Better Than the Alternative

Against the lesser-evil vote, however it is worded

Every election, Christians hear that both candidates are flawed and that one of them is still better than the alternative. John Halle and Noam Chomsky made that case to the American left in 2016, and Wayne Grudem made it to evangelicals the same year. The argument goes by several names, the lesser evil, the better of two flawed men, the only realistic choice, and every version rests on the same claim, that the worse man’s faults can make it right to help the other. Scripture denies the claim. This paper argues that a Christian may not vote for a man he judges unfit to rule because his rival is worse, and that declining both is always open to him.

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The question

Most Christian arguments about an election are arguments about candidates. This one is about a reason. A Christian who votes for a man he would refuse if the man stood alone, because the other man is worse, has made the other man his reason. He calls the choice the lesser of two evils, the better of two flawed men, or simply better than the alternative. The words change and the reason stays the same. The vote goes to this man because of who he is not.

We call such a man unfit, and by that we mean the voter’s own verdict, the one he would give if the man stood alone. Scripture supplies the measure for that verdict. Moses told the tribes to take “wise and understanding and prudent men” (Deut. 1:13), and Jethro told Moses to look for “able men, fearing God, righteous men, hating pride” (Exod. 18:21). This paper does not say which candidates meet that measure. It asks what follows when a voter has judged that his own candidate does not.

Our paper What Do We Do? said that “the lesser-evil argument has governed Christian political behavior for two generations, and the result is that the line keeps moving and we keep moving with it.” This paper examines the argument itself. It does not rest on None Gives What He Has Not, which asks whether a Christian may vote for rulers at all. For its length it sets that question aside and asks only whether the other side being worse is a reason God accepts. We ask three questions of every idea: where it came from, what truth has been twisted to produce it, and where it leads. Stated as a syllogism, the case runs as follows.

The argument in its own words

The argument has advocates at both ends of the axis, and they reason the same way.

In June 2016 the composer John Halle and the linguist Noam Chomsky published “An Eight Point Brief for LEV,” lesser evil voting, for the American left. They advised a vote for the Democrat in contested states, and a third-party vote or none at all in safe ones. They noted the objection that a lesser of two evils is still evil. The obvious rejoinder, they wrote, is that doing less evil is “exactly the point of lesser evil voting,” and they set it aside for their main claim. A vote should not be treated as self-expression or as a judgment meant to punish candidates who fail the voter’s values. It is an act to be judged by its likely consequences, and in a contested state its only consequence is to raise or lower slightly the chance that one of the two major candidates wins. The evil they meant to lessen was the suffering the worse man’s policies would bring on other people.

Wayne Grudem, who had taught Christian ethics for nearly four decades, made the case to evangelicals in three columns for Townhall that year. On July 28 he argued that a vote for Donald Trump was a morally good choice. He called Trump “a good candidate with flaws,” mainly for the policies Trump supported, and he held that it is right to vote for a flawed candidate the voter thinks will do more good for the nation than his opponent. That is the argument at its strongest, because it claims the candidate is good.

After a 2005 recording of Trump became public, Grudem withdrew the July column on October 8, and on October 9 he wrote, “There is no morally good presidential candidate in this election.” He urged Trump to withdraw and said he did not know how he would vote, except that it would not be for Clinton. Trump stayed in the race and apologized. On October 19 Townhall reinstated the July column, and Grudem published a new one. Finding both candidates morally objectionable, he set aside a third-party vote as help to Hillary Clinton, reduced his options to voting for Trump or helping Clinton get elected, and settled the question by asking whose policies were better. He took up the objection that when faced with the lesser of two evils a Christian should choose neither. He agreed with that rule where both choices are evil actions, such as stealing and lying, and denied that it applied: “We are not talking about doing something evil. We are talking about voting.”

Halle, Chomsky and Grudem disagree about nearly everything a ruler should do, and they agree on the shape of the reasoning. Each measures a vote by which of two men it helps. Each grants that a third choice exists and counts it as help to the worse man. Each answers the charge of choosing evil, Halle and Chomsky by judging the vote by its consequences, and Grudem by denying that such a vote is an evil act.

Where it came from

The maxim is older than the ballot. Its history runs from a rule for aiming, to a rule for bearing loss, to a rule for choosing between sins, and back into politics.

