How Shall We Then Vote?--Session 2--William Wolfe

The Center for Baptist Leadership and the Need to Recover Baptist Faithfulness

All right, it's wonderful to be with everybody here tonight. My name is William Wolfe. I'm the founder and the executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership. You can see our beautiful blue banners there.

And it's a joy to be here at First Baptist Church Travelers Rest. Rhett is a dear brother and a friend. He's been super helpful in the fight to take back the SBC. There's many things I could say about the Center for Baptist Leadership, but in brief, we are certainly trying to make Baptists great again.

So that's something that we certainly want to do. But so how do we do that? Well, we need to make sure that the Southern Baptist Convention stays faithful to its theological roots and commitments. It's arguably orthodox and theologically conservative commitments that are found in its Statement of Faith, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000.

Make sure that those are taught and applied in our seminaries and our entities. So we want to make sure that the Southern Baptist Convention stays strong unto itself. But then we really want to rally Baptists to be bold in the public square.

We are the largest Protestant denomination in America. You have Catholics and then you have Baptists and then you have like Presbyterians. Go look at the numbers. We're like 14 million strong. And I think that our absence in particular as Baptists from the public square has led to a lot of the issues that we're seeing in this country.

So that's what we're doing at the Center for Baptist Leadership. If you want to hear more about it after this, I'd be happy to talk to you about it. And I did bring some books to give away. So I'm going to start with that first.

I don't know if you've heard of this book. It's called Shepherds for Sale by Megan Basham. It's a New York Times bestseller. And let me see how we're going to do it. We have five copies to give away. So let's start with this.

Who drove the furthest? If you think you drove the furthest to be here, just come on. Give it a shot. Who drove more than an hour? Huh? Hickory, North Carolina. Okay, great. You have one? Okay. Who doesn't have one of these?

Who doesn't have one? All right. I'm just going to give it to hands. I see who doesn't have one. Who else? Let me see. All right. Was it Scott? Two more back there. This book tells a story of how a very intentional effort has been made to subvert conservative American evangelical Christianity.

Not just Southern Baptists, but particularly Southern Baptists, but all levels of institutions and denominations and Christian colleges and universities and publishing houses. There has been an intentional subversion through money.

As Matt said, follow the money, follow the money. You follow the money of the funding sources from organizations like the Gospel Coalition, the ERLC, and others, and you see that progressive, very progressive billionaires are pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into Christian organizations.

Now, why would they be doing that? Well, because it gets them access. It gets them to do things that they want them to do, which are contrary to our interests, to Christian interests, to the Gospel, and to conservative interests in this country.

So it's a very important book to read. If you read that, to those who I just gave it out to, you think, well, what do we do? What do we do about it? Well, that's what the Center for Baptist Leadership is here to do in the Southern Baptist Convention.

Why Voting Matters for Christians in a Christian Civilization

So that was all sort of preamble. That's not exactly what I'm here to talk about tonight. Tonight I'm here to talk about voting. So I'm not actually really speaking too much about sort of national politics in general, but I do want to talk about voting in particular, and this is what we're going to do.

We are going to consider what our founders said about voting. So the people who gave us the right to vote here in the United States of America, what did some of those men think about the purpose of voting?

Then we're going to consider what a vote is and what a vote is not, which I think get often confused these days. Then I'm going to look at some biblical principles for voting. I have about six or seven key verses that I want to apply to how we think about voting, and then with whatever time is left, we'll get into Trump and Kamala, okay guys?

We're going to get there. That's the fun stuff, and we'll get to that at the end. But I think it's important for Christians to think better about voting here in the United States of America. And Rhett, why don't you go ahead and give me when you think you'd like me to stop so I can just time it here.

Okay, great. So we live in Western civilization. I hope you understand that. We are the inheritors of the glorious tradition of Western civilization, and Western civilization is fundamentally a Christian civilization.

I won't go through everything that this has brought to us, but advancements in science and education and freedom, you know, in arts and sciences. This is a product of Western civilization of men who knew God, of men who sought to glorify God in all things, in all of life, and not just in the church on Sundays, but Monday through Saturday as well, and everything that they pursued.

And right now, we live, I believe, in an urgent time where the future of Western civilization hangs in the balance. And I won't go into everything that's going on in Europe right now, but, you know, Europe is a great foreshadowing of what might be coming to America.

And right now, Europe in particular is being conquered by two new forms of barbarism, essentially. Two new barbarian hordes. On one hand, you have the shock troops of the LGBTQIA plus agenda, and don't forget the plus because it really stands for a P, and I won't go into that here.

