...because they won't vote for anyone.

Collectively we've only had the better part of a day to process the results of the 2016 election, but in the age of information and technology that's plenty of time to start parsing through some of the relevant data, and the findings are fairly bleak.

Granted it's still early, and numbers are still being reported from a few of the slower precincts around the country, but it looks like about 125 million Americans voted for president during the 2016 general election. With roughly 245 million eligible citizens (according to the Federal Register), that's a turnout of just over 51%. That leaves over 48% of the adult population of these United States who couldn't be bothered to get up and exercise their most basic right as a citizen. Donald Trump will become the next president of the U.S. with the ascent of a mere quarter of eligible adults.

Now certainly, as many might say, some of that 48% are people who were unjustly purged from voter rolls and disenfranchised. Some may perhaps suffer from some condition that does not officially knock them off the eligibility estimate but may still make it exceedingly hard to vote, like homelessness, mental illness, or incarceration. But not 48%, my friends. The only way there can be 48% of the population that fail to vote is through pure, unadulterated irresponsibility.

​Low voter turnout is nothing new, of course. Turnout for a Presidential election hasn't been over 60% since 1968, and the last time it made it over 2/3 was 1900. The reasons non-voters generally site for not voting are predictably shallow: that it seems like they don't really have a choice, that there's not much difference between the two parties, that there are so many millions of people voting that their vote doesn't really count, blah, blah, blah. Choosing a candidate to vote for would require them to rub two neurons together in a way to which they are not accustomed, so they decide to bag the whole thing.

In the past, this sort of unwillingness to lift a finger hasn't had a particularly disastrous impact. Sure, presidential elections have been decided by slim margins, and perhaps the best qualified candidate hasn't been elected, but at least both candidates have been reasonably respectable politicians who were not a threat to the republic.

This election was different. There has never been a Donald Trump before. We have literally elected (to shamelessly quote myself) a greedy, manipulative, vengeful, wrathful, tax-dodging, lying, racist, jingoist, megalomaniacal demagogue and serial adulterer who has defrauded thousands of employees, students, and business people, sexually assaulted dozens of women, encouraged foreign entities to commit cyber crimes against the US, and quite possibly raped children. 

And I get it, people don't like Hillary Clinton. They don't trust her. I get it! I don't really trust her, and only sort of like her. But do not think for a second that the choice was between two equally undesirable options. If you take everything that she has ever been accused of in her more than 30 years of public service and aggregate it, it wouldn't even be as bad as a quarter of what Donald Trump has said in this last year and a half, let alone done. Plus, in that time Hillary Clinton did a lot of amazing good for the people of this country as well, while the Donald was busy defrauding people, bankrupting businesses, sexually assaulting beauty pageant contestants, and starring in a lousy reality show. It is unconscionable for an eligible citizen not to have voted this year.

​When I was a senior in high school, all the way back, long, long ago in 2008, I was required to take half a credit of government. Barack Obama was running against John McCain at that time, and I was really excited to cast my very first vote in such a massively important and historic election. During class one day our teacher urged us to vote, and informed us that we would be required to register to vote in order to receive a passing grade. One of my classmates got fairly angry about this, and said that she didn't want to vote. When asked why, she said something along the lines of, "I just don't want to get involved in all that." 

In what I can only imagine was a combination of stress, excitement, senioritis, and my well-documented tendency to butt in I stood up in that classroom and yelled, "that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard! You 'don't want to get involved in all that'? You don't want to take just a moment of your daily life to make sure that you're informed on the issues and in control of your own fate? Well, let me give you a guarantee, [student's name]: if you don't get involved in all that, it will get involved in you, and there won't be thing one you can do about it because you will have surrendered any power you had."

In the coming days, weeks, months, and, God forbid, years, there are bound to be non-voters who claim that they are innocent in all this; after all, they didn't vote for Trump. No, non-voters. You aren't getting off that easy. You helped bake this cake just as much as anybody else, and come January you're going to have to choke it down with the rest of us. Thanks for nothing.

Alright, before you say "no" just hear me out real quick, I promise that it will be thought-provoking. 

There has been a lot of speculation about the institutions and traditions that may be left in an irredeemable state after the train wreck of a campaign that Donald Trump has run. Certainly I would say that unless the Republican Party acts quickly to distance themselves from the man - which many in the party already are working to do, of course - his campaign may destroy any chance they have of glimpsing the presidency again without significant restructuring. In fact, no less prominent a figure than president George W. Bush said he was worried that he would be "the last Republican president".

