Yes, God, God. So welcome to

to PlotGast 101.

Thanks for if you've been with us since the very first one, thank you.

It's been a long road trip.

Thanks for sticking it out.

If you're just joining us, I hope you enjoy yourself.

And thanks for coming.

So in our podcast today, I wanted to talk about what's sometimes called consequentialism.

And this whole issue has been brought to the forefront by the election of Donald Trump.

Donald Trump and Donald Trump got elected in part because of the massive support that he got from evangelicals.

And there's been a great deal of weeping and gnashing of teeth and people saying how, you know,

evangelicals have totally thrown away their witness because they voted for whatever happened to the character matters argument and so on.

So here's the dilemma. And consequentialism is the view that, well, what matters is the policies that

Donald Trump supports and if he's going to appoint good judges if he's going to

if he's going to appoint pro-life judges then we can just hold our nose over his personal affairs and pull the lever and just say I'm

voting for these consequences, I'm not voting for him. And of course, people who did this were also, people who held their nose and voted for Trump

were also likely to have objected loudly to Bill Clinton and his

misbehavior, sexual misbehavior while he was in office and Monica Lewinsky and all of that.

And never Trumpers are able to point to evangelical supporters of Trump and say,

see, you're just pragmatists at heart.

You're not really principled conservatives, you're not really principled Christians operating

in the realm of politics. you are pragmatists.

...