We’re faced with a crisis

Editor’s note: In the run-up to next Tuesday’s election, we have asked several Christian thought leaders to weigh in on what they are considering as Election Day nears. This is the second column in that series.

Though elections have consequences—some more than others—they are moments in time. As such, they reflect as much as they determine. The outcomes matter—again, in some elections more than others—but those outcomes result from cultural trajectories. In other words, they tend to be downstream from the rest of the culture.

The fact that this election will be so immediately consequential for so many and so much—for preborn humans and the future of pro-life activism, for children and their parents, for public safety, for education, for the integrity of the republic, for the trajectory of the world’s wars, to name but a few—reveals the kind of nation and the kind of Church we’ve become. All elections are instructive, but this one is like a big yellow “You are here” marker.

Remember the days when America largely agreed on where it should be headed but disagreed, even sharply, on how best to get there? Those good ol’ days are long gone. Not only do we lack a shared vision for the future, but we also lack shared definitions and vocabulary about foundational questions of the true, the good, what it means to be human, and what progress even looks like. The factions in play are not merely misaligned but antagonistic, their views not merely in contrast but in “winner-take-all” conflict. If we cannot have some shared ideas about what a good and flourishing society entails—or even the basic definitions of essential notions such as freedom, virtue, human dignity, family, or marriage—how can we possibly get there?

When this seemingly endless election season ends, it will be 15 years to the month after Chuck Colson, Robert P. George, and Timothy George called Christians to faithfulness in the areas of life, marriage, and religious liberty via The Manhattan Declaration. This statement of Christian conviction was not intended to be political per se but primarily to and for the Church. First, the declaration offered clarity of where and why Christians must stand on issues essential to Christian faithfulness and human flourishing. Second, it questions whether there was any salt or light for the church to offer, as it had in so many times throughout history.

Though 2009 was not an election year, The Manhattan Declaration is a helpful countermarker to the 2024 election, especially in terms of how much has changed in the years in between. It is at least worth noting that, on both life and marriage, the official platform of the conservative party in this election is what the liberal party’s platform was back then. The liberal party, for its part, not only promotes what would have been unimaginable to either party (and almost anyone) in 2009 on these issues and others but even threatens all dissenters.

How Christians are navigating these seismic shifts—from Evangelicals for Harris to shofars and proof-texted prophecies to parishioners begging their pastors to just say something (anything) from the pulpit to pundits who believe they’ll “save conservatism” by voting for the most radically anti-Christian, anti-American, and anti-human administration in the history of our republic—has exposed in new ways the crisis of Christian discipleship and the anemia of a “bits and pieces” approach. Neither a privatized nor a politicized nor a pietistic vision of the Christian faith is big enough for the moment.

Our national future depends exclusively on pre-political realities, the recovery of words, and the recovery of civil society. When the outcomes of these things depend on the results of an election, we’ve already lost. The Church’s voice, which is to provide moral and definitional clarity, is barely discernible.

Politics has a role, as does the state it ushers in. However, flourishing requires that these roles be limited. Politics in this day and age and in so many hearts and minds has sucked all of the air out of the room.

And this makes it quite likely that, to repeat a cliché, this election is the most important of our lifetime. That so much will be decided for so many (have you seen the size of the Colorado ballot?) points to the real problem, one too many will miss and that no election could fix.

The warnings of Western decline, voiced over the years by Solzhenitsyn and Schaeffer and Colson and others, are obvious in the coming election. Ours is a crisis of truth, of trust, of meaning, of leadership. It’s not really a political crisis at root, but there’s no question after this political season that there is, indeed, a crisis.