Voting in a fallen world

The first thing that Christians should contemplate in this election is the fact—the tragic fact—that we live in a fallen world. That means that our politics is not about building toward an earthly utopia. It is about mitigating the effects of evil. Utopian politics of the left and right have always ended with tragedy, sometimes on a scale that is hard to imagine. And as we live in a fallen world, political life, rather like the tragic dramas of ancient Greece, involves contexts where moral norms are often set in conflict with each other at the ballot box. Indeed, German theologian Helmut Thielicke—a man who lived at a time and in a place where political choices were as stark as they were dark—drew on the analogy with Greek tragedy several times to express the difficulties Christians face in the realm of politics.

Given this reality, while the “lesser of two evils” argument has been dismissed as a lazy way of foreclosing discussion about candidates, it is hard to see how a Christian might think otherwise about casting a vote. Purists might perhaps support the old Reformed Presbyterian attitude whereby no Christian was supposed to vote for someone not committed to the kind of principles found in the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. But then the result is that one never votes and thus plays no role in how the outcome of the election might lessen the effects of evil. Such people may feel themselves to be innocent and uncompromised, but, in rising above the process, have they not merely acquired guilt of another kind?

The second thing that Christians should consider is whose platform proposes to abolish humanity the least. What it means to be human is the big question of our age and neither presidential candidate in this election offers a fully satisfying account of what that might be. Policies on abortion, the transgender issue, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, immigration, and freedom of speech and religion, among many, many others, all play into this. Tragic choices face us here, as elsewhere. Abortion abolitionism is not on the ballot in any serious way. There is no real pro-life candidate to consider. Nor does either presidential candidate seem to have thought through the gender issue at any depth, despite the passion with which one side clearly holds its views. And it is clear that neither has the intellectual imagination to understand how IVF and surrogacy reflect and shape attitudes toward children, turning them into commodities. In short, neither candidate seems competent to restore a true vision of what it means to be human because neither has thought about what being human actually means. But—again, tragically—they are the choices before us. When neither is going to be great, the unavoidable question becomes: Who is going to be worse?

Third, there is that exemplary element of leadership. The head of state should be someone to whom we can point our children and grandchildren and say, “When you grow up, you want to be like that.” Sadly, I would be horrified if my children behaved as either of our two serious presidential candidates routinely do. Yet one of them must take the top job. The choice is a grim but unavoidable one. But, as noted at the start, the fallen world is tragic. We cannot escape that fact simply by willing ourselves to pretend otherwise.

So how might one think about this election as a Christian? It was recently put to me that the way to think about voting in this vale of tears is to see it as voting against someone. That is a useful perspective. Vote against the candidate who will do the most damage by policy and by example of what it means to be human. And that is exactly what I intend to do—cast my vote against the most anti-human of the two options before us. Then I will go home and take a shower.