Christians are called to live in the real, fallen world, not a wistful fantasyland where everyone tells the truth, secretly means well, and is just a winsome podcast or three-minute hug away from repentance and salvation.

Stuff’s getting real out there. The principalities and powers are waxing cocky. They’ve started to drop their masks and strut their horns and hooves by daylight. Believers can only benefit by calling things as they are. Our thin-skinned friends might wince at first and shun us, but give them a little while, and one after another will call late at night and say, “I thought you were paranoid, but I’m worried you might be right!” I’m getting quite a few such calls. Cold comfort, but I’ll take it.

Politics rarely overlaps directly with spiritual warfare. Most of the time there is plenty of right and wrong on either side. Sometimes there’s mostly wrong on both sides, as when Hitler’s regime invaded Stalin’s. It’s rare that you get a contrast so close to black and white as the RAF defending Britain from Nazi bombers. At such times, the wall between the seen and unseen world seems weak and thin, and you glimpse the hidden stakes of the battle: You are not even fighting these depraved or deluded people. You are wrestling with the spirits who feed them their evil ideas, who seek the destruction of all and the ruin of souls.

That is how clear American politics is becoming. Here’s what the next election should be about, if we do our jobs: The Little Sisters of the Poor vs. The Big Merchants of Baby Parts.

It really is that simple. We must press every politician in America to take a clear, explicit stand on two critical issues which can rouse the right passions of Americans: Religious freedom and abortion profiteering. No Republican who won’t support the First Amendment Defense Act and zero out federal aid to Planned Parenthood is worth even two seconds’ consideration. We should flee them as near occasions of sin.

We will be tempted, so tempted, to sloth and cowardice. But this thought should brace us: If Christians can’t force Republicans in the primaries to oppose the persecuting of religious orders and churches, and to put an end to the selling of baby parts (Is that too much to ask?) then we are worthless hirelings and the lambs whom we guard are doomed.

There’s a lot of junk in the Republican pond, but it still supports life from time to time. The Democratic, by comparison, is a mauve-coated pool of radioactive, flesh-eating bacteria. Their connection with any meaningful concept of the Good has long been tenuous, but now it has snapped. How else to explain apparently sane people who would use police and prisons to punish Christian bakers, but not the merchants of unborn children’s lungs and livers. The Republicans are imperfect but not committed to such monstrosities, showing glimmers of right reason on a list of important issues. Theirs is the only party where at least some leading politicians

• Don’t want to actively persecute the church with punitive taxes and lawsuits if we don’t bless acts of sodomy at our altars and teach our kids to approve them in church schools.
• Don’t want to send the police to stop nuns from caring for the poor unless they hand out abortion pills.
• Don’t want to shovel half a billion dollars every year to the abortionists of racist-founded Planned Parenthood, who appear to be making a tidy profit selling organs from butchered babies.
• Aren’t in the pockets of self-serving public employee unions that want to vote themselves the kind of benefits that just bankrupted Greece.
• Aren’t so drunk on multiculturalist absinthe that they mix up jihadist thugs with Christian preachers.
• Don’t want your taxes to fund sex-change operations for recently amnestied illegal aliens and felony prisoners.

It’s our job to determine which politicians really are against all this, against it passionately, with all the force and fervor that Ronald Reagan hated Communist tyranny, and loved American freedom. We need a pro-life, pro-religious freedom president with fire in his belly, who can stand up to his advisers, his friends from college and even his donor base.

We need someone who won’t be spooked when everyone from the mainstream media and the Ivy League denounces him as a troglodyte, a racist, an unfeeling bigot, an enemy of “love.” We need a candidate who will use such abuse as fuel, who will know that the fight is not against mere deluded flesh and blood opponents, but against powers of spiritual darkness that we must not permit to prevail.