Joel Alberto

Pastors who spend their time engaged in politics are going to fail, and God is going to smash their political idols, because they chose a vocation to save souls. They will not save souls through politicians. That does not mean the church should abandon the political process. Pastors can remind their congregations that, unlike the early Christians, they are blessed to live in a nation where they can participate in self-government. They can encourage members of their congregations to run for office. They can tell their people to vote their consciences, and they can tell them plainly that there are moral evils in the world. They can teach deep theology and tie the modern church to the ancient church and its defense of life, its rejection of worldly sexuality, its commitment to marriage, etc. The church should be doing that. The 21st-century church does not stand alone, but on the shoulders of two thousand years of persecution and faithful witness. Unfortunately, too many pastors were willing to speak against only one party. How many spoke out about the cruelty toward illegal aliens in the deportation process? I support the deportations, but there was real cruelty in how they were carried out. How many told voters in Texas they had to go vote for Ken Paxton — a serial adulterer, impeached by his own party, who had to pay restitution as part of a criminal settlement — because he was the lesser of two evils but never spoke up during the primaries about choosing candidates of good character? I suspect very few did.

Congrats everybody. Republicans did this to themselves. God is smashing your idols now. Maybe instead of telling people to vote for a lesser evil, find better candidates. Find character that counts.

Trump and his political team have managed to do what the pre-Trump GOP never did — shrink the map of Republican states. Bush and Rove turned Texas red. Trump turned it blue. The pre-Trump GOP turned Georgia red. Trump turned it blue. But MAGA says we can't go back to winning.