The canons Gratian collected are the step that matters. Aristotle’s least of evils were vices to steer between and Cicero’s were losses to bear, and Cicero refused the proverb the moment it touched moral wrong. The canons carried it over to sins, and Gregory’s own examples show where the necessity comes from: men caught by a rash oath, a superior chosen without care, or an office bought. Each trap was closed by an earlier sin. Gratian kept the rule to a man’s own case, and for sinning to keep others from worse sins he gave Augustine’s answer. Augustine’s example was Lot’s offer of his daughters to the men of Sodom (Gen. 19:8), and he judged the trade in no way to be imitated. The lesser-evil vote is that case, help given to one man’s wrongs so that another man will not do worse.

What truth it twists

An error that lasts is built from a truth, and this one is built from three.

Of evils suffered, take the lesser. Christ used the rule himself: “it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell” (Matt. 5:29). A man may lose an eye rather than his soul, and a surgeon may take a leg to save a life. Thomas à Kempis gave the rule its Christian use, “Of two evils we should always choose the less,” and his two evils were the trials a man endures now and the fire to come. These are evils a man bears. The twist carries the rule from evils suffered to evils done, as if a sin were one more loss to be kept small.

A ruler may tolerate what he cannot cure. Christ said that Moses, “because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives” (Matt. 19:8). Moses put away no one’s wife. He left unpunished a wrong other men did. A law may leave an evil unpunished, and a ruler may bear with what he lacks the power to remove. The twist turns a ruler’s restraint toward another man’s sin into permission to help the sinner.

Prudence weighs outcomes. Christ sent his disciples out “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” (Matt. 10:16). Prudence weighs outcomes and chooses among lawful acts. It works inside innocence and cannot make an act lawful, and the twist asks it to.

What the vote does

Grudem’s reply is the stronger one, because it grants Paul’s rule. He agreed that a man faced with two evil actions should choose neither, and he denied that a vote for a flawed candidate is one. Everything now rests on what such a vote does.

The lesser-evil argument measures a vote by the margin. Halle and Chomsky said its only consequence is to move one candidate’s chances a little, and Grudem measured his by whose policies were better. On that reckoning a vote buys the difference between two men. The ballot does not record a difference. It records a name. It is cast for one man to hold an office and its powers, and its object is that man in that office, whatever else it is meant to achieve.

Scripture measures help to a wicked ruler by the man helped. Jehoshaphat, a king who sought the Lord, married his house into Ahab’s and joined him in a war to take Ramoth-gilead “out of the hand of the king of Syria” (3 Kingdoms 22:3), a war against a common enemy. He told Ahab, “As I am, so also art thou, as thy people, so also is my people with thee for the war” (2 Chron. 18:3). When he came home, the prophet met him: “King Josaphat, dost thou help a sinner, or act friendly towards one hated of the Lord? Therefore has wrath come upon thee from the Lord” (2 Chron. 19:2). Syria was the enemy and the reason for the war, and the prophet gave his ground in the man Jehoshaphat had helped. Ahab already reigned, and the help was a war, not a vote. If wrath came for joining a wicked king’s cause, helping an unfit man to a throne he does not yet hold is not a lighter thing.

Paul names the share. “Lay hands suddenly on no man, neither be partaker of other men’s sins: keep thyself pure” (1 Tim. 5:22). He wrote it of ordaining elders, and two things in it bear on the vote. The man who lays on hands does not give the office its authority. Christ gives it, and the elder names the man and sets him apart. That is all the most modest account of a vote claims for it, the account Leo XIII gave, in which the people designate a ruler and God confers his power. Yet Paul says the one who names shares the man’s sins. And the share comes from haste, from naming a man before he is proved (1 Tim. 3:10). If haste makes a man a partaker, knowledge does not make him less of one. A voter who has judged his candidate unfit and helps him anyway has not been hasty. He has acted knowing. We carry Paul’s rule from church office to civil office, and the application is ours. It rests on what the two acts share, a man named to an office by men who answer for whom they name.

The share reaches what the voter knew. A man who names a candidate he judges fit does not answer for sins no one could foresee. A man who names one he has judged unfit answers for the unfitness he judged. Nor does it matter that one ballot fills no office. The law spoke to the man in the crowd: “Thou shalt not associate with the multitude for evil” (Exod. 23:2). A man answers for his own share in what many do together.

