When Kamala Harris told the people shouting “Jesus is Lord” last week that they were at “the wrong rally,” the viral moment seemed to sum up the vice president’s true sentiments on faith. “Somebody said, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and she immediately said you’re in the wrong place,” Pastor John MacArthur pointed out. “What else do you need to know?” And yet, Harris’s hostility toward Christians hasn’t seemed to move the needle for millions of churchgoing men and women fed up with the options this election cycle. If there’s a cure to the political apathy gripping believers, it should be persecution. And this vice president has promised plenty of it.

Just this week, Harris reiterated that she didn’t believe in religious exemptions for something as profoundly offensive and violent as abortion. “I don’t think we should be making concessions,” the former senator told NBC News’s Hallie Jackson when she was asked what compromises would be on the table for a nationwide abortion law. These are “fundamental rights,” she claimed (falsely), and, as such, Harris argued, there should be no accommodations for Americans with sincere moral objections. If a woman wants to destroy her unborn child, Christians should be forced to oblige. Presumably, she believes the same about same-sex marriage, transgender surgery, education, parental rights, or any other issue of conviction hotly debated in the country today.

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That’s just one reason Dr. Albert Mohler warned, “We live in a political reality right now that is quite limiting, daunting, and frankly, frightening. But if we’re frightened by the current situation, just understand how frightened we should be.” Unless the church shakes out of its malaise, it won’t have the luxury to sit and choose whether or not to get involved. The choice will be made for them when free speech, religious liberty, and conscience rights cease to exist.

“I wish I were more optimistic about the involvement of the church,” Cornerstone Chapel Senior Pastor Gary Hamrick told FRC’s Joseph Backholm, “but unfortunately, I’m seeing a trend right now that Christians want to check out. They’re not enthusiastic about [the] candidates. And I understand that as far as enthusiasm goes, but I try to tell people enthusiasm is not a prerequisite for voting.” These are critical times, he insisted, “because if we as Christians decide to sit it out, guess what will fill the vacuum? Every evil policy. And then we have no one to blame except ourselves.”

For the purist, it’s not an easy election. But that’s the point, Hamrick argues. There is no perfect leader. “You have to look at the candidates and who most closely aligns with your biblical worldview.” That means “sometimes we have to unite in ways that promote righteousness, even though we don’t particularly like everything about it.” But let’s be honest, the longtime pastor pointed it. “Without it, we’re worse off.”

To those who say Hamrick is politicizing the pulpit, he replies simply, “Look, I’ve been preaching out of the same Bible for 30-plus years. I haven’t gone anywhere. As the culture has drifted further Left, it makes people like you and me look like we’re going further Right. … [I]t’s the culture that’s drifted. It’s not us.” And let’s face it, Hamrick explained. There isn’t a single political issue that God didn’t “have the first word on.” “Everything from life to how we designed two biological sexes, even national security — you know, the 12 tribes of Israel had borders. God is okay with borders, and he wants us to protect our borders. When you think about judges and justice, all of these are biblical issues. The world [and] the culture has taken the moral narrative. They’ve distorted it and twisted it. And then they’ve told people like you and me, don’t get political. These are not political issues. These have been biblical issues from day one…”

Are the problems with the Republican Party frustrating? Absolutely. As Princeton Professor Robert George pointed out on the “Outstanding” podcast, “Too many Republicans don’t want to take up our responsibility to stand up and speak out for the persecuted, for the victim — in this case, the unborn child. [And] it’s your job and mine and the job of others … to be something of a gadfly within the Republican Party to remind people of what so many don’t want to be reminded of — and that is our first obligation. We mustn’t run away from the defense of the unborn. We mustn’t allow the Republican Party to run away. The party has removed its historic and noble commitment to defend the innocent unborn from its party platform. That’s a tragedy, and, if I may say so, a disgrace.”

Worse, he continues, the candidate of the party, the GOP presidential nominee, “has stepped away from his pro-life commitments, opposing — now, indeed, vowing — to veto any federal legislation to protect the unborn child, endorsing the abortion pill, which accounts now for a very substantial proportion of the abortions. [He’s] … embracing IVF, which in our country is done in a way that inevitably produces many, many, many embryonic human beings who are then discarded, destroyed, cast aside. The fundamental pro-life commitment of the Republican Party has been compromised in this election cycle,” but, he insists, “it’s our job to restore it.”

And frankly, George wanted people to know, “the other party is even worse.” “The Republican Party with our current nominee has compromised itself shamefully on abortion, on the defense of the unborn. … Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, announced that she was not only pro-abortion, but that she was ardently pro-abortion, that you could indeed not get more pro-choice than she was, and that she was for legalized abortion as a fundamental woman’s right, as she said, all the way through pregnancy. It’s exactly Kamala Harris and Tim Walz’s position. So things are bad in the Republican Party. They’ve gone in the wrong direction, but they’re even worse with the with the Democrats.”

It’s time for the church to recognize “how appalling” a Harris-Walz administration would be. “We cannot lose the one pro-life party we have,” reiterated the professor. But at the end of the day, “Our responsibility, first of all, as Christians, is to be faithful. It’s to be faithful to God. It’s to be faithful to Jesus Christ. It’s to be faithful to the gospel that has many, many dimensions and it affects all dimensions, all aspects of our lives, including our lives as citizens.” We have to “draw on those resources of hope, that virtue of hope, in order to be faithful to the gospel. And that means acting above all in defense of the least, the last, and the lost.”

LifeNews Note: Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand, where this originally appeared.