Last summer, I spent a week with David French in Washington, D.C., as part of an American Enterprise Institute-sponsored seminar on pluralism, the belief that differences do not necessitate social distance. Over long lunches and spirited conversations with students from across the U.S. and world, I found Mr. French to be a generous, well-meaning, and deeply sincere individual committed to his particular conception of American democracy. He’s someone who, whether its on the Holy Post’s “French Friday” segments or the New York Times’ opinion column, wrestles openly with the tensions between faith and politics, and, more importantly, does so in settings that are not always receptive to faithful, “little-o” orthodox Christians. But it was also in those conversations at AEI’s historic Andrew Mellon building, and especially in reading his now-infamous or famous, depending on where you stand ideologically, New York Times essay endorsing Kamala Harris for president, that I came to see the philosophical and moral fault lines in what I’ll call “David Frenchism.”
In its most charitable, agreeable form, David Frenchism is a political sensibility which cautions Americans, particularly evangelical Christian Americans, to approach politics from a position of love and to view the public square as merely a neutral forum for what are ultimately intractable policy quibbles. In other words, French puts forth the view that Christians ought to be more concerned with how they interact with the wider political world, not so much with the whole what part, that is, the actual of those interactions.
Though true in some respects, many conservative Christians, Sohrab Ahmari first among them, have noted that this schema of French’s is not, in any meaningful sense of the word, rooted in the Christian tradition. Instead, he draws his conclusions about the Christian’s political duties from a distinctly secular, irreligious source: liberalism. He reasons that individual autonomy is the highest good, that “protecting individual liberty is the prime purpose” of the political order, leaving no space for a government that promotes substantive goods. While I could address the foibles of this liberal political theology at a later date, that aspect of French’s thought has been so thoroughly dragged through the mud that it would not be instructive to further prance upon its grave.
Instead, I endeavor to highlight something that French’s defenders and critics alike tend to miss: his unyielding desire to be right about a candidate. As much as conservatives, rightfully so, chide French for his over indulgence on liberalism in drawing his political conclusions, those very same conservatives can likewise fall into a trap of their own making by desiring a certainty to their political theology that is simply not there.
Namely, his public political reasoning often rests on a stew of secular “moral” frameworks, with a hint of Christian morality and a substantial dose of consequentialism, which, when scrutinized closely, collapses under the weight of its contradictions. The problem is not just the lack of intellectual rigor in his allegedly conservative arguments, but the way they, like those of both Deep South Baptist ministers and pride flag-adorned Methodist preachers, make Christianity into a code for unlocking the perennial questions of politics, rather than those of the human heart.
In his essay for the Times, French begins from a premise that many Christians, including myself, share: that character matters in leadership and that political choices should reflect more profound moral convictions. “I believe life begins at conception,” he writes in the very first sentence, an anchoring claim that signals his pro-life bona fides and his desire to ground his argument in Christian ethics.
But it’s precisely this framing that makes his subsequent defense of voting for Kamala Harris, who supports abortion access far beyond what most Christians would consider acceptable, all the more confusing. French’s central contention, at least from the outset, is that the Republican Party under Trump has abandoned its moral compass, and that voting for Trump would be tantamount to endorsing cruelty, deceit, and a decaying political ethos. Yet, he never seriously engages with the moral implications of supporting Harris, whose stance on abortion and other fronts of the culture war, by French’s own criteria, should be considered morally unacceptable. Instead, French seems to treat a vote for Harris as either simply a rejection of Trump or as a necessary choice to preserve American institutions, without fully addressing the ethical cost of endorsing policies that conflict with his Christian convictions. But who’s to say that the moral compromise French made is any better than the one made by the conservative Christians who plugged their noses and voted for Trump?
French attempts to resolve this moral tension by appealing to outcomes: under Trump, abortion rates didn’t decline, and the pro-life cause suffered from political backlash and cultural erosion. But it’s at this point that his argument entirely abandons its veneer of objective morality in favor of a soft consequentialism that sits very uneasily with his Christian moral vision. If, as French insists, life begins at conception and abortion constitutes the unjust taking of innocent human life, then it’s hard to see how voting for a candidate who supports its legal expansion becomes the safer moral choice. As French says of Trump voters, you would be “validat[ing] [her] cruelty.”
At best, and I mean that in the most charitable sense, this is an appeal to unknowable hypotheticals: perhaps Harris would have governed more moderately than her rhetoric suggested, maybe Republican extremism would generate even worse outcomes. But as limited beings, we are not afforded the luxury of omniscience. We cannot know how any politician will act in office, nor can we presume to measure the relative sinfulness of one leader over another. All we can say about politicians with confidence is that every human being, politician or otherwise, falls short of moral perfection.
To his credit, French gestures toward the complexity of abortion as a “social phenomenon,” rightly highlighting the cultural conditions that make it tragically persistent. That point is well taken. But in doing so, he sidesteps the deeper spiritual and moral question: What does it mean to knowingly cast a vote for someone who, through the power of the state, would actively preserve and expand what one believes to be a grave moral evil? Why spend so much effort arguing—along consequentialist lines—that a vote for Harris could be compatible with pro-life convictions, only to concede that the roots of abortion are opaque and that “reasonable people” disagree? At what point do reasonable people disagree unreasonably?
