How should we vote as Christians?
How should we vote as Christians?
Today we are starting our Epiphany sermon series which is shaped in response to questions that have come from the congregation. So, these are your questions, and I’m going to do my best to answer these questions from a Christian point of view. … Epiphany is a time to think about light illuminating darkness. It is a time to think about the revealing of who this child in the manger really is. So, my hope is that this sermon series will be a time when we seek the light of Christ to illuminate our questions.
I should say that I haven’t been able to fit every question into the sermon series, but I’m going to try to respond to the extra questions in The Link (St. Leonard’s newsletter).
The question today is:
“On page 678 of the BAS, there is a prayer ‘for responsible citizenship or for an election’. What questions should Christians be asking when they decide who to vote for?”
As we seek an answer to this, we have to ask what political leadership is for.
This is also a fairly new question for Christians. Being able to vote for your leadership has only been a reality for a couple hundred years. And that’s if you were a male, over 21, and of a certain level of socio-economic status. For women and men of lower economic status, they have only had the vote since about the end of World War I, I believe. And there were other hurdles if you were Indigenous, for example. So, this is a pretty new question in terms of Christian history. …
A lot of what we find in the New Testament concerning politics has to do with surviving in an empire where you have no control over the leadership. You pray for the rulers, and you behave as good citizens as far as your conscience will allow. Mostly you pray for peace and for a lack of interference in the work Christ is calling you to do. …
At Epiphany we remember the wise men coming to worship Jesus as the newly born king. Last week we spoke about Herod trying to kill the child as a political rival. … Jesus will be killed on a Roman cross with a sign hung above him saying, “Jesus of Nazareth the king of the Jews”. So, those who encountered Jesus seemed to think there were political consequences.
Though, Jesus also said to Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” (Jn 18:36). He was not the kind of Messiah they expected, who would kick out the Romans, reunify the country, and reform the Temple leadership. … This is just to say this is a complicated question. … Moses was the political leader AND the spiritual leader of his people. But Jesus doesn’t seem to be setting up a nation the way Moses was. He spoke a lot about the kingdom of God, and while the kingdom of God has earthly effects through his followers, he didn’t seem to say that it was something we were to bring into reality on the earth in its fullness. This was something God was going to do, eventually.
But I do think we need to start with a Christian understanding of the purpose of political leadership. And Christians throughout history have tried to answer this. (I’ll have to ask for your grace when it comes to some of this, because I’m not a political philosopher, so I’m going to do the best I can). …
This question became really important when the Roman Empire surprisingly shifted from persecuting Christians to adopting Christianity as its religion. Christians never before had to consider how to wield that kind of power. Before this, Christians largely seemed to be pacifists. But now they had to consider, as followers of Jesus, how do they deal with violent invaders? How do they protect the people they are responsible for? How do they enforce laws and deal with criminals? … They knew how to exist as an oppressed minority, but they didn’t know how to be a powerful majority.
St. Augustine struggled with these questions. He felt that there couldn’t really be a truly peaceful or just society, because only God could establish this with people who are truly turned towards God. So, until Christ comes again, society will be made up of people with mixed desires. Some will be driven by love for God, but others will be driven by love for self. There are places where these desires will overlap which allows this mixed group to work together. But creating a utopia isn’t possible in a society with such mixed motives. As Jeremiah instructed the people in exile in Babylon, Christians are essentially working for the peace of Babylon (Jer 29:7).
