As election season is nearing its fever pitch many of my Evangelical and Christian friends are reaching out and asking for voting advice while those who don’t find me a friend want to be sure I toe a party line. Let me be clear:
God has no political party. There are plenty of very fine people on both sides of the aisle who claim faith in God and plenty who don’t. But God is above and beyond things like political parties, neither of whom reflect healthy Christianity. But God transcends American politics anyways – His Church, the Body of Christ, is a global enterprise with people from all different tribes and tongues. It’s not that God doesn’t care for American politics, it’s that God cares equally for all His children and the places they find themselves in. Frankly, we’re not that special.
BUT some will try to tell you, dear Christian, that you MUST vote one way or another to please God. This is a lie. You have choices.
The Christian has vast choice in the voting booth. Some would like to suggest that one issue is more valuable to God or a Christian ethic so we must care more for that. I will say abortion is a tragedy with so many lives lost. Using the rubric of single-issue voting but being people with a wide Scriptural basis for ethics and values, it is a false assumption to say that God cares for just one issue above another AND even more presumptive that we could figure out precisely what God wants. But if we cared for all the ethics laid out in the Bible, even if we just focused on candidates who actually upheld the 10 Commandments, we should not vote for people who break each of these things, because each of them have worthy merit. They share equal weight in God’s eyes until and unless we arbitrarily decide which ones matter less… which is shaky ground.
So an appropriate Christian voting ethic should probably take a note out of our Anabaptist brothers and sisters’ book: not voting is more Christian because the Christian is then not complicit in what the elected officials do with our votes.
But if the Christian must vote, then we must have the maturity to apply a uniform and consistent standard of requirement to all candidates employing all Biblical ethics. Or we should at least acknowledge our bias and judgments in endorsing certain sins over others as we do vote, though all have eternal value.
If the vote is so powerful, then there is vast choice in the voting booth, and that shouldn’t be interfered with by Russian propaganda, malfeasance by officials, or guilt trips from supposed officials.”
trialsofjoy 