A Slow Descent

Sometimes the slippery slope isn't a fallacy

I’ve been reading Kevin Kinghorn’s book But What About God’s Wrath?: The Compelling Love Story of Divine Anger. Chapter six is titled “Truth as God’s Response to Sin and Self-Deception,” and deals with how human beings fool themselves into rejecting what is best for them—God’s plan and way of living.

People generally don’t start out completely opposed to God and His plan. Certainly, we are all part of the fallen human race (post-Genesis 3), and seem to have a natural proclivity toward selfishness and away from the self-giving love God demonstrates and calls us to imitate. But Romans 1 declares that there is enough information available in nature—what theologians call “general revelation”—for people to know that (1) God exists and (2) something about His character.

Because of that, even those who don’t have the special revelation contained in Scripture are without excuse. Yet even with all the evidence for God and His love, if we move away from Him instead of toward Him, our hearts will grow harder and harder.

A settled moral disposition takes time to develop….How do we become blind to large, glaringly obvious truths (such as the attractiveness of heaven)? By turning our attention away from smaller truths over a period of time. How do we become blind to deep truths about our own moral character? By turning our attention away from smaller, uncomfortable truths about ourselves over a period of time. (pp.108-109)

Photo by Dana Ward on Unsplash

The Bible refers to this as a seared conscience. One can only ignore the promptings of the Holy Spirit for so long before becoming totally insensitive to God’s voice. Christian music group Casting Crowns addressed this in their song “Slow Fade.”

While the most important application of this principle is personal morality and disposition toward God (which is what the book deals with), I think we can also see it happening in the way Christians have engaged in the political sphere.

Back in the 1960s, American political parties were reticent to nominate a man for president if he had been divorced and remarried for fear of alienating Evangelical Christian (and maybe Roman Catholic) voters. In 2016, People who self-identified as Evangelical according to primary voting exit polls (but who often were not regular church attenders) propelled thrice-married Donald Trump to the GOP nomination.

I’m sure many of you heard the justification of “we’re voting for a president, not a pastor,” or “it’s about policy, not personality.” A small, seemingly necessary compromise to stave off a potential administration led by Hillary Clinton.

Fast-forward to 2026. I have Christian friends (some of them ministers and church pastors) who, in 2016 and even 2020, talked about holding their nose and voting for the lesser of two evils, who have now become apologists and “defense attorneys” for Trump’s actions. No matter how egregious this administration’s actions (such as overreach in immigration enforcement tactics accompanied by blatant lies to the American people, or the video Trump just shared depicting former first couple Barack and Michelle Obama as apes), they not only accept the current state as a necessary evil, but either fail to speak out when a line is crossed, or actively defend the indefensible.

Trump keeps pushing the limits, and professing Christians keep following him over the line. We have to wonder: would 2016 Joe Conservative even recognize the 2026 version of himself? None of us think we could every become that bad, that we would go that far.

But just like you can slowly increase the temperature of the water and the frogs never realize they’re being cooked to death, moral compromise can turn us into someone we never thought we could become, one small step at a time. Personal life or public morality, it works the same way.

A Sports Metaphor

People who know me personally know that I could never come up with a sports metaphor on my own. That’s how much of a nerd I am (I only watch sports on TV if Arkansas is in a major championship, and I’ve only gone to homecoming games at my old high school because of the chance of running into former classmates).

That said, Kinghorn gives a comparison to basketball that made sense even to me (especially based on posts on Facebook see from friends ranting and raving about officials during the collegiate season):

Sports fans do this kind of selective remembering all the time. It is fascinating to watch a game such as basketball on television while in a room with fans from both teams. Each group of fans ends up yelling at the referees. Each group sees the fouls that are being committed against the players on their own team. Each group sees the traveling violations being committed by the players on the other team. Each group ends up yelling at the referees, genuinely convinced that the bulk of the referees’ missed calls are going against their own team. The neutral observer naturally wonders how the referees can be working so effectively against both teams! (p. 109)

Just as we can easily see others’ personal sins more readily than we can see our own, I think the current political situation demonstrates how easy it is to see the corporate “policy sins” of the other party/side (and allege that the courts or certain media outlets are biased in their favor) while failing to see and confess the failures of our own team, or recognize the bias and spin exercised by our own preferred media sources.

Hopefully, there will be a remnant who can observe neutrally and not only see how both sides are compromised, but also speak up with Christ-focused truth to confront evil in all its forms, no matter where it is found.