A Response to John Piper’s, “Policies, Persons, and Paths to Ruin.”

Yesterday, my social media feed showed a number of my dear Christian friends delighting in an article written by John Piper entitled, “Policies, Persons, and Paths to Run: Pondering the Implications of the 2020 Election.”

It is always an interesting experience to read something with which you largely agree, written by someone you respect, and yet conclude that enough serious flaws exist in the argument so as to require some sort of response. I don’t know John Piper personally but know several people who have served with the man over the years. I know that privately, and sometimes publicly, he has taken gracious exception to what he considers to be the flawed reasoning of fellow Christian leaders without even a hint of indulging in a kind of evangelical cancel culture. This response to his article is penned in a similar spirit.

Toward the end of his article, after concluding that he sees no clear way to support a presidential candidate in the upcoming election, Piper states, “You may believe that there are kinds of support for such pathways that do not involve such a contradiction — such an undermining of authentic Christian witness. You must act on what you see. I can’t see it.”

To which I now reluctantly respond, “Well alright John, please hold my beer.”

Piper is Right About the Sin He Sees

My “pathway forward” involves firstly acknowledging everything Piper said about Trump (without naming him) is true. The man does appear to be guilty of everything Piper alleges in the first section of his article. Some of my Trump supporting friends won’t like that statement. But like Piper, I must state what I see. I truly believe that if Trump loses, he will have himself to blame as much as any other factor.

Joe Biden Exhibits the Same Sins

Yet here I believe it is crucial to stipulate that Joe Biden has exhibited these very same sins and seems to be likewise unrepentant. For whatever reason (I have some suspicions), we are given less opportunity to see Joe Biden’s creepy interaction with women, his arrogance and divisiveness, than we are with Trump. Here it is important to state unequivocally that Joe Biden is a bad man. During a recent townhall, Biden stated that an 8 year old should be given the freedom to transition their gender. This is evil and cruel. Joe Biden is absolutely not, in any way, Trump’s moral superior.

Neither man is all bad. Both men exhibit some redeemable behaviors. Yet both men are in the end, exceptionally prone to serious character flaws which, as Piper states, will fuel moral degeneration (to some extent) in the country.

One Way or Another, We’re Going to Have a Sinful President

Piper states that sinful leaders can be just as ruinous to a nation as sinful policies. Later on, I would like to nuance this assertion a little. For now, we will leave it as stipulated because he is mostly correct. Since one way or another, we will have a president who is arrogant and divisive, we must recognize the choices God has given us and not dwell on the choices he has withheld.

God has not given American Christians the opportunity to elect a personality which reflects biblical standards of personal behavior. He has, in his providence, taken that choice off the table. God has given American Christians the opportunity to select a set of policies by which this nation will be governed. There is where I believe Piper has missed something. He seems to think that God has given us a choice between sinful personality and sinful policies. If those two choices existed in the terms Piper seem to put forward, then his planned electoral abstinence might be in order. Yet this is clearly not what God is doing. One way or another, a deeply sinful man will run this country and we are not given any say over that. The only choice that God has provided has to do with which policies will guide the country for the next 4 years and beyond.

In these God-ordained circumstances, refusing to vote for a presidential candidate will have zero short term effect on the kind of man who leads this country and will only be a choice between actively supporting good policies and passively supporting negative ones.

Piper is Right and Wrong About Our Witness

There is a massive difference between voting for a candidate in the privacy of an election booth and openly campaigning for a candidate with the full weight of our Christian witness hanging in the balance. Piper’s concerns about “communicating a falsehood to unbelievers when we act as if policies and laws that protect life and freedom are more precious than being a certain kind of person” are valid reasons for Christians to refrain from explicit endorsement of either candidate. Christians like myself, will vote for a presidential candidate, but will not go to great lengths to openly campaign for him. In short, I do not believe my private voting for a candidate constitutes the kind of witness degradation that open electioneering would.

If, when expressing concerns about our witness, Piper is thinking of mere Christians entering a voting booth and making a God-informed choice. If Piper believes that hurts the church’s witness, then I believe he is incorrect.

If Piper is thinking of other churches and pastors who are openly endorsing Trump, then I would agree with him in suggesting this is unwise and unhelpful to providing the world with moral clarity. I recognize that some Christians feel otherwise and have chosen to firmly endorse Trump. I personally, can’t see it but if others can, then so be it.

Why I Will Vote for a Presidential Candidate

Since I believe God has only presented me with a policy choice, and not a choice between personalities (I believe Trump and Biden are the same moral creature in many respects), I will vote for the policies I believe most accurately represent God’s will for human flourishing. I will not make a big show of it or make apologies for my chosen candidate’s character flaws and thus confuse the culture about what God calls men and women to be.

I will enter the voting booth in an effort to obey Isaiah 1:17 and “seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless, and plead for the widow’s cause” by voting for the policies which I believe will do them the most good.

Can Christians Refrain from Voting?

My interpretation of Romans 13 prevents me from being politically abstinent. Due to the constitution’s investment of ruling authority in the citizenry, the voters of America are collectively, “the king.” Therefore, like a king, I am forced to make a ruling. I cannot abstain because I am, as an American citizen, a servant of God — an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer. (Romans 13:4)

When a case comes before the king, he must rule under the conditions the Lord has created. He cannot manufacture a new case which will be easier to rule upon. He must take the case which is presented before him through the providence of the Lord. When he rules, he must rule with wisdom and impartiality on the facts of the case and realities of God’s law. He cannot abstain from ruling nor can he rule in favor of one party because he likes the way he smiles.