Trump's campaign may also herald at the very least a restructuring of the way presidential campaigns are covered by the media. The major televised news coverage of this campaign has been an absolute clown show that appears to be visibly crushing the spirits of any legitimate journalist who comes near to it. The unwillingness of reporters to call out blatant lies out of fear that they will be accused of bias is unsustainable, irresponsible, and when it comes to Donald Trump perhaps even unethical.

His campaign may also thankfully cause irreparable harm to previously underground hate groups that felt this was their time to make a move and go public. Donald Trump will now almost certainly be defeated, and the racist, jingoist militant groups lurking in the shadows of American society have been brought into the light before they can accomplish their goals. I see this as a positive, in the long run, and a major blow to the ultra-right.

But I'm interested today in the possible ramifications of Trump's candidacy on an institution that has not really been discussed in depth this election: the "Christian right", and the "Moral Majority". Since the 1940s - and more blatantly since the great abortion debate of the 1970s - American evangelicals and conservative Catholics have enjoyed an uneasy alliance that has formed the backbone of the Republican Party's membership and voting population. Members of the Christian Right are primarily united over a select number of social issues, like abortion, stem cell research, traditional family structures and sexuality, etc. and over time conservative economic models and the like have been woven into the fabric of their platform. 

The Christian Right voting bloc has proven to be very influential, representing as it does a large sub-section of the American people. Indeed, being a good evangelical Christian in America has become synonymous with voting Republican. In all that time the Republican Party candidate for president, and pretty much any office really, has had to be a conservative Christian. And, for the most part, even when I have vehemently disagreed with their economic positions or their proposed solutions to social ills, I have at least been able on some level to respect their faith and conviction. When George Bush, or John McCain, or many others have said that they are faithful Christians, I have done them the service of taking them at their word.

​But that foundation has been showing pretty significant and growing cracks for some time now. The necessary binding of conservative Christian ideals to secular conservative ideals has necessarily led supposedly good, "pro-life" Christians to support the death penalty, to deny equal treatment to minorities, to support disastrous imperialist wars and the torturing of prisoners, and to advocate mass gun ownership and self-defense even though Christ said plainly "Do not resist the one who does evil, but when someone strikes you upon one cheek turn and offer them the other also" -Matthew 5:39. I thought perhaps it might all come apart when Mitt Romney became the strongest available presidential candidate from the Republican Party. I wasn't sure how the Religious Right would react to a Mormon candidate, but they did largely decide to get behind him in the end. It helped that he was a legitimate conservative and reasonably good person.

This last year, I have looked around and seen nothing but monsters on the right. Everywhere I have turned I have seen despicable individuals that are clearly just paying lip service to any real Christianity, and who merely have to say in a speech that they are against abortion and they will have throngs of adoring voters, even if there is clear evidence that they are corrupt, greedy liars who will say anything to get elected. I am reminded of Penn Jillette who said in a Big Think video "I have tried with friends to say the most blasphemous sentence I can possibly say, and it does not come close to the blasphemy of Michelle Bachman saying that earthquakes and hurricanes where the way God was trying to get the attention of Politicians."

​Which brings me at last to Donald Trump, because Donald Trump is the epitome of all that Christianity is against. We have come to a point where the vast majority of the Christian Right, who believe that voting for the Republican candidate for president is an exercise of their faith, will be voting for a greedy, manipulative, vengeful, wrathful, tax-dodging, lying, racist, jingoist, megalomaniacal demagogue and serial adulterer who has defrauded thousands of employees, students, and business people, sexually assaulted dozens of women, encouraged foreign entities to commit cyber crimes against the US, and quite possibly raped children (seriously). None of that is an exaggeration, and is just a partial list of his crimes against God and humanity. If there is such a thing as an anti-Christ, it is Donald Trump. It is absolutely unconscionable to vote for Donald Trump, and I feel doing so may finally expose the Christian Right for what it is: a diseased, corrupted institution benefiting from the rote routine following of otherwise good and faithful people who simply have not been able to see it yet.

Oh, and Happy All Saints' Day :/

May God bring a swift and peaceful end to this election.