We have kids, but you know what I mean. I trust, right? So you have the shock troops of the LGBT agenda who are essentially cultural Marxists, and they are taking over Europe, subverting Christian laws, throwing Irish teachers in jail who refuse to use fake pronouns for their students, fining men who are praying silently outside of abortion clinics, 12 ,000 pounds, essentially policing thought crimes.

So you have the flag, the rainbow flag waving barbarians on one side conquering Europe, and then you have mass Islamic migration conquering Europe as well, through essentially open border policies. And neither one of these groups have any respect for the history, the heritage, the traditions, the freedoms of Western civilization that are fundamentally Christian freedoms.

And the radical Marxists who have essentially created the conditions for the third world migration to come in from the Muslim countries, they're not the ones who are going to win in the end, to be clear, right?

They will ultimately be conquered by Islam. I won't get into all this. You should read Defenders of the West. It's a great book that sort of explains why Christians used to fight for their country. But that's what's going on in Europe, and it is coming here in different degrees, right?

We certainly have the radical Marxists amongst us corrupting our institutions, corrupting our federal government, and while we don't have so much explicitly mass Muslim migration, we have mass migration coming from South America, Central America.

We have as many as 20 to 30, if not more, illegal immigrants in this country at this time. It's probably more. We've seen a surge in illegal immigration over our southern border since Biden and Kamala have been in office to the tunes that we've never seen before, and this is having real world, real life impacts on the culture of this country, and it's not something that we should wish upon anybody.

And so in this urgent moment, what can we do about it? As Edward Gibbon observed in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, internal decay often precedes external conquest. If the West becomes too internally divided or loses confidence in its own legitimacy, it might become vulnerable to more assertive external cultures or ideologies, and I just gave you two of those.

Well, I'm not calling for a new crusade, to be clear. I'm not calling for us to march on Jerusalem, but I am calling for us to march on the ballot box. The main way that we as American Christians in the United States of America today can defend Western civilization is through the act of voting.

And just pause for a second and consider how unique this really is, that we get to peacefully and freely select, Lord willing, legitimate rulers over us. For the vast majority of human civilization, rulers were decided through violence and conquest.

We have the opportunity given to us by our founding fathers to select our government peacefully, and this is, I think, something we should not lightly dismiss or throw away or fail to use. So this is how we save the West, fundamentally is through voting, not just for presidents, but also for your members of Congress, for your senators, for your county commissioners, for your sheriffs, etc.

And there's much more that can be done politically, but I really do want to impress upon you the unique nature historically of a vote and what it means. It is how we advance and defend our civilization.

The Founders on Consent of the Governed and Civic Duty

So what did our founding fathers think about voting? Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 22 said that the fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of the consent of the people. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure original fountain of all legitimate authority.

The consent of the people. Here in the United States of America, again, so historically unique, the citizens are the sovereigns. The monarch of England has no jurisdiction here. The Pope certainly hath no jurisdiction here.

Here in the United States of America, we as the citizens are the sovereigns, and we have vested our sovereign authority, the consent of the governed, into a document, the Constitution, that then sets forth how our elected representatives should rightly rule over us.

Benjamin Franklin said that in free government, the rulers are the servants, and the people their superiors and sovereigns. Just think about that for a second. The government is supposed to be our servant.

Doesn't often feel like that, does it? Well, frankly, I would argue that's because so many people have abdicated their responsibility to vote rightly and to be engaged. I mean, voting participation in America is very low.

And now, to be clear, I don't necessarily just want a whole lot more people voting, because I don't know if you've met people, but I do want more Christians voting, because I'm going to trust the average Christian, I hope, more than just the average American citizen.

But again, historically, the American citizen was supposed to be a virtuous and moral citizen who would recognize the limits of government, his freedom set forth in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution, and whether he was a Christian or not, would seek to see that system advanced.

I'll give a couple more quotes from our founding fathers here, I think that are just really helpful. Patrick Henry said that the Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.

And that, again, is so important and ties directly into voting, is that the Constitution is not telling us necessarily what our rights and freedoms are, although it does secure them for us, but it's telling the government that the government cannot intrude upon our lives in this way.

And in our day and age, this has been so flipped on its head, and I can't think of a better example in recent times than COVID, right? COVID comes, you know, engineered virus in a lab to disrupt the 2020 election, at least that's what I believe.

I don't know what you believe, but that's okay, we can talk about that afterwards. And here's what I think churches should have done. I think churches should have just stayed open, and then if the government told them to shut down, the church should have said, no, and I'll see you in court.