Scripture’s measure for a ruler is the man himself. When it grades wicked kings against one another, the grading never moves a king out of the evil column. Of Joram it says, “he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, only not as his father, nor as his mother” (4 Kingdoms 3:2). The comparison measured how evil he was. It did not make him good. Grudem grants a floor in principle, and in 2020 he named one, flaws so serious that they would disqualify a candidate by themselves. In 2016, asked whether there were no limits to what he would tolerate, he answered that it was useless to speculate about future elections. The test he used had no floor of its own, and a test that asks only which man is better admits any man who stands beside someone worse.

None of this requires a sinless candidate. It requires the voter to take his own verdict seriously. Grudem judged on October 9 that there was no morally good candidate, and ten days later he found both morally objectionable. Halle and Chomsky called their own candidate the lesser evil. The argument begins by conceding that its man fails the measure and then asks the voter to help him anyway.

The worse man is no reason

Once a vote for a man is help to that man, the lesser-evil argument is an argument for doing a wrong because of what someone else will do. Paul named that reasoning in its plainest form: “Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just” (Rom. 3:8). The verse closes his answer to men who said that their unrighteousness served God’s righteousness (Rom. 3:5–7). God brings good out of evil, as Joseph told his brothers, “Ye took counsel against me for evil, but God took counsel for me for good” (Gen. 50:20). He gives no man leave to do evil so that he will.

The argument also needs the voter to be trapped, with no lawful choice left. Scripture denies that the trap exists. God “will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it” (1 Cor. 10:13). The Westminster Larger Catechism gives the rule for reading the commandments, “That what God forbids, is at no time to be done” (Q. 99), and the divines proved it from Romans 3:8. Aquinas put it in the terms of the schools. A man may seem trapped between two sins, but he is never “perplexed simply,” because the trap is always a sin or an error of his own that he can lay down. Herod beheaded John the Baptist “for his oath’s sake” (Mark 6:26), and the oath he thought bound him was the sin he could have repented of.

The way of escape is not always comfortable. Paul promised a way “to bear it,” and sometimes the way is the furnace. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were given two choices, the image or the fire, and they took the fire: “But if not, be it known to thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the image which thou hast set up” (Dan. 3:18). They chose an evil to suffer over an evil to do, which is the true rule of section 04.

Saul shows what the reasoning does once a thing is forbidden. His case does not prove the vote forbidden, and section 05 has to carry that. Samuel had told him to wait seven days at Gilgal (1 Kingdoms 10:8). His army was scattering and the Philistines were gathering, and he reasoned from the worse outcome: “Now will the Philistines come down to me to Galgala, and I have not sought the face of the Lord: so I forced myself and offered the whole-burnt-offering” (1 Kingdoms 13:12). Samuel answered with the command, not with the danger: “Thou hast done foolishly; for thou hast not kept my command” (1 Kingdoms 13:13). Saul had a lawful choice, to wait, and he took the forbidden one because of what he feared would come.

Grudem answered the Christian who would trust God and abstain by saying that God often works through human means, and that the ballot is one of them. God does work through means, and Scripture names the means he forbids. Whether a means is lawful is the question, and its usefulness does not answer it.

Where it leads

The argument goes three places, and each is visible now.

The line moves. A test with no floor of its own takes its floor from the other side, and the other side moves. Grudem’s columns show it in one man over twelve weeks. In July his candidate was good with flaws. On October 9 there was no morally good candidate. On October 19 both candidates were morally objectionable, the July column was back, and the only question left was whose policies were better. Grudem wrote that he did not know whether Trump had really changed, and the vote returned before that question was answered. This is the moving line of section 01, in one man.

The test can never refuse. A voter who follows it has said in advance that he will vote for whichever man is less bad. The comparison can tell him which man to help. It cannot tell him to help neither, because there is always a less bad man. Grudem’s friends asked him to send the Republican Party the message that a candidate like Trump was unacceptable, and he answered that they did not have to. On the test’s own terms he was right, because the test has no way to send that message. Halle and Chomsky wanted the left to break with the Democratic establishment, and their brief still told it to vote for the Democrat wherever the vote counted.

It moves the question from the act to the outcome. The argument teaches a Christian to ask who will win before he asks what he is doing. On October 9 Grudem asked whether our grandchildren would ask why we failed to stop what was coming when we had the ability. The question assumes the voter answers for the outcome. He answers for his act. The outcome belongs to God, who “is most high over the kingdom of men, and he will give it to whomsoever he shall please” (Dan. 4:17), and Grudem closed that column with the same verse.

