Lux Lucet

Tuesday’s Elections  

Note that the title of this post is “Thoughts on Tuesday’s Elections (plural)” not “Election” (singular).  There are two ways in which we have multiple elections on Tuesday.  In the first place, although the presidential election is on Tuesday, the office of the presidency is hardly the only office for which voters will make a choice.  There are thousands of elections that will take place on Tuesday for local, state and national offices.  Many localities will have tax levees and other ordinances on the ballot. For my part, at least in years where there is a presidential election, my tendency is to focus on that vote and ignore the many other offices that are up for grabs.  But local races matter.  For honest local and state officials can serve as a shield to their constituents in the event the national government becomes corrupt.  This is the doctrine of the lesser magistrate as developed by John Calvin. 

A second sense in which we have elections (plural) on Tuesday is the presidential election itself.  In the U.S., we do not elect presidents by popular vote, but by the Electoral College.  In practice, the way this works is that the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote in each state earns that state’s electoral votes.  A states electoral votes are determined by the size of each state’s congressional delegation.  In effect, the indirect method used in presidential elections means that there is not one big presidential elections, but 51 (50 states plus the District of Columbia).  The states’ electors gather in December to cast their votes based upon the popular vote in each state and the winner is declared the “president elect.” 

As likely was the case for many Americans, I gained a new appreciation for the Electoral College in 2016, which saw Donald Trump win the presidency by electoral votes, even though he officially lost the popular vote.  For what it’s worth, although this author is not convinced Trump lost the popular vote, the official tally favored Hillary Clinton by about 2.9 million votes.  In the opinion of this author, the Democrats, as is their wont, attempted to rig the election in favor of Hillary, but it’s much harder to rig 51 elections that it is to rig one big election.  In the end, their rig wasn’t big enough.  The Electoral College saved the American people from the Monstrous Regiment of Hillary Clinton. 

Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

In 1884, Presbyterian minister and Union Civil War veteran Dr. Samuel D. Burchard said, “We are Republicans and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents are rum, Romanism and rebellion.”  And what was the party he mentioned whose antecedents were rum, Romanism and rebellion? 

The Democrats.

For my part, I’ve been a registered Republican my entire voting life as is my family generally.  As a Republican, while I disliked for Democrats, there were times when I wondered whether my negative thoughts about them just represented over the top partisan prejudice on my part.  Perhaps I was just being too hard on them and unfair.  “After all,” I would think to myself, “they are my fellow Americans.”    

But after seeing the obvious and over the top corruption of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and the corruption and vileness of the Democratic machine that backed her, I stopped having second thoughts about my misgivings relative to the Democrats.   

Samuel Burchard got it right way back in 1884.  He was right then, and he is right today.

Just taking the “Romanism” part of Burchard’s statement, one can see this by the fact that it is the Democrats who have given this country now a series of Roman Catholic presidential candidates: Al Smith (1928), John F. Kennedy (1960), John Kerry (2004) and now Joe Biden (2020). 

Al Smith and John Kennedy both faced tough scrutiny due to their Roman Catholicism, but the Romanism of Kerry and now Biden has passed almost without comment at all, either from the mainstream media or from independent bloggers, YouTubers and podcasters. 

But there are very good reasons for Americans to distrust a Roman Catholic president.  John Robbins put this quite well in his book Ecclesiastical Megalomania where he wrote,

It might be expected t hat an institution such as the Roman Church-State, ruled by an absolute emperor, structured in a rigid hierarchy, supranational in scope, aristocratic in character, and none of whose officials is elected [note well, Rome does not believe in elections, even though as we have seen above, elections are God’s provision for filling offices in church and civil government, author]…would favor constitutional capitalism.  But how deep-seated its hostility to freedom and free enterprise is was a surprise even to this author.  The popes have expressed their hatred, not only for Protestantism…but also for the political and economic expression of Christianity: capitalism.  In the pages that follow, the reader will find scores of such statements from the Magisterium of the Roman Church-State.  They are part of a system of thought that is one of the most impressive systems yet devised by men.  They are not disjointed statements, but the logical conclusions of premises accepted in Roman theology.  They are offered to the world by the Roman Magisterium as part of a package deal, and we are not are liberty, as some American Catholics would prefer to do, to accept the Church-State’s theology and reject its economic and political philosophy.  That flies in the face, not only of the claims of the Church-State itself, but of reason as well (24, emphasis mine). 