Far too many churches, even some of the ones who were held out as examples, they shut down, and then they sued the government for the right to remain open. Do you see how that's reversed there? The church should have just stayed open and said, you want to sue me over this?

I'll see you in court. And we've lost that, and so much of that, again, comes down to giving up the importance of voting in our constitutional republic. So in short, I mean, our founders saw the consent of the governed as being the legitimate basis for our government, the participation of the people in a representative democracy as being a safeguard against tyranny, and that this promoted civic duty and engagement, and a protection of our rights.

Voting was understood to be seen as a means to protect individual rights and liberties, because by choosing our leaders, citizens could ensure that the rights were not only recognized, but actively defended.

It would not be an exaggeration at all to say that our founding fathers would have imagined and understood voting to be a duty, not an option, but a duty that the American citizens would undertake and would rightly fulfill.

And we've lost that in so many ways today. And so I think that that's a good picture of what our founding fathers thought about voting. So now, what is a vote? So that was sort of a historical sort of lesson there, but let's think carefully here about what is a vote when you when you go to do this action.

What a Vote Is and Is Not

So first, a vote is a choice. A vote is a choice. You go in, you have people running for offices, and you have a chance to steward everything I was just talking about and choose one of them. Nobody's going to make you do it.

Nobody's going to make you pick one over the other. You have this free choice between, at least at the presidential level in particular, two candidates. So a vote is a choice. As I said already, a vote is our civic duty, and I think that a vote is an intentional act of self-government, and a vote is a say.

I think this is very important. A vote is a say in the direction of the future for this country. When you vote, you get to say, I want to go this way and not that way. Now, Kamala Harris has been saying quite repeatedly through this campaign, we're not going back.

We're not going back. We're not going back. What does that mean when she says that? Well, she means we're not going back to a day and an age in America when abortion was illegal in this country. She doesn't want to go back to things like that.

We're not going back to a day and age in America where homosexuality wasn't celebrated for an entire month out of the year. This was funny. I saw recently, I've got some friends who are living in Cookville, Tennessee now, and a church is sponsoring a Christmas parade, and there were homosexual activists who are getting worked up as to whether or not there would be LGBT representation in the church-sponsored Christmas parade, to which I just have to say, listen, y 'all get an entire month to celebrate your deviancy.

I think we can keep Christmas, right? And so a vote is a choice. It's a say in the direction of the future of this country. It's not a guarantee of where we're going to go, but when you vote for a candidate, you can see what their policies are, and you can see which way they want to take us, and is it towards a better direction in general or a worse direction, you get a say in that.

What is a vote not, or what is a vote not? A vote is not picking a pastor. A vote is not picking a pastor. God in his infinite wisdom has given different spheres of authority, we could say, to govern the lives of men in this world.

There's the civil sphere, and there's the ecclesial sphere, the sphere of the church. And in the church, God, in his infinite wisdom and through his inspired scriptures, gives us very clear standards for picking elders, in particular, to govern the church and to exercise the keys of the kingdom in the body of a local church, which is to say, you are a Christian by welcoming you into membership.

This is a Baptist church, so I trust you're tracking with me. You know, we can affirm your profession of faith, and the elders help oversee that and shepherd that, and so there are very particular qualifications.

They're supposed to rightly teach God's word, it's understood, it's just assumed they'll all be regenerate believers. Those are the instructions God has given us to pick pastors in the church, in first Timothy and in Titus.

That's not what we're doing when we vote for a candidate for a civil office in the United States of America. We don't have a religious test for office in the United States of America. I'd be happy to have a conversation if you think that we should.

You might be surprised what I think, but as much as it stands today, we don't, right? And so we as Christians need to think carefully and not make a categorical error and say that because God wants pastors to look like this, we need all of our politicians to look like that too.

That's not the right way to think through a vote. A vote is also not a sacrament. What do I mean by that? A vote is not something that we do in our lives as Christians that is part of sort of showing our allegiance and our obedience to God in the life of the local church, or a commemoration or a celebration of what Christ has done on the cross.

So Baptists recognize sort of two main sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper. Both of those are deeply rooted in the gospel message. A vote is not that. It's not a holy thing. It's a civic duty. It's not a holy thing.

I hope that point I'm making here makes sense to you. It's not something that is necessarily pertaining to sin and righteousness in the life of a Christian before God and in the church. It's rather something that we're doing to participate in the civic sphere and to uphold principles of justice for all people in our country, which I again would concede are grounded in scripture, but it is it's not a sacrament.

