What's In a Vote?
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If there is anything uniting America today, it is an interest in our politics - America’s new pastime. As we make our way toward the election next week, our public life is being sucked into the vortex of politics. While this is an important election, it has more to do with the fact that national politics has become totalizing in American life. To that point, you’ve probably read and watched all you care to see about the candidates and the issues in this election. I want to talk about something slightly different.
I’m interested in how Christians conceive of voting. In short, do Christians have a biblical obligation to vote? Are votes pragmatic or sacramental? Endorsements or choices? There’s a lot of discussion around these questions, and it’s worth considering arguments all the way around the issue.
Kevin DeYoung is always incisive on these issues, and this article is one of the best of the election season. Instead of hitting the topic of the election head on, he takes a broader view, giving advice to pastors on what he suggests and discourages during election season.
First, DeYoung leads his church in praying for leaders and controversial issues. This is done during the Sunday service in the pastoral prayer, a longer prayer before the sermon. When people are grappling with issues Monday through Saturday, it’s only natural to pray about them on Sunday. This requires a lot of wisdom on the part of the pastor and the congregation, which leads to the second point.
DeYoung talks about difficult topics as they arise in Scripture. Here’s the missing piece for so many of our conversations in the church about political or controversial topics, do we have a biblical backing? Do we have the advantage of understanding the whole counsel of Scripture as it applies to our lives? Preaching that creates this kind of grounding is essential during election season, but it can’t be done during election season. It’s similar to teaching about suffering; you need it before you’re actually suffering. Preaching through Scripture will force us to talk about many of the social and political issues of our day in a measured, biblical, timely manner. If you’re just starting now, or you’re doing it as a reaction to culture, you’re too late.
Now for a few things DeYoung does not do. He does not provide voter guides for the congregation. These are popular among political groups, think tanks, and campaigners but don’t have a place in the church. Let those groups distribute their material through other means, and if Christians want to read them - all the better. But DeYoung’s point is that it’s nearly impossible to find one that is not partisan. Additionally, though he does believe Christians should vote and encourages his congregation to do so, he does not host any voter registration drives in the church. He also does not allow candidates - even church members - to campaign at the church or during church events. Here’s the rationale, “Voting is generally a good thing, but I have no biblical authority to say a Christian must vote (would we exercise church discipline on someone who didn’t?), nor do I think that voting is such a necessary expression of the fruit of the Spirit that it is the church’s responsibility to get people registered.”
This all seems like a wise place to draw the line. Keep the mission central. What you support through church time, facilities, and activities communicates a lot more than you think. In individual cases with enough nuance, we might see how these could be hard decisions to make, but there’s no real downside. The church is not a campaign arm for a political party or a set of candidates. I take DeYoung’s advice here to be a common sense approach not to confuse anyone or allow for any misconceptions unnecessarily. “To be sure, Christians may seek to educate and mobilize their fellow American citizens. But the unique aim, purpose, and warrant of the church is to educate and mobilize our fellow citizens of heaven. We must not confuse one mission with the other.”
In this article from 2022, Thomas Kidd offers some lessons from the past. As much as we tend to forget it, we are not the first people to deal with the issues we’re facing. And whoever says politics and religion have never been intertwined before should look back to our founding era. Things then were just as contentious as they are now. That means we can learn from their experience.
Kidd focuses on the 1800 presidential election between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, one of the closest in history. Neither man was an evangelical; both wanted Christians to vote for them. At the time, some churches received money from the federal government and thought Jefferson’s concern for the separation of church and state might cut them off. They were wrong.
Jefferson’s concern was not so much keeping the church out of the government - as he is often used today - but keeping the government out of the business of the church. Kidd draws an interesting lesson from Jefferson’s approach to the church: “Obviously, we never want the government to become hostile to religion, or to place believers under special disadvantages because of their faith. And we must remember that the First Amendment gives equal weight to disestablishment and to the free exercise of religion.
However, as a matter of prudence and the health of the church, we should never want church leaders to become partisan campaigners, regardless of the party in question. Getting involved in campaigning and partisanship disrupts the unity of the church, and risks turning the church into a servant of temporal power as much as the Kingdom of God.”
In another lesson from history, Gospel in Life released an essay by Tim Keller from 2005 with a new introduction by his wife, Kathy. While 2005 does not seem long ago, it was, in some ways, a lost world of American life. Before Trump, Covid, Obama, and so much of what figures into this election, Keller wrote of the relationship between faith and politics.