But answering such questions with pragmatic calculus or speculative predictions of social harm shifts the ground from moral theology to something like actuarial ethics—a framework where good and evil are weighed on a cosmic ledger, and the voter plays the role of omniscient evaluator. This assumes a level of foresight no one possesses: the ability to measure long-term consequences and assign proportional moral weight to competing evils. Even with a clear biblical ethic, what exactly are we measuring? Is it less harmful to vote for a leader whose character erodes public trust, or for one whose policies, to French, permit the legal codification of infanticide? Can any proportionate reason truly justify endorsing the making of abortion into a protected right? And more fundamentally, is harm reduction enough to ground a distinctively Christian ethic of political engagement, or is it simply a way to evade the burden of moral clarity? What is clear, though, is that in such a fraught and uncertain moral landscape, we should be exceedingly cautious, perhaps even silent, to make public pronouncements from a Christian perspective that imply certainty where Scripture does not speak directly.
There exists a double standard in French’s thought, treating the moral cost of a vote for Trump as disqualifying while framing a vote for Harris as a defensible act of Christian conscience. It’s not that Christians must vote for Trump, or Harris, or anyone at all. The Gospel does not demand allegiance to a party, though it does give clear moral teachings both for the individual and the church catholic. But French’s framing leaves little space for the Christian who, seeing both candidates as morally compromised (as all candidates to ever run for political office are), chooses, out of conscience, either to abstain from voting or to quietly select the candidate they judge to be the lesser evil. Instead of recognizing non-participation or fallible Christian prudence as a legitimate moral option, he presented the election as a false dichotomy between institutional preservation and moral rot. In doing so, he reduces Christian political engagement to mere utilitarianism hinged on uncertain and unknowable future outcomes.
And yet, French himself offers the very wisdom he later seems to ignore. In a moment of admirable clarity, he writes:
“Reasonable people disagree with me. I have friends and family members who will vote for Trump only because he is more moderate than Harris on abortion. I hate the idea that we should condition friendship or respect based on the way in which a person votes. Time and again, we make false assumptions about a person’s character based on his or her political positions. There are truly bad actors in American politics, but we cannot write off millions of our fellow citizens who vote their consciences based on their own knowledge and political understanding.”
That passage is generally accurate, and it deserves more than a parenthetical nod in an otherwise moralizing argument detached from Christian ethics. If we take this seriously, then we must resist the urge to cast electoral decisions as moral imperatives, which is something French spends an entire op-ed doing before ripping the rug out at the last moment. That’s the real danger, not that Christians will vote the “wrong” way, but that we will come to believe voting itself is a form of righteousness — a righteousness we can achieve by picking the right candidate. For Christians, voting is less like choosing a pre-ordained answer on a multiple-choice test and more like responding thoughtfully to a complex essay question. We have a responsibility to engage deeply with Scripture, carefully weigh our options, and make reasoned arguments, but ultimately, we cannot claim absolute certainty about who the “right candidate” is. The test, like us, is flawed.
I’m not saying Christians shouldn’t vote, though it is not so clear that Christians should vote — depending on one’s interpretation of Romans 13. Voting is both a privilege and a responsibility, and, in many cases, an act of neighborly love (and not in the Tim Walz “neighborly” way). As stated previously, voting is an act of prudence, not piety. Nor am I suggesting that Christians should retreat from public advocacy altogether. Public support for demonstrably moral causes with plain analogs in Scripture ought to be pursed. The distinction here is that we must resist the urge to conflate the moral quality of an individual policy, say, state-recognition of same-sex unions, with the moral character of the person who holds it, or to treat complex political judgments—especially about candidates—as if they have equally-simple answers. Because, when Christians frame political decisions, especially presidential votes, in binary moral terms, we turn fallible, personal judgments into public litmus tests of faith.
Worse still, we risk dividing the body of Christ over decisions that Scripture neither commands nor prohibits. The moment we declare that a vote for Candidate X is a moral obligation and a vote for Candidate Y is morally indefensible, we move beyond Christian ethics and into the realm of a secular, civic religion. This kind of reasoning should be especially concerning to evangelical Christians like French, given that the Protestant tradition has long been wary of declaring fallible human judgments as binding on the conscience.
This tendency to transform political judgments into moral certainties reflects a deeper spiritual danger: the elevation of politics from a necessary civic duty to a central preoccupation of Christian life. When we invest our electoral choices with such ultimate significance, we risk not only dividing the body of Christ but also displacing the Gospel itself from its proper place in our hearts and minds.
C.S. Lewis identified this precisely. He wrote:
“A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion; to ignore the subject may be fatal cowardice for the one as for the other. But if either come to regard it as the natural food of the mind—if either forgets that we think of such things only in order to be able to think of something else—then what was undertaken for the sake of health has become itself a new and deadly disease.”
Scripture is clear that it calls us to uphold righteousness and order, and it endorses certain readily ascertainable moral principles that must shape political action. Yet it also acknowledges that no single politician or political agenda perfectly embodies these truths. This recognition should temper our political engagement, reminding us to treat political positions and those who hold them with the same humility and grace we extend to one another: flawed, yet not without hope of redemption.
The real lesson from those conversations last summer, and from French’s agonized public reasoning, is not about which candidate Christians should support, but about the limits of what political choices can bear. If “reasonable people can disagree” on the candidate, then we should treat it as such. Otherwise, we allow either our zeal for politically wins or anxiety that we must be right get the best of us. The Gospel calls Christians to justice, mercy, and humility. It does not call us to certainty about electoral outcomes, nor does it promise that our political judgements, however carefully reasoned, will restore the brokenness of American public life. We cannot vote away our problems.
