“First, do no harm” in the voting booth

In medicine, doctors adhere to the historic maxim: “First, do no harm.” This principle is as simple as it sounds: Medical doctors should use their powers to heal, never harm.

It is a principle that applies just as much to governance and public policy as it does to medicine.

It would be counterintuitive, after all, to install leaders into office who would use their power against the interests and well-being of their citizens. It should also inform our approach to voting. As Christians enter the voting booth, “First, do no harm” can provide remarkably helpful insight into our responsibilities as voters. At its heart, the phrase mirrors the call to love our neighbors as ourselves, a foundational teaching of the Christian faith. Applying this principle to voting challenges us to consider the moral implications that come with voting. Chiefly, this principle tells us we should seek policies and leaders that promote human dignity, protect the vulnerable, and foster the common good.

“First, do no harm” does not identify ideal policies. In fact, framed in the negative, it only tells us never to use our agency to bring about intentionally destructive ends. It helps us establish a few first principles, such as that law and public policy should tell the truth about the human person, the truth about the family, and the necessary conditions, such as freedom, that we require to live fulfilled lives. The law should always align with truth and human flourishing.

The moral argument I am presenting is this: We should never use our free will to intentionally cause the destruction of moral goods that are essential for human flourishing as God designs them and the natural law facilitates them. Applied to voting, this means avoiding support for platforms, policies, and candidates that maliciously undermine natural law goods. Doing so raises concerns about complicity in wrongdoing.

As Election Day 2024 bears down on us and I think about all that is under consideration, “First, do no harm” is the fundamental principle that guides my voting considerations. Keeping in mind that no candidate or platform is perfect (and I disagree with elements of both from both major parties), from a Christian perspective, the principle of “First, do no harm” also forces us to evaluate which candidate’s policies would do the most proportional harm versus the other.

Without question, the gravest harms to the human person, the family, and freedom in 2024 are coming from Vice President Kamala Harris’ candidacy.

At its core, the modern Democratic Party is the party that supports, glorifies, and celebrates moral evils as positive moral goods. It relishes unborn death as the acceptable collateral for unbounded sexual autonomy. Most recently, Vice President Harris conceded that religious liberty deserves no special protections when weighed against abortion. President Joe Biden, before he was ceremoniously dethroned, began his reelection campaign under a banner that read, “Restore Roe,” something Vice President Harris also promises to do. Earlier this year, she toured an abortion mill and heralded its work. The Democratic Party celebrates sexual perversion. It supports the redefinition of society’s most basic unit: marriage and family. It tells children to maim and castrate themselves in the name of gender ideology. It seeks to undermine parental rights by either confiscating children from “non-affirming” homes or by keeping parents ignorant of their child’s “transition” at school. Along with supporting the Equality Act, which would gut religious liberty protections, the whole logos, ethos, and pathos of the Democrats is a campaign of secularism designed to sanitize the public square of any whiff of meaningful religion that isn’t just platitudinal pablum.

Presently speaking, it is a party that attracts half of America’s population and celebrates unchecked moral evil at odds with Scripture, creation order, and natural law. As the psalmist says in Psalm 34:14, “Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.” The Democratic platform inverts this by turning away from good and doing evil.

We must ask: How much of your agency are you willing to give to a party committed to policies that intentionally and knowingly further and empower moral evil? How far can a party and platform go in its moral repugnance before a Christian can no longer plausibly identify with it or support it is not a question that a person with a well-formed Christian conscience should want to ask himself.

My argument is not that Christians must vote Republican. My argument is that the Democratic platform is beyond the moral pale for any Christian to support. It has been for a long time. Knowingly cooperating with this party is a degree of complicity that one should never even want to find oneself in the position of considering.

The reality is that while the Republican Party has weakened elements of its platform dear to social conservatives, there is still no moral comparison between the two parties. A party that is less strong on the sanctity of life and marriage is not the same as the party that views the untrammeled right to late-term abortion and two homosexual men cosplaying the natural family through surrogacy as morally equal to a mom and dad. The GOP is still not the party that allows a mobile abortion and vasectomy unit outside its convention hall. If you do not want progressives to do any worse damage, you will have to work to create majorities that can block their misuse of power. That will require working with political coalitions that get you some of what you want but not everything. This may be uncomfortable, but it’s simply called politics.

Ask yourself: Who will use their power to do the most damage to America’s well-being? Whose policies will teach moral evil, advance it in law, and influence a generation’s behavior? The Democrats. The Republican Party and former President Donald Trump may not embody all my values, yet neither he nor they hate my values and will protect them better than the alternative. To put an even more stark binary on it, while Trump’s character is offensive, the Democrats’ agenda is destructive.

When politics becomes a direct attack on Genesis 1–2, we should expect politics to mirror the intensity of a theological fight. That’s exactly what has happened. So just remember that maxim: “First, do no harm.”