So, I think Augustine would caution us against trying to create a utopia. We should be looking for where Christian values overlap with the values of other citizens, so we can work together there. Augustine seems to want us to take a fairly practical look at politics and what can realistically be accomplished in a society with many mixed motivations. …
Later, in Europe, there developed the idea that the king dealt with matters of the state, and the pope dealt with matters of religion. … So, there was already in medieval Europe a recognition of these two different areas of influence. These can’t be completely separated and they will always have influence on one another. But they did seem to see that these were two different kinds of leadership. …
In the 1200’s, influenced by Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas believed that human beings were political animals and were designed that way by God. This was a shift in thinking. Before this, politics and hierarchy seemed to be viewed as a consequence of sin and the Fall from Eden. But to Aquinas, politics was a good and natural part of human life. The secular rulers were meant to punish evil, and to order society towards attaining virtue, justice, and the common good. …
So, if you were following Aquinas, the questions you might be asking when you vote are- what evil needs to be dealt with? What virtue does our society need to attain? What needs to be done to make our society more just? What do we need to do to attain the common good?
In the 1500’s, Martin Luther taught a “two kingdoms” approach. The “kingdom of God” was driven by love. Parallel to this was the “kingdom of the world”, which was driven by violence. They had distinct areas of dominion. The Kingdom of God was concerned with teaching the Word of God, helping people to lead a Christian life, and showing them how to obtain forgiveness of sin, etc. … The kingdom of the world was primarily concerned with enforcing laws to restrain evil, which included the threat and use of violence when necessary.
So, if we were to seek advice from Luther’s thinking we might ask, “what evil needs to be restrained?” He seems to be primarily concerned with safety. The job of political leaders is to keep the people safe.
In the late 1600’s, the Protestant philosopher John Locke came up with the ideas that modern democracies are based on. The American Declaration of Independence basically applied what Locke was saying. He argued that humans have natural rights, given by God. Governments are formed by individuals establishing a social contract for the purpose of protecting these natural rights. … So, we gather together, and we agree that we will work together to create a society that will protect our natural rights. … As long as others in the society are trustworthy, and upstanding participants in society, differences in points of view are tolerated. The primary thing is that citizens are respecting and willing to work for the social contract. …
So, if we are following Locke’s thinking, when we are voting, we would be asking who is most concerned with preserving our natural rights? Who will work towards the health of the social contract, which is meant to protect our natural rights?
Since this time we know that there have been a number of political movements. I haven’t touched on Anabaptists, who largely excluded themselves from politics. …
Communism seems to have a lot of good motivations in terms of creating a fair society. In some ways it seems to be motivated by the book of Acts, where Christians were said to have lived together in unity and shared their belongings so that no one was in need. But, the 20th century attempts to apply Communism has resulted in an incredible amount of death, which should make us wary.
Capitalism has done a lot to lift people out of poverty and has created incredible wealth for nations, but when it is unregulated it can crush workers, as we saw especially in the industrial revolution, but we continue to see this in sweat shop factories. …
We also have questions we could ask about the size of government. There were Roman Catholic thinkers that put forward the principal of subsidiarity, which says governments should intercede only where individuals and smaller institutions are unable to work towards the common good on their own. Essentially this is a preference for the local to govern themselves whenever possible. … We can do a lot when we gather our resources together as a nation, but it also seems like we have a tendency to create monstrous bureaucracies that can hungrily eat up tax dollars, and can become inefficient. …
This is an almost incomprehensibly vast topic.
Apart from considering who we should vote for, we should also consider our way of being political. We can’t park our command to love God and our neighbour when we enter the arena of politics. I think the advice we see in Titus is helpful to us as we enter into the area of politics. We want to be helpful citizens, and be obedient as far as our integrity will allow. We shouldn’t speak evil, or be quarrelsome people. We should be gentle, courteous, and gracious. We should be devoted to good works. The manner in which we are political, matters.
It is also important that we think deeply about this, and pray deeply about this. Voting is a profound responsibility. And there are many voices trying to gain our attention and our vote. We need to try to see through the rhetoric, to the actual policies, and to the actual quality of the integrity of the personalities. … But we should also not make politics into an idol. God’s kingdom is not of this world, not yet. We can’t force the kingdom to come fully through politics, as important as it is for our common life together. Lets keep our eyes on God’s kingdom, and allow the rest to flow from that vision. AMEN
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