As I noted last week, a win by Hillary Clinton in this year’s presidential election would pose a dire threat to the freedom of American Christians. She would appoint more leftist, anti-Constitutional judges to the Supreme Court, giving them an unstoppable majority, and that would be only the beginning. The new regime likely would suppress our freedom of speech (see Iowa), seek to monitor our sermons for unacceptable content (see Houston), and subject us to a special tax (see Obama’s Solicitor General), which might as well be called the jizya.

Knowing these brutal facts puts us in a very awkward position when we try to jockey for influence with the likely alternative, Donald Trump — in an attempt to keep him true to his pro-life promises, win him over to the patriotic duty of protecting religious liberty, and infuse his campaign with deeper principles than have thus far bubbled up. One could sum up that campaign to this point with the slogan, “Vote Us, Not Them.”

But Americans want more than that. It’s part of what’s real about American exceptionalism. While it’s wrong to reduce America to nothing more than a set of Whig principles, it must never be anything less; pursuing naked self-interest and group narcissism gives Americans a bad conscience, eventually. We know that we were meant by our first settlers to be a “city on a hill,” a shining an example of ordered liberty for the rest of the world.

Globalists on the right too often forget that it must first be a functioning city. But populists such as Trump seem not to give a hoot about the hill. Let’s just look out for number 1, these populists say, and let the rest of the world go hang. But as Christians, we must care. Yes we must always keep in view the tragic limits of our fallen, human condition and avoid imagining we can spread ordered liberty as easily as we can McDonald’s. But we cannot ever forget that our citizenship of heaven demands transformative conduct on earth, including respect for the vulnerable and a genuine love of justice. Do any less, and we treat the Cross as a tribal totem, instead of the key to heaven.

From one point of view, the Left has a gun to our head, and we must say either “Trump!” or “Shoot!” If that fact exhausted the matter, there’d be nothing more to say other than “Hold your nose, vote, and hope.” In fact, that is about where many Christians were left in 2008 and 2012, with tepidly pro-life candidates John McCain and Mitt Romney. We didn’t hold either candidate’s feet to the fire, but let ourselves be terrified by the prospect of Obama, and meekly fell in line. Many of us didn’t end up bothering to vote, and both candidates failed. This year, we divided our support much more widely among the candidates, and many rallied to Trump — some, no doubt, in disgust at how completely the GOP “establishment” has decided to take us for granted.

No wonder they do.

Each election, we face the prospect of a really terrible Democrat who will further use the guns and bribes of the State to de-Christianize our society, threaten our rights, and keep on killing babies. There is no plausible Republican presidential prospect in America who is as bad on those issues as the very best Democrat. That lets GOP leaders see us in the same cynical fashion that Democrats view black voters: Where else are we going to go? The only plausible threat we can make is not to turn out to vote, which only makes it more likely that our least favorite candidate will win.

But there is more going on this election year than in most. While reaching across the aisle to try to steal blue collar voters, Donald Trump has flouted most of the traditional power bases among Republicans. He has outraged and infuriated foreign policy hawks, pro-business elites, tax cutters, de-regulators and most of the vocal conservative commentariat. Each of these group’s criticisms of Trump has genuine merit, but by now that’s beside the point.

What matters is that his chosen isolation makes Trump in some ways vulnerable. It means that he needs us in ways that John McCain and Mitt Romney thought they didn’t. The Trump campaign is far behind the Clinton machine in building infrastructure, recruiting volunteers and buying media. It has major conservative outlets and Republican senators openly rooting against it. There are long-time Republican donors (like pro-choice, anti-marriage, open-borders billionaire Paul Singer) announcing that they won’t give Trump a penny.

On top of all this, the Trump campaign keeps mangling its narrative and stumbling into dead-ends that offend potential voters — like Trump’s Hillary Tweet that was (not unreasonably) perceived as anti-Semitic. That, and a defense of Saddam Hussein as an effective terrorist hunter took up Trump’s valuable time during a news cycle that should have focused on Hillary Clinton’s almost treasonous email mishandling of government secrets.

If any other candidate were acting this way, we know what Trump would tweet: Pitiful. Amateur hour. You’re fired.

So Trump needs more than our votes. He needs our money, our talent and quite frankly our advice. He needs to see that the anti-Christian agenda of the left is part and parcel of its anti-Western prejudice, a key item in the agenda of political correctness. Christians are fighting for our basic Constitutional rights as Americans, and Mr. Trump should see us with the same sympathy he extends to coal-miners and auto-workers. We are pushing back against the soulless globalist elites who want to pull every issue out of the hands of grubby voters, and rule the world via backroom deals among the U.N., the EU and various Chambers of Commerce. So right now the Christian cause is also a populist one.

But unlike the angry Alt-Right types who seem to be driving Trump’s social media outbursts, we hew to moral principles that cut across tribal lines. We have much more in common with Christians from Africa or Syria than we do with veal-colored, pro-gay, open borders bishops in rainbow vestments. Black and Latino voters might not always support us, but they know we don’t despise them. How could we, when we pray with them on Sundays, help rescue their babies from the abortionists and direct billions in charity toward poor Americans and underdeveloped countries?

Stripped of media caricatures, Christianity is attractive because it is good. It calls out the good in each of us, which comes from the same Creator, a good lost by sin and restored by the same Redeemer, and flows through each member of the body of Christ thanks to one healing and blessing Spirit.

It was language like that which built America, unified it, and kept it tolerant and free. It’s a dialect of English we might rightly call “American.” We Christians are fluent in American, and could teach it to Mr. Trump, if he’s humble enough to listen. Or else he can keep on as he is going, and lose an election in humiliating fashion to a politician damaged by numerous scandals and lost on the stump. The choice is Trump’s.