It's not a holy thing that we're doing. A vote is also not about your feelings. A vote is not about your feelings. This is really important. We live in a hyper emotional age and we'll get worked up about all sorts of things, but when you go to vote you shouldn't vote based primarily off of how somebody's news clip made you feel or if somebody's words hit you the wrong way.

You know there are some very likable people out there who are really evil and then there are some very not so likable people out there perhaps who actually have really good things that we would want to see done in the political and civil arena.

So don't vote off your feelings or as Ben Shapiro would say, vote off your facts, right, when you go into the voting booth. And finally, and if you'll indulge me on this for a second, a vote is not only about your Christian conscience.

I've heard this phrase a lot these days in our discourse around voting as Christians. Your conscience is an important piece of your life as a believer, but I think that people misunderstand what your conscience is and how it works, right.

So I'm going to quote from a very smart guy, Ben Crenshaw, who wrote an article at American Reformer. He says, conscience cannot tell us who to vote for or why. Conscience is the innate faculty in man that murmurs against evil, condemning us when we err, and praises the good, commending right behavior.

Conscience can only teach us general moral principles, but just conscience alone cannot tell us that voting for such and such a candidate on this or that platform is morally permissible or prohibitory.

So what do I mean by that? Well there are plenty of people out there who would say, I am voting for this pro-abortion, pro-LGBT candidate in good conscience, right. I hope that makes sense, right. There are people out there who would say, my conscience is telling me I need to vote for this individual who we would say as Christians fails to meet the basic standards that we would expect to see upheld as righteousness in the civil sphere.

Conscience is an important piece of the Christian life, but conscience must always be subject to reason and to prudence as well. So conscience is a part of your vote, but it's not everything there is to it.

Biblical Principles for How Christians Should Vote

All right, so that was sort of the philosophical breakdown of what a vote is. I hope everyone's still tracking with me here. So now as a good Christian, as a Baptist, I want to bring in the Bible. So what should we think about how we should vote from a biblical perspective?

And I'm just going to run through these, and I've got a verse for each of them. First, I think as Christians we should vote to honor our father and mother. Exodus 2012 says, honor your father and mother that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

What do I mean by honor your father and mother with your vote? Well that was the first part of my talk really. Honor this inheritance that we've been given. Honor the men who have fought and died to preserve freedom in America for us and to defend and uphold the Constitution.

So we live in a very atomized age where people view themselves as divorced from the past and with no stake in the present. That's not how Christians should live. We should live connected to the past and with an eye towards the future as well.

So vote to honor your father and mother for the very many, many men and women who have died to secure these freedoms for us. Second, vote for your kids. You see where I'm going? Vote for the past, vote for the future.

I have my three beautiful boys here with me tonight and my wife, and you know I always thought that I was pretty conservative. Hey Evan. I always thought that I was pretty conservative, but let me tell you having three boys in this day and age will make you an outright radical.

When I look at the country that my kids might grow up in, it causes me great concern. And so what is the future that I am going to have a hand in leaving for them? Well I get to decide that, at least to a certain degree, with my vote.

So when you vote, vote for your kids. Proverbs 13 .22, a good man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. Three, vote to be salt and light. Vote as Christians to be salt and light in this country.

Matthew 5 .13 -16 says, you are the salt of the earth, but if the salt loses its saltiness, how could it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.

You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand and it gives light to everyone in the house.

So vote to be salt and light. What do I mean by that? Well salt is a preservative. That's what Jesus meant when he was teaching this. Vote in such a way as to be a cultural and a Christian preservative in this country to help hold the line against greater decay and decline into darkness.

Vote to be a light. Vote to show a better way, a better future. Vote to show a world in which men and women in marriage is the norm, right, and not something that's just an option. Vote to be a light for the unborn.

Vote to be a light for this country. And in terms of the immigration issues I already talked about, you know, vote for the sake of the future of an America that exists as we know and love it. Vote to be light.

And on this point I do want to say something about third-party voting. Third-party voting is not salty. It is not salty. It doesn't have an effect. It really doesn't. You might not like to hear that but it is the truth in the American system as it is today with a two-party system.

A third-party vote, you know, is like water on top of salt. There's no more flavor there. A third-party vote might as well be at least at the presidential level putting your light under a bowl. A third-party vote, I think, for most people is fundamentally a vote to make themselves feel good about something, which what I was saying earlier is not the only reason why you cast a vote.

So vote to be salt and light. Vote with prudence. Matthew 10 16, behold I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. It's tough. It's not perfect.

