I just read on msnbc that Evangelicals are having problems deciding who to vote for in the next election. Several leaders met together to talk about it. (here is the article, if you are interested)
My question is this: why do I care about who James Dobson is going to vote for?
In a country whose two party system has caused severe disunity in its people (especially so in the last two elections) why do I want to vote as a block with every other white, male, conservative Christian?
The answer I often get is that what I should be looking for is a candidate who is on the right side of two issues : abortion and gay marriage. Those are the problems facing our country today, and those are the biggest issues that we face. But has our current ‘evangelical’ president done anything in his tenure to help those causes? Is there really much that any president could do to change the public opinion, to whom Congress is a slave to? I fear that Bush touted an amendment to the constitution before his last election, which stirred up controversy but solidified his standing among evangelicals, only to win the election – and we never heard of that amendment again. (I had totally forgotten about the amendment till I watched ‘So Goes the Nation,’ and interesting documentary about elections – I recommend it)
I do not deny that God is concerned about both the lives of unborn children and sexual purity, but are there not other things that God is concerned about? Sodom and Gomorrah may have been punished for Sodomy, but Israel was punished for its inability to take care of the oppressed, poor, and hungry (Isaiah 1:16-17). And should social policy and internal affairs not also determine our political positions, not just the fake litmus test of the middle east, or abortion?
Good theology would dictate that God is not only concerned with what we often delegate to the “religious” realm, but that (to use a catch phrase one of my professor’s loved) ‘everything is theological’
(no joke – a question on my midterm was “Everything is _______)
Maybe all the other problems have various and sundry hues of black and white, whereas abortion and civil unions are black and white. Maybe we are deluded into thinking that those are the tests to make sure that the candidate is “one of us,” and once we figure that out, we can be reassured that he (or she) is one of the good guys. But I do not think that those two typically evangelical issues are the only ones which win my vote. And I certainly feel like this country has more issues than just moral ones.
As a Christian, I feel like my responsibility is to make every facet of my life look more and more like Christ’s, and to change the situations that I am in to look more and more like Christ wants them. And living in Chicago I can see a broken education system, a failed attempt at public housing, environmental issues galore, and the list goes on. My brothers in Christ seemingly suggest that God does not care about the poor black boys in the Cabrini Green projects avoiding the gang scene – only that they don’t marry other boys. I can’t believe that God doesn’t care about the poor.
Maybe I will be voting for the same third party candidate that the evangelical big wigs do. but only if I feel that the candidate I vote for will take the country in the right direction. Does that include my conservative views on abortion and gay marriage? Yes. Exclusively? Not at all.