What we do

Each session of our series ends with what a man does about what he has learned, in four places: himself, his home, his church, and what he asks of rulers, and this argument gives him one thing to do in each.

He judges the man, not the matchup. Before he helps any man to power, he asks whether he would help him if he stood alone. If the answer is no, the man beside him changes nothing. He measures by Scripture’s standard for rulers (Deut. 1:13, Exod. 18:21), not by the other name on the ballot.

He teaches his sons the third choice. He teaches them that no one is ever trapped between two sins, reads them Saul at Gilgal and the three men before the furnace, and teaches them the difference between an evil a man suffers and an evil he does. When someone tells them the other side is worse, they will recognize Saul’s reason.

He asks his church to teach the measure, not the comparison. He asks his elders to teach what Scripture requires of rulers before the next election, and to stop teaching that the other side being worse settles a Christian’s vote. If the church hands out a voter guide, he asks whether it ever says which man is fit, or only which is worse.

He tells rulers what he will not help. He writes and speaks to candidates and officeholders plainly, names what God requires of them, and tells them that the other side being worse will not buy his help.

Seven objections

“Abstaining elects the worse man.” Grudem argued that withholding a vote from Trump would help Clinton, and in 2020 he told John Piper that declining to vote for either candidate “is not a neutral position for evangelicals.” The objection treats allowing as doing. A man who will not throw a rope to a drowning man sins, because love commands the rescue. A man who will not help an unfit man into office fails no duty, because Scripture commands no one to choose between two men he judges unfit. Where it speaks of men choosing rulers, it tells them to take “wise and understanding and prudent men” (Deut. 1:13). The wrongs the worse man does after he wins are his own, and the men who elected him share them.

“The voter holds public power, and a ruler may tolerate the lesser evil.” On this view a voter is an elector with a share of public power, and like Moses he may bear with an evil he cannot remove by choosing the man whose rule will do less harm. Toleration leaves another man’s wrong unpunished. It does not do the wrong or put the man who does it into office. And if the voter is a public person choosing an officer, Scripture’s rule for that act is stricter, not looser. It is Jethro’s rule for Moses (Exod. 18:21), and David’s rule for his own house, “The proud doer dwelt not in the midst of my house; the unjust speaker prospered not in my sight” (Ps. 100:7). Naaman is cited on the other side. He asked pardon for bowing in the house of Rimmon at his master’s side, and Elisha told him, “Go in peace” (4 Kingdoms 5:19). Naaman asked for mercy in advance, “let the Lord, I pray, be merciful to thy servant in this matter” (4 Kingdoms 5:18). He did not call the act a good choice.

“Rahab and the midwives lied to save lives, and God blessed them.” Scripture names what it praises. Rahab is commended for faith and for receiving the messengers (Heb. 11:31, James 2:25), and the midwives because “the midwives feared God” (Exod. 1:21). Augustine read both cases the same way: “That therefore which was rewarded in them was, not their deceit, but their benevolence” (Against Lying §32). Aquinas stated the lesser-evil argument for lying in its strongest form, that a physician “cuts off a limb, lest the whole body perish,” and answered that “it is not lawful to tell a lie in order to deliver another from any danger whatever” (II-II q.110 a.3). Paul’s own statement of the forbidden reasoning begins from a falsehood that the speaker says served God’s glory, “if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory” (Rom. 3:7), and his answer is the next verse.

“David ate the showbread, and Christ approved.” Christ cited David to show that a ceremonial law gives way to mercy, “I will have mercy, and not sacrifice” (Matt. 12:7), and in the same breath he said the priests who work in the temple on the sabbath “are blameless” (Matt. 12:5). The showbread was holy, and eating it was not evil in itself. Christ’s point is that God himself orders some laws beneath others. It gives no man leave to do what the moral law forbids.

