I was dumbstruck back in 2016 when I heard so many people say “I just can’t vote for Trump or Clinton.” Mind you, in 2012, 42% of Americans didn’t vote for Obama or Romney! and this figure is always worse in local elections. Do Christians have an obligation to vote?
What we have now though is not that people who are too busy or too uncaring to vote. They are voters; they care deeply – but cannot in good faith pull the lever for someone they loathe. The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued for this kind of ethic: when we are given two bad options, we must choose neither.
This I understand and feel. But something about it feels odd, even troubling to me – and for three reasons.
(1) None of us has ever, ever voted for an un-flawed human being. Christians should know well that all of us are broken, fallen, sinful, confused people, with hidden turmoil and a string of botched decisions in our past. Is there some threshold of “good enough?” and if so, where would you draw it? And if you did, is that line where you happen to be, or are you above or below it? If I pass judgment on candidates (and in a way, we all must), is there simultaneously a huge log in my own eye?
(2) Maybe of more interest is this: if I just can’t cast my vote for either person, am I treating my vote as something sacred, or utterly holy? It is lovely and fitting to think of your vote as a huge deal, not to be squandered lightly. But is it so sacred, does it have a pristine history of purity, that it can’t be soiled? Or is my vote my best stab at doing my small part in helping the world to be less woeful than it would be if I withdrew?
(3) Almost every day, I find myself faced with some choice between bad options, and you do too – so we should be used to it. Some are little trifles, some are heart-wrenching, but the decisions we make in our working and personal lives, if we step back and ponder them from the perspective Jesus might have, in a fallen and constantly compromised world and culture, are really in that “lesser of two evils” zone. And you find each day that not to choose really is to choose, because something ugly steps into the vacuum where you were supposed to be. Not choosing is itself a choice that does impact the outcome.
But I am not at all sure about these things. They are just questions that surface in my gut when I think about just not voting at all. Even if you can’t go for Trump or Harris, there are other important elections at the state and local levels…
By the way: I love it when people shift parties for thoughtful reasons, or vote across party lines after much reckoning. Tribalism dominates politics – but our tribe is the Christian community, which isn’t this party or that party, so we should expect to surprise and be surprised by where we land! I much appreciated David Brooks’s telling us (in The Atlantic) “Politically, I am a bit of a wanderer” (reminding me that we Christians are a pilgrim people!). He was liberal as a young man, then solidly Republican for years until being repulsed by Tom DeLay, the Tea Party, and then Donald Trump. He now locates himself at “the rightward edge of the leftward tendency.”
Yet he’s not at all at home in his new Democratic party (reminding me of the way Christians are never fully at home here!). Being a wanderer, not stuck in one tribe, he is able to pinpoint troubles in his new left party, mainly the “categorial thinking” of identity politics, the elitism and more. He concludes by describing himself as “a social conservative in believing that the universe has a moral order to it, that absolute right and wrong exist, and that we are either degrading our souls or elevating our souls with every little thing we do.” What party is that!
Feel free to wander, my friends – and to think, and even to vote.
The Rev. James C. Howell is senior pastor of Myers Park United Methodist Church in Charlotte, N.C. This post is republished with the author's permission from his blog on the church website.