Dear Friend,

I know the red maps of Wednesday were tough for you.  I know you hold your convictions deeply, and that to you a Republican vote is a vote against human beings, against flesh and blood American people.  So, without snark or arrogance, I want to tell you why I voted Republican and why Tuesday gave me hope for our country.

First, I don’t believe the Republican Party to be the hope of the future, or full of perfect people, or God’s will for America.  Neither do I believe that God is a Republican or that America is a Christian nation.  I believe the whole world, every nation, is God’s book, and He is writing a story of redemption and America is a part of that.

Many Democrats in their despair last night declared that we Republicans obviously want pollution, starvation, oppression, war, unaided illness, poverty, bullying, and the list goes on.  My motives are frequently very selfish, and you would in an honest moment admit that yours can be too.  But do you really think that Republicans want that list of things for our country?  Do you really think we hate America and American people so much?  Do you think we hate our own children, who will inherit the America we make for them, so much that we would purposely work to destroy it?

I can’t speak for all Republicans, or for all Christian Republicans.  I speak for myself when I say that what I want is to stand for the party that most closely retains the Biblical definition of life and its inception and ending, of gender which we have no more authority to change than we do to change our species, of marriage and the clear pattern that was set by the first two humans who were married – Adam and Eve, of the obligation and responsibility to work for the good of the place I am put.

To your protest that a Biblical definition is up for grabs, open to millions of interpretations, I say no, it’s not.  And you know it.  The Bible is clear.  You and I don’t get to subtract what we don’t like and mold what’s left into our own image, though we all are prone to this, even those of us who say we submit to the Bible as our chief authority.

Because authority is the issue, isn’t it?  I vote Republican not because Republicans are all Bible-believing Christians or even all admirable people, but because Democratic ideology seeks to make itself God.  It wants to remove the highest authority, the Creator, who determines night and day, and water and land, and male and female.  And it wants to put itself in His place.  It would abolish the pillars of our culture and put nothing in their place except individual personal feelings.  Personal feelings won’t hold up a culture.  The cry is that this pillar-abolishing is in the cause of tolerance, equality, fairness.  And who could argue with those goals?  Except that I don’t believe they are the real motivation.  The real reason the pillars must be abolished is because they are put in place by the Authority; they are an affront to one who would be his own god.

Are you thinking that I have my head in the sand, and haven’t looked at our polyglot, poly-religious, poly-everything country in the last half century?  I have.  I don’t expect everyone to be Christian, Southern, church-going, white, conservative, football-manic, small-town, happy, optimistic, women like me.  I know this list is everything you push against.  But you didn’t push against me.  You respected me and I have always appreciated that.

No, I don’t expect America to be Christian, but I will fight, I will vote, for the pillars to remain precisely because I love America. I want it strong for my children and their children, and I believe that removing those pillars, removing the Author who has all Authority, will be bad for you.  And for your children’s children.  And for the very people – marginalized, needy, different – that it claims to help.

Can you see this as a compliment to you?

Your Friend