“The vote is remote material cooperation, permitted for proportionate reasons.” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote in a 2004 memorandum that a Catholic who votes for a candidate for other reasons, while rejecting his support for abortion, is engaged in “remote material cooperation, which can be permitted in the presence of proportionate reasons.” The note separates formal cooperation, sharing the candidate’s evil aim, from material cooperation, contributing to what he does without intending it. Paul’s partaker in 1 Timothy 5:22 is a material cooperator in exactly this sense. The elder who lays hands on a man too soon does not intend the man’s sins, and Paul still says he shares them. Jehoshaphat did not intend Ahab’s idolatry, and the prophet still asked, “dost thou help a sinner” (2 Chron. 19:2). The proportionate reasons that are to justify the cooperation are the comparison this paper examines, a good weighed against the worse man’s evils.

“Refusing is about keeping your own hands clean.” Halle and Chomsky wrote that the consequences of our actions for others matter far more than feeling good about ourselves. The objection is about motive, and our argument is about the act. A man may refuse a sin out of vanity or out of love for the people the worse man would harm, and either way the sin is forbidden (Rom. 3:8).

“Then paying taxes and serving under a wicked king are sins too.” Tribute is a debt owed to the power that is, “Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due” (Rom. 13:7), and Paul commanded it under Nero. Joseph and Daniel held office under pagan kings, and Obadiah, who “feared the Lord greatly,” was Ahab’s steward (3 Kingdoms 18:3). Each served a king God had already set over him, and none of them chose whom to serve. Jehoshaphat owed Ahab nothing, and he chose to join him. A vote is the choosing.

Where the argument stops

The limits of the argument should be as plain as its conclusion.

It does not reach the voter who judges his man fit, or settle whether a Christian may vote at all. None Gives What He Has Not answers both on other grounds, and this paper does not depend on it.

It does not say which candidates are fit. It takes the voter’s own verdict.

It does not forbid a ruler to tolerate what he cannot cure, or forbid weighing outcomes among lawful acts. Moses bore with the hardness of men’s hearts (Matt. 19:8), and prudence chooses among lawful acts.

It does not judge the faith of the men it answers. Grudem, Halle and Chomsky are answered for what they wrote.

It does not promise an outcome. It claims that a lawful choice always exists, not that the lawful choice will win.

It stands or falls on one premise. If a vote for a man is not help to him, or if helping a man one judges unfit into office shares in none of his wrongs, the comparison could justify the vote, and Grudem’s reply would stand. Section 05 answers that premise with the ballot, with 2 Chronicles 19 and with 1 Timothy 5. A reader who rejects the conclusion should reject it there.

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Texts and editions

Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, trans., The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament (London, 1844), with its numbering.

The Holy Bible, King James Version (1611), for the New Testament.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.9, 1109a33–35, trans. W. D. Ross, Internet Classics Archive.

Cicero, De Officiis III.3, 105, trans. Walter Miller, Loeb Classical Library (London and New York, 1913).

Gratian, Decretum, D.13 c.1–2 and D.14, ed. Emil Friedberg, Corpus Iuris Canonici, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1879).

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II q.19 a.6, II-II q.110 a.3, III q.64 a.6, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd ed. (1920).

Augustine, Against Lying §32, trans. H. Browne, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 3 (1887).

Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ III.12, trans. William Benham.

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1513), ch. 21, trans. W. K. Marriott.

Westminster Larger Catechism (1648), Q. 99.

Leo XIII, Diuturnum Illud (1881), §6.

John Halle and Noam Chomsky, “An Eight Point Brief for LEV (Lesser Evil Voting),” JohnHalle.com, 15 June 2016, reprinted at chomsky.info.

Wayne Grudem, “Why Voting for Donald Trump Is a Morally Good Choice,” Townhall, 28 July 2016, and its editor’s note.

Wayne Grudem, “Trump’s Moral Character and the Election,” Townhall, 9 October 2016.

Wayne Grudem, “If You Don’t Like Either Candidate, Then Vote for Trump’s Policies,” Townhall, 19 October 2016.

Wayne Grudem, “A Respectful Response to My Friend John Piper about Voting for Trump,” waynegrudem.com, October 2020.

Joseph Ratzinger, “Worthiness to Receive Holy Communion: General Principles” (2004), EWTN library.

Published by Beyond Left and Right. Old Testament from Brenton’s Septuagint with its numbering and spelling (1 Kingdoms is 1 Samuel, 3 and 4 Kingdoms are 1 and 2 Kings, Psalm 100 is Psalm 101, Josaphat is Jehoshaphat). New Testament from the King James Version. Gratian is summarized in our own rendering. Correspondence: contact@beyondleftandright.com