I know a woman -- let's call her Anne-Marie -- who homeschools her large family. She was raised in an unusually Catholic family in an unusually Catholic city, and she grew up steeped in a culture that said "ending abortion must be the highest priority for committed Catholics, and the most reliable way to end abortion is to pass laws against it."
When I met her mom in 2014 I was shocked almost into rudeness by her willingness to broadcast conspiracy theories as fact. I wondered if perhaps the mom was having some premature cognitive decline, because surely, surely, no one with intact faculties could believe that nonsense. In hindsight I suspect that too much talk radio was a more likely culprit than cognitive decline.
Anne-Marie and I crossed paths most often on Facebook, where I wound up hiding her posts for a while. On the day of the Newtown shooting she posted about it: she thought it was so sad that those kids had died, and she hoped the liberals wouldn't use their deaths as an excuse to take away people's rights.
In 2016 Trump was a bridge too far for her. She had voted Republican for as long as she had been able to vote, but she thought it might be better to vote third-party over Trump.
Now, though? Over the past four years she morphed into a rock-solid Trump voter. She thinks you should have voted for him too, because he is the most pro-life president in history, and her #1 priority is to ban abortion.
A few weeks ago I thought to myself, "What we have in this country is an EPISTEMOLOGICAL CRISIS!" And then I thought, "Probably saying the phrase 'epistemological crisis' out loud disqualifies you as a source of information in the minds of the people whose epistemology concerns you." I have so many church friends who see it as a badge of honor to eschew mainstream media in favor of Fox News and its ilk. Don't get me wrong -- I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and when Trump does something that makes me angry I make a point of reading what the National Review says about it. It's not Fox's conservative slant I'm complaining about; it's the truth dearth.
Within the US Catholic Church our Trump problem has been massively compounded by priests and bishops who are also watching Fox News. I was gobsmacked to find that Catholics were still -- still -- being cautioned that it was a mortal sin to vote for the Democrat. Did you see Mark Shea's series on this earlier this fall? It was excellent, and I think it went largely unheeded by the folks who have been hearing since the 80s that good Catholics vote Republican.
I voted for Biden with a clear conscience, because Trump is the very embodiment of a proportionate reason. If Biden wins I will weep with relief -- not because I have any disagreements with the teachings of the Church, but because Trump is a menace and we are lucky that he has only presided over the deaths of a quarter-million Americans and ravaged the norms of democracy. But if Trump pulls out a victory, Anne-Marie will celebrate, and she will be certain that the angels in heaven are rejoicing with her.
This bespeaks a problem larger than the results of the 2020 election.
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