leaders are saying, “We have no inheritance in the house of Bill. Let’s go home, Washington.”
Apparently, their best hope for stopping Clinton is voting Trump, an avowed abuser of women, hater of foreigners and, like Clinton, gatekeeper of belief.
Trump’s lewd views on women, caught on tape a decade ago before he became the Republican nominee for president, have turned out to be the toughest stain on his election day suit.
“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women —I just start kissing them, it’s like magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. When you are a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” Trump said.
And much darker things, you know. The column can only go so far as to address a family setting.
The run-up to the final race has been littered with his gross language targeting just about every demographic other than rich white males.
While fellow Republican leaders falling over each other to condemn Trump’s comments as “disturbing and inappropriate,” inexcusable, “vulgar, egregious and impossible to justify,” “repugnant, and unacceptable in any circumstance,” conservative Christian opinion are stuck with him.
They have been refreshing their endorsements, putting their money on him as “the stitch in time that will save nine,” that is maintain a semblance of conservatism on the nine-justice Supreme Court bench.
From Liberty University to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, overtly and covertly, evangelical leaders have been pouring prophetic oil on Trump to save God’s people from his iconoclastic counterpart.
On the other hand, liberal tendency of evangelicals is routing for Clinton to keep an avowed misogynist, xenophobe and inquisitor out of the Oval Office.
Curiously, some of Trump and Clinton’s indiscretions are not coming across as inadvertent flaws but statements of narcissistic intent.
And both have also been assumed to share an appetite for remote-controlling drones on Washington’s geopolitical chessboards — with guns in their hands and God on their side as 2016 Nobel laureate Bob Dylan sang.
If God had already turned His back, then He has finally recalled His name from US elections.
Endorsements and alliances being morally equivocal and biblically unsustainable, preachers may well send politics to the devil and champion moral conservatism from their own turf.
By insisting on questionable endorsements and alliances, they risk compromising the higher demands of their vocation.
Right is a question for political determination but righteous is a question for spiritual conviction. The priesthood of every believer, not the presidency of one believer, is what preserves a nation morally.
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