We are out in the midst of wolves, right? I'm not in any way shape or form trying to paint some rosy picture where, you know, on one side we have Jesus we can go vote for and on the other side we have Satan.

That's not what it's like out there, right? We are out there in the midst of wolves and so we need to be wise. We need to use the reason that God has given us. We need to use our heads as well as our hearts.

Vote out of love for self and neighbor. I said vote to love your parents. I said vote to love your kids, but vote to love yourself and your neighbor as well. In Matthew 22 37 and 39, Jesus summarizes all of the commandments into the two greatest commandments, which is love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and to love your neighbor as yourself.

Let's focus on that second part there. Jesus is assuming there will be self-love. You better believe that I, when I go vote on November 5, I am voting out of self-love in many ways and that's a right thing.

I'm going to vote out of a sense of self-preservation, but I am also going to vote out of love for my neighbor as well and you should too. You should think about what God has said is good for your neighbors according to his righteous law and his decrees, his creation order for this world, and vote to love your neighbors.

I've said over and over again recently, love your neighbor, support mass deportations. That's just one example, right? Love your neighbor. Love your unborn neighbor. Support abolishing abortion. Love your neighbor.

Support appointing a president who might give us more justices who would one day overturn Obergefell. That would be a good thing for our country. It's not loving for our neighbors who live in an LGBT lifestyle to be confused and misled on what marriage is by the laws of this land.

So vote out for self and neighbor love as ordered by Christian principles. And then this is the one I really want to hone in on here, if you're not convinced yet, is vote as an act of stewardship before God.

I've talked quite a bit already about how we have inherited a stewardship from our earthly forefathers in Western civilization and in America, but this act of the freedom to vote is a stewardship that God has given us, right?

It is God's sovereignty that exists over everything here that we have in America. Matthew 25, 24 to 28 tells the story of the unfaithful steward, and he had received one coin. Another steward received five.

Another steward received ten. And then when the master returns, he calls them up, and this is the account of the unfaithful steward. Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. Master, he said, I knew that you were hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed.

So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you. His master replied, you wicked, lazy servant, and then he judges him. We have an act to steward this talent that God has given us, and there are many out there who talk about voting in terms of God's judgment, and I do think that there's a degree in which God's judgment is on America.

There's no question about that, but I also, from reading my Bible and the theological tradition that I hold to as a Reformed Baptist, I am not confident that I can say that I know exactly how God's judgment is being poured out on this land, or that I know exactly how my vote may or may not further that judgment.

There are those out there who are saying things like, you cannot vote for Donald Trump, because that will help bring further judgment upon this country. I've even heard some people say, we're already being judged, so actually it might be good if Kamala Harris wins, because that will be even more judgment on America, because of things that we're doing in this country that are sinful and wicked.

And yes, those things are sinful and wicked, but I think that's a significantly faulty theological assessment for voting and our role as citizens here in this country. And actually, I think that this rebuke here, where we see that the servant was afraid, and then he refused to invest that talent, is what should ring in our ears.

Look, we will answer to God for our vote. There's no question about that, but I'm going to try to use it as well as I can to do everything I've been talking about, and I cannot plumb the depths of the infinite wisdom of God and know if God is going to judge me when I vote for Donald Trump or not.

I think that when I go do that, which I plan to do, that I am making a smart decision, a wise Christian decision, based off of everything that I've said here. And if I am wrong, I'm wrong, but I will not have buried that talent and be wrong in that way.

So vote to steward what God has given us. And then let me close with this. Vote knowing that God is on the throne. God's sovereignty is not at the ballot box on November 5th. Now, the vast majority of this talk, brothers and sisters, has been about your human responsibility.

It's been history. It's been an encouragement for you to be active and do your civic duty, and I'm not pitting that against God's sovereignty, and I'm not at all conceding that God's sovereignty is an escape hatch out of doing our civic duty.

It's not. But brothers and sisters, Jesus is not on the ballot box, right? So you can vote with confidence in God's sovereignty. God knows who is going to take the oath of office in January of 2025. We don't, but God does.

Philippians 2, 9 through 11 says, therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

So I know how I'm going to vote, and I'm going to hold off on all the stuff on the platforms for the Q &A, but I am going to vote cheerfully and confidently, regardless of the outcome, because God is on the throne, and while the kingdom of man may come and go, and Western civilization may one day fall, though I'm committed to not being a part of that fall, at the end of the day, Christ's throne stands secure, and that is the confidence that we can have as we face the election this year.

Thank you so much.