But this morning, I heard on the radio a guy from Gaithersburg (where I work) who pretty much summed up the reason that potentially millions of pro-life, conservative and Christian Americans already have and probably will cast their ballot for Trump: we need to start winning again.
This particular guy said that Cruz was his favorite, but he voted for Trump because Trump will give us one small victory at a time so that, eventually, we can actually elect someone like Cruz.
Now, Cruz may not be your personal best idea of a conservative Christian pro-life candidate, but just substitute whoever else that happens to be, and you still get the gist.
For me, as soon as I got over Trump's chauvinism and petulant immaturity - both of which I still think to be genuine personal characteristics that he must constantly master within himself - it became pretty clear just why he was the only logical choice.
The bottom line is, conservatives and Christians have suffered such a crushing string of defeats in the 21st century - primarily in the culture wars, which then naturally translated into ever greater political and legal setbacks - that we've developed a "sore loser" complex which blinds us to the need for an actual strategy to win.
This complex - which can easily be exploited by the evil one - has pushed us in recent years into ever more all-out, all-or-nothing battles against the forces of the left and of secularism that even we ourselves know have already been decisively lost in the realm of public opinion.
It's high time we quit the pitiful rear-guard harassment of trying to preserve the "Judeo-Christian" nature of our public spaces and institutions when even we can't deny that they've long since been reduced to little more than a hollow veneer - lone islands of exclusive dogmatism in an ocean of postmodern universalism.
Trump is an insurgent, and we are looking at fighting an insurgency. We can't count on the conventional or mainstream tools and institutions to change the prevailing culture back to where it should be. In the last decades of the 20th century, the left waged a constant insurgency - a counter-cultural movement of exceptional depth, scope, and intensity - and it finally succeeded so thoroughly that after 2000, it acquired the wherewithal to start going mainstream and conventional with its demands and goals, as its dominant ideology eventually acquired ever more teeth and muscle within the normal channels of political and socioeconomic power.
We're already in a post-Christian or even anti-Christian world. The longer we refuse to face this reality, the longer we'll lose.
I won't get into the particulars here of how I think a Trump presidency will help our cause. But for now, consider Mr. Trump a messenger more than any inkling of messiah: the message he sends is that any morality - or Christianity, specifically - that doesn't prioritize winning, if even winning only small and piecemeal in the beginning, is doomed to irrelevance and extinction.
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