Added to the list of undecided voters for this presidential election, I've heard at least two people who believe and practice Christianity say that they're undecided because they don't think they can vote as Christians in this election; meaning, they don't think they can pick a candidate and still uphold their beliefs in good conscience.
Thinking back to the logic behind that statement, it's a wonder that, as Christians we can do anything at all as such. If we believe that we are as broken as the world around us, as broken as our political systems, then it's a wonder we even breathe "as Christians" because of how closely sin permeates even our best intentions.
Watching the second presidential debate this past week, I couldn’t help but think that the political climate today is a lot like the Bible story of the tower of Babel. It’s basically a room full of people, each espousing their own agendas in their own language without listening to each other. Those who try to listen are often hindered by the language barrier spanning socioeconomic class, race, gender, religion. Concerned voters from the audience asked a few questions that revealed their agendas and the candidates tried to match their agenda to what the public was asking, sometimes failing to establish authentic rapport.
As a Christian myself, I’ve observed many other Christians take certain paths during this political election.
One of them was the same path that was taken by many Christians before Obama got elected for office: a reductionist and simplistic approach to politics. Many refused to vote for Obama because he “supported abortion”—not only misunderstanding the full range of Planned Parenthood’s provided services, but also refusing to look at his full political platform on other important issues, like climate change and health care. Thus, many Christians voted Republican by default.
The next path is voting Republican by default, except this year, the Republican candidate isn’t a very viable alternative for people who take the Bible seriously and in context—unless you don’t understand what the Bible actually says about loving your neighbor, caring for the poor and the refugee, respecting women, loving diversity, and the evils of excessive wealth.
To be fair, many Christians who vote on behalf of their interests, not in order to be devotees towards a candidate, look carefully at the platforms of the candidates and vote on the "micro" as opposed to the "macro" level. That is, they look at policies that directly affect their businesses, careers, taxes (which add up towards the big picture) but their focus isn't big-picture stuff, like international relations, climate change, social equity, international trade, etc.
Another path is voting for a third party. I have heard Christians take this path for many reasons, but one of them is a sense of morality akin to Pilate’s washing his hands of choosing whether or not to crucify Jesus. “I don’t vote for Hillary, I don’t vote for Trump, I wash my hands of both parties and their potential effects by voting Third Party.” At a moral and individual level this might help some people sleep at night, but the sad reality is that the country runs on a two-party system. To change that, I imagine that a few straggler votes toward third parties have to occur and then grow until a multi-party system becomes the norm, but that’s not going to happen in the next month or so. Sadly, at this point, one vote for one candidate means a lesser vote for the other.
Some Christians won’t vote at all, or will vote for local offices but not the presidency.
Lastly, many Christians have taken an option best portrayed by Yale Theologian Miroslav Volf’s argument in favor of Clinton’s candidacy based on multiple aspects of her platform, not just her funding of Planned Parenthood. He has included in his well-rounded list of arguments many aspects of voting that Christians who are near to the heart of God’s gospel should consider, such as environmental, economic, international, and gender-equality policies.
Regardless of how many newsfeeds we skim through and how many debates we watch, Christians stand at a crossroads of difficulty because they want to take their calling seriously as they vote, but feel that they can’t. And their reticence and insecurity often feeds into the societal perspective of Christianity as an angry mob of bigots that would eschew the Democratic Party based on reductionist arguments.
The truth is that we live in a nation where culture and politics define what being a Christian means, as opposed to the words and actions of the faith’s founder, a revolutionary Jewish man who fought against the system in a patriarchal, oppressive society 2000 years ago.
We live in a country where Christians are perceived as the people saying that God hates the LGBTQ+ community, people who hand plastic fetuses at women trying to get inside a clinic, who leave anonymous, cowardly jibes on celebrity Instagram posts calling Clinton derogatory names, followed by “GOD BLESS AMERICA,” and who begin to question Trump’s candidacy when he insults their White wives and sisters but not when he insults people of other religions and nations.
We have let this picture bleed over the true meaning of being a Christian (literally, a “little Christ”)—a faith best depicted by God hanging from a wooden pole out of love for his enemies, out of a desire to make them his friends, to heal the broken, and to draw all people to himself.
We have painted a picture of Christianity and left its God outside of it, a God who is angry at social injustice, at the amassing of wealth, at the rich who let the poor go hungry, and the rulers who oppress their people.
While voting choices for Christians won’t be easy or perfect (because neither party is), I think it’s important to go back to Scripture and truly understand what it says about the world we live in.
At the heart of its essence, Christianity is not a reductionist religion that creates a dichotomy between what is human and what is divine; rather, we believe that the divine comes down and gets its hands dirty with human work, an often laborious and thankless endeavor that is somehow worth it. The God of the Bible is a God who pursues those considered lesser in the eyes of society and works amazing things through them.
He is a God who, since the beginning of time, has been caring holistically for all of his creation, human and non-human.
Furthermore, he's a God who does social activism right because he’s full of passion for his dream of healing, yet he has been channeling that passion with purpose for thousands of years without losing focus and without giving up. He has never abandoned those he loves, never left his goal of making all the nations flourish in a relationship with him. He hasn’t let fads, trends, emotions, or human variability side-track him from his purpose. His justice and mercy have not been hashtag trends on Twitter, but a commitment to his creation that he makes daily and without fail.
Thus the Bible might not tell us who to vote for, but it does give us a guideline on how to vote.
To summarize--We have a God who is unfailing in his efforts at social justice, who cares for the oppressed, who cares for the holistic thriving of all things, who died for us while we were still his enemies, and who draws all people to himself.
Do any of the two candidates perfectly represent this?
No, they do not, and they can’t because they’re not God.
But Christians can make informed, educated choices that faithfully stick to what we know of God’s character. The reason why voting as Christians is a hard choice is that one candidate might allure to our daily anxieties--going out of business, getting replaced by another workforce, having higher taxes, and so on. Not only might they allure to our basic needs, but they might also allure to our prejudiced hearts by appealing to the things we fear most.
I think that this is where trusting God matters most, because although we can't see the future, we have to understand that if we align our choices to his character, his will, he will take care of us.
This is why he calls us to re-examine our agendas in favor of his dream, which is so much better.
And while the following years might be a school of hard knocks for everyone in this country regardless of who gets elected, I think the most revolutionary thing about the gospel is that it shapes our choices by shaping our character.
God called us to be influential people, and when our influence comes from a character that reflects his, we can hope for a better future for this government and this country, for political and social healing.
We can long for a movement from a chaotic Babylonian ziggurat where nobody could understand each other to a gathering at Pentecost, where language barriers were overcome, and God’s Spirit united people who would have otherwise remained divided.