Keller first points out that politics is downstream from culture. For this reason, when the culture changes, politics will change - and although they can be mutually reinforcing - electing the right person will not change the culture. That has to happen on the local level, person to person.
“The current obsession with politics misses this. A particular group cannot ‘change the culture’ by taking power. Any group that simply goes after power without aiming to serve the common good will not win the hearts of society; the basic narratives animating such a group will not capture society’s imagination. This is not to say that Christians should be less involved in politics than they are, for example, in scholarship, art, journalism, education, film-making, literature, and business. But we should not think that politics is any more central to the forging of culture than these other pursuits. It may, in the final analysis, be less so.”
This is not to say that political candidates don’t change anything. They wield more and more influence over our lives. What the Keller’s are getting at is how to change things.
Kathy concludes her introduction with a great summary of Keller’s perspective on faith and politics, “My prayer is that we who are Christians would turn our energy and attention first and foremost to sharing the hope of Christ, living missionally in the neighborhoods, workplaces, and relationships where God has placed us. May we see how the power of Christ’s love will do far more to change our culture than the gaining of political power ever could. Let us put our faith in Christ, the king of all creation.”
As much as any candidate furthers these ends with their platform and administration, trust God and vote for them, but the encouragement here is to make sure we get the order right.
You may have noticed none of these articles has to do with voting, the 2024 election, or the specific candidates. There’s more than enough information out there about all of that. What’s missing is the role voting and politics play in the broader approach of the church. The church’s mission is much bigger than politics, but it is not completely disinterested in it. Instead, think of the church as having its own God-given goals of evangelism and discipleship, justice and mercy, of which what happens politically is a means to an end.
Joe Rigney calls this stewardship. Voting is stewarding a resource that has been given to us to pursue the greater ends God has given. Like money, talents, time, or anything else, our vote should be used for God’s ends.
With this in mind, Rigney recommends we consider the candidate, the administration, and the platform. This brings a broader vision to our analysis than the politics of personality. “At the same time, we must not separate a candidate’s character from his or her platform and personnel. Both policy and personnel reflect character. It doesn’t matter how upright a candidate is in private if he or she proposes wicked policies and appoints wicked people to carry them out. Conversely, a man or woman of poor personal character who advances good policy and appoints faithful people to carry it out is preferable to the alternative. This is along the lines of what Martin Luther often has been attributed as saying, that he’d rather be governed by a wise Turk than a foolish Christian. The Turk may have any number of character defects, from false religion to personal immorality. But if he pursues just policies and appoints competent men to execute them, his rule is preferable to a Christian who worships the true God and lives uprightly but whose policies are evil and whose governance is incompetent.”
The Bottom Line
With this in mind, we can proceed into the issues and the candidates, but certainly not before. As you vote next week, or choose not to, do it because you see the broader mission of what God has commanded us to do. Then, make the choice that furthers those goals. Politics is important, but it will not save our country.
As for the substance of this debate, the polling shows that the top three issues are the economy, immigration, and abortion. Donald Trump leads Kamala Harris on the first two, and both candidates have strong bases on the third, even if neither stands quite in alignment with their party on how to go about legislating abortion. Al Mohler has written one of the best articles on the single issue of abortion. That alone will be enough to decide this election for millions of Christians. Indeed, it’s hard to stomach the abortion agenda of the Democratic party, or their stance on trans-gender surgeries for minors. For others, the combination of character flaws means they will not vote in this election. Robert Postic has written a good article at Christianity Today on his decision to sit this election out. There are others who completely disagree, voting for Harris either as a protest against Trump or because of an alternative weight assigned to the political topics.
Non-profits are not supposed to endorse candidates, and I’m glad about that. It’s not my intention or conviction to endorse anyone here, but to provide a discussion around the issue of how we see the act of voting. This, truly, is our democratic privilege. I could not improve on the two speeches Albert Mohler and Douglas Wilson gave at NatCon this year for insight or the kind of robust thinking needed to wade through the fog of religion and politics today.
But more than anything, I would encourage Christians to remember that our mission is not smaller than politics; it is bigger. Religion is not downstream from culture; it is upstream. Keep working at the headwaters - and let justice roll down like waters and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream.
With all this in mind, Rigney ends with a line to remember, “And so, Christian, trust the Lord and don’t waste your vote.”
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Dr. Cole Feix is the founder and president of So We Speak and the Senior Pastor of Carlton Landing Community Church in Oklahoma.