Therefore, I do not believe that American Christians are correct in abstaining from voting for a presidential candidate. As Piper states, there is plenty of room for disagreement on this point. If you, after careful study, come to a different conclusion, then so be it and I hope to see you on Sunday!

I will state that even if you determine to abstain from choosing a presidential candidate, nothing in Piper’s article endorse the idea of abstaining from the ballot booth entirely. There are other races for senate, congress; state and local offices which require your kingly ruling. Do not fall into the trap of fatalistic laziness and attempt to adorn it with talk about convictions. You are a steward of a fantastic treasure called, “American citizenship.” Do not be a “wicked and slothful servant.” (Matthew 25:26)

Are Persons and Policies Equally Powerful?

In his article, Piper states, “I find it bewildering that Christians can be so sure that greater damage will be done by bad judges, bad laws, and bad policies than is being done by the culture-infecting spread of the gangrene of sinful self-exaltation, and boasting, and strife-stirring (eristikos).”

I believe that Piper is working with a faulty equivalence between the destructive power of evil policies and the destructive power of evil personalities. To be sure, he is correct in asserting that both policies and persons can inflict damage. I believe he is incorrect in suggesting these forces have equal negative influence. Our constitutional republic has been designed in such a way as to ensure that policies transcend personalities. They have greater influence for good or bad than people. In America, our laws simply carry more weight than our leaders.

God can strike down an individual leader at any time. We have seen it happen before and may very likely see it happen in the next four years. When God removes a president in America, his party apparatus, platform, and policies continue to lead the nation after he is gone.

Without diminishing the constructive/destructive power of both persons and policies, it seems self-evident to me that laws carry more weight than leaders. Piper and I seem to disagree on this. This surprises me because I’ve listened to and read Piper since the late 90s and know he does not feel this way about church history. Consider how, in the life of the church, many leaders have fallen away due to moral compromise. Their sin has indeed inflicted great harm on the church. Yet if a church’s doctrine (its policies) remain biblically faithful, recovery from a bad leader is possible. In analyzing the history of the church, we can conclude that embracing evil doctrine (policies) have much greater destructive effect on the church than the occasional evil leader. If tomorrow we discovered that Piper was an absolute moral fraud, great damage would be incurred. But after the dust settled, the doctrines of grace would prevail. Laws simply carry more weight than leaders.

Given Piper’s article, I am frankly surprised he has spoken favorably of men like Martin Luther or Martin Luther King in the past. Both men had manifest sins evident in their lives. Yet in these instances, Piper points to their ideas. I’m having trouble seeing how he’s differentiating the approach he has historically taken toward Luther’s anti-Semitism or MLK’s womanizing (by focusing on the goodness of their policies as being more weighty than than the flaws in the personalities) and Trump’s sins. Isn’t this, by Piper’s terms, confusing the culture and clouding our witness?

Trump vs. Biden or Pence vs. Harris?

Since I believe that laws carry more weight than leaders, I would have a clear choice if both men were in their 50s. Yet both men are in their 70s and this supports my point in another way. For the first time in my life, the advanced age of both presidential candidates makes the vice presidential candidate an unusually relevant factor in my political choice-making.

It is not difficult to imagine that God will remove either Joe Biden or Donald Trump from the presidency in the mid-course of their term. If I believed, as Piper seems to believe, that policies and persons carry equal weight (to damage or bless), then I would be totally naive not to factor in the personalities of Kamala Harris and Mike Pence when making my decision.

If like Piper, you simply cannot differentiate between the negative power of policies and persons, then I encourage you to look to the vice presidential candidates, using Piper’s own heuristic, and ask yourself three questions:

1. Is it reasonably likely that God will remove either presidential candidate from office before the conclusion of his term? This seems to be a simple math problem and as kings, we should know how to how to read a basic actuary table.
2. In the event that God does remove Biden or Trump, do you have the moral clarity to recognize the massive personal difference between Harris and Pence?
3. Since many vice presidents go on to be elected into the presidency, which of the two personalities (Harris or Pence) do you believe better embodies biblical morality? To put it very starkly, in many ways, this presidential election is a referendum on the character of the vice presidential candidates. Would Piper have written his article if this election were between Harris and Pence? He most certainly would have not do so. Is this an election between Harris and Pence? Well, not technically, but in another credible manner, these two candidates are unusually positioned to become president in the next 1–5 years.

Conclusion:

I believe some read Piper’s article with a sense of relief because he had articulated, in a way they could not, some of their misgivings about Trump. He is to be congratulated on expressing one particular position on this election in an articulate and generous way. My response is merely written to suggest that his position is not, like any human argument, without contradictions or potentially flawed logic. Piper begins his article by saying,

“Nothing I say here is intended to dictate how anyone else should vote, but rather to point to a perspective that seems to be neglected. Yes, this perspective sways my vote. But you need not be sinning if you weigh matters differently.”

To which I respond, “Thanks John! Good thoughts indeed. Here’s what I’m going to do…”

I am not a vocal Trump supporter for many of the reasons you outlined in your article.

Though I voted 3rd party in the previous election, I will be voting for Trump/Pence this time around.

That vote should not be misconstrued as an endorsement of Trump’s personal flaws but rather an assessment that God has arranged this election to be solely about policy. You seem to have a category for this way of thinking in your view of church history but not in real-time political history and I don’t know what to make of that.

I would encourage Christians who plan to abstain from the presidential ticket to reconsider. If after doing so, you remain incapable of choosing a presidential candidate, then please vote as Christians ought to on the rest of the ballot. Don’t let Piper’s article persuade you to skip voting entirely. That’s absolutely not the point he is making.