Now there are some American Roman Catholics, even Roman Catholic public officials, who are more independent minded than others and will inconsistently uphold the Constitution over against the dogmas of Rome.  But any time Americans put a Roman Catholic in office, they run the risk of getting someone who is a tool of the pope.  This is an especially big risk when it comes to the presidency. 

Joe Biden certainly seems to be a politician who’s open to Vatican influence.  On his website, one can find an entire section titled The Biden Plan for the Catholic Community.  Reading though it, one may suppose that it was written by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which it may very well have been.  The “Plan” states a litany of all the Roman Church-State’s favorite socialist tropes: raising the minimum wage, nationalized healthcare, mass taxpayer funded immigration, migration and refugee resettlement, etc.  Biden even cites Pope Francis’s globalist Green New Deal encyclical titled Laudato Si.  For more on Biden’s political Catholicism, please listen to my recent podcast on the subject here. 

What to Expect on Tuesday

With the big day just two days from now, what can we expect to see on Tuesday?  Will Trump or Biden with the White House?  More to the point, will we even know who won, or will the process be dragged out for weeks or months? 

As you may suppose, opinions differ quite a bit.  If you listen to the national news media, Biden has all but won the election already.  He’s got a 10 point lead in the polls.  Nate Silver gives him an 89% chance of winning.  According to one headline, “Thousands of witches plotting to cast ‘binding spell on Donald Trump on Halloween so he loses to Biden on election day.”  So I guess Biden has the Satanist vote locked up.  Apparently, the Dems have the felon vote locked up in Florida.  Historically, Democrats have dominated among dead voters, so there’s that.  So with a 10% lead in the polls, and a strong showing among witches, felons and the deceased, Trump and the Republicans may as well just give up already.  Right?

Well, not so fast.

One of the best political forecasters I know of, Gerald Celente – Celente calls himself a “political atheist”, so he’s not a partisan guy – has forecast a Trump win on Tuesday. More to the point, he forecasts a Trump win followed by riots for a few weeks, which will then settle down as we move into the Christmas season.

From my own personal observations, it certainly appears that Trump and his voters have a big edge in energy and excitement over Biden.  Trump regularly has rallies with thousands of supporters.  According to this article, the Secret Service estimated that Trump’s 10/31 rally in Butler, PA had 57,000 in attendance.  Biden, on the other hand, has made it a practice to call a “lid” on campaigning early in the day.    

This is similar to the situation in 2016, where Trump was drawing huge and enthusiastic crowds at rallies all over the country, one of which  this author attended, while Hillary Clinton struggled to attract rally goers.  Yet we were told day after day that Hillary had a huge and insurmountable lead in the polls and a 98% chance of winning the election.  I did not believe the polls and the predictions in 2016 and do not believe them today. 

What Should Christians Do Tuesday and Afterward?  

The prophet Jeremiah, addressing to the Jews already in exile in Babylon, wrote, “And seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the LORD for it; for in its peace you will have peace.” 

Expressing much the same idea, the Apostle Paul wrote to Timothy, “Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence.”

Clearly, one of the most important actions for Christians relative to this election is to pray for the nation.  This year has seen unprecedented intrusions by government on civils liberties in the form of Covid lockdowns across the nation and riots the like of which have not taken place in living memory.  Ours is a nation bankrupt both financially and, more important, morally. 

A good friend of mine once told me he believes America is under God’s curse.  I would have a hard time arguing with him on this point.

So with all these problems we already face, plus with the prospect of a corrupt, Roman Catholic Democrat taking the White House being a real possibility, are Christians to despair?

Certainly not!

Whatever happens Tuesday and in the elections’ aftermath, God is in charge. 

And God has foreordained whatsoever comes to pass both for his glory and for the good of his people.  This includes the election results.

We probably all have seen videos of so-called “snowflakes” melting down in 2016 when Donald Trump won.  They melted down, because they did not know God.  For them, all their hopes were tied up in a particular election result.  When they didn’t get it, they couldn’t cope.

 As Christians, we are made of studier stuff than snowflakes. 

Come what may, let us be about our Father’s business Wednesday morning. 

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