Two big reasons the GOP lost big last week

When it comes to the results of last week’s election — and the election before that, and the election before that — I can trace back the current death spiral to two things.

First, the overall sad state of the church in America.

There is simply no excuse for what happened Tuesday in Ohio with the baby-killing referendum, Issue 1, even though we all saw it coming.

When it comes to the outgoing generation of pastors, too many either reduced themselves to mascots for the Republican Party — so they lost their prophetic witness to the culture — or they chose the “seeker-sensitive,” purpose-driven life over their prophetic witness, otherwise known as amassing the multitudes rather than discipling the nations.

And what's happening with my generation, as it assumes the pulpits and goes out of its way not to become Pat Robertson clownishly endorsing pro-baby-killing Rudy Giuliani in Republican presidential primaries, is that it is becoming politically naïve in an entirely different direction. Many Gen X pastors have decided that the gospel belongs in a hermetically sealed environment and is about salvation alone rather than salvation primarily.

Thus, they’ve calculated that there really is no reason why they need to run perpendicular to the culture. You know, maybe if Paul had just been more strategic, Nero wouldn't have cut his head off. Maybe if Peter had stayed within the church realm, officials wouldn't have crucified him upside down. Maybe if Polycarp had just stuck to not living out his faith in public, if he treated it as a largely theoretical exercise without any real-life application, they wouldn’t have knocked on his door one day and given him the whole “bow to Caesar” routine before burning him alive when he refused.

But that isn’t how this works. That isn’t how any of this works. Which is why if you are in my audience in Ohio, and your church did not push people to vote against the baby-slaughter referendum, you should never go back there. And I mean ever. You should leave right away.

Never go back. Don't cut them another check. The salt has lost its savor, and as Christ said, at that point it's of no use to anybody except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. Do not waste the master’s talent on dead ends. God is a god of multiplication, not division or subtraction.

Which brings us to the second reason why we fail so gloriously at elections these days: Everything it would take to reverse the current political trend — from better candidates and better messaging to better organization — runs counter to far too many people's gravy trains.

I’d be willing to bet plenty of people who say otherwise in public now would answer “no” if they were bound by the lasso of truth and asked, “Do you think Trump can overcome his own negatives and 91 indictments to win the presidency next year?” But they won’t tell you that, because they believe it is a truth you are unwilling to hear and maybe you’ll tune out if you do.

So we get more of the “muh polls” feedback loop, where we convince each other we’re about to win right before we lose. Media that hate us and lie to us about virtually everything are doing these psy-ops ... err, I mean polls ... but I’m sure their polling departments are given N95 masks to remain unstained by the rest of their corruption.

It cannot be a coincidence that their polls keep telling us good things while we keep losing. No coincidence whatsoever.

It’s been a brutal year for us in terms of special or off-year elections all over the country. You’d think all the glorious polls showing Biden’s cosmically bad approval rating and plummeting credibility would have paid off by now. Instead, when it’s time to actually vote, “we held Mississippi” is our rallying cry. Democrats have averaged only 38.2% of the popular vote in presidential elections in Kentucky so far this century. But a GOP gubernatorial nominee whose closing ad campaign pitch was his Trump endorsement lost by five points.

We simply can't be bothered to be even marginally better for the sake of our children’s future. Our team sucks. We have no heart. We are men without chests. It's always somebody else's job. There is no vision. No leadership.

Nothing current better illustrates our predicament than a bunch of MAGA influencers on social media (rightly) demanding the head of Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel after yet another election loss. But they never bother to point out that their meal ticket — Donald Trump — is the reason McDaniel is still running the RNC! Demanding accountability while shielding accountability is as passive-aggressively on-brand as we can be possibly be.

We do have the dopest memes, though. And can you guys believe Ron DeSantis' boots?

Did I mention we’re terrible? Voters, who don’t obsess with polls like we do in conservative media, keep telling us so on Election Day. They’ve made it clear they see that the current Republican brand is in desperate need of a reboot.

If we won’t listen to them, maybe we’ll listen to Jack Nicholson’s Joker. This town needs an enema.