Politics: What Is the Meaning of Voting?

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Christ therefore forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

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Welcome to Bible Bashed, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask.

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Listen and enjoy this installment of Iron Sharpening Iron as Pastor Tim answers your sincere questions.

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Here's Pastor Tim. This episode of Bible Bashed, we'll be answering the question, what is the meaning of voting?

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Now when we try to answer a question like this, it may be helpful to start by describing the Christian in America's basic moral responsibility to vote.

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Romans 13 tells us to be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.

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So as Christians living in a representative democracy, under the authority of the Constitution, we are given both the right, the privilege, and the voluntary responsibility to vote.

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So we have been given the responsibility to select our representatives, and no doubt we do not do this in a direct way but an indirect way, but nevertheless we do have a responsibility to pick our governing authorities.

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And being faithful citizens is going to involve taking this moral responsibility seriously, even though it's a voluntary responsibility and not a mandatory responsibility that's given to us.

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Now the reason why it's not a mandatory responsibility is because it is conceivable that there are certain situations that could arise where an individual would not wish to endorse a particular political candidate, and so that brings us into some sort of discussion about what the meaning of voting actually is.

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Now many people treat voting as if it's some sort of quasi -religious sacrament in which the individual in question casts his vote and is essentially declaring his fundamental and unquestioning allegiance to the particular political party of his choice.

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Now because politics have been polarized in America in general, for many people, voting does for them function as a civil sacrament in this exact way in that the person, the individual, or the party that they vote for, they devote themselves to following that party or person, right or wrong, and defending anything that individual happens to do.

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And so for them, voting becomes a declaration of allegiance, and there should be nothing that's more offensive to the individual

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Christian than the notion that voting, that their vote, essentially is making some sort of absolute and fundamental commitment to the lordship of their political leader at that point.

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Now if you move beyond this kind of thing, though, one of the things you'll realize is that voting, the meaning of voting is somewhat complicated.

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So there's many people who do not wish to view voting as this fundamental declaration of allegiance.

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But then there is this sense when you're casting your vote that you are making a moral decision that you are in some sense responsible to make, and then there are entailments of that decision that you are making.

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So Romans 1 tells us that Christians are condemned not only for practicing unrighteousness, but for giving hearty approval to those who are practicing unrighteousness.

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And so in some sense, we realize that in making the choice to vote for an individual, we are tying ourself to them in some sense beyond this basic slavish allegiance.

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In some sense, what we're doing is we're signing off on them. We are empowering them. We are giving them power.

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And then we are in some sense responsible for how this individual exercises that power. And so there's a variety of other options that we might choose from besides this civil sacrament view of voting.

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And some of those options might include an endorsement of the entire political platform that you're voting for.

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So for the individual who takes this endorsement that they're going to make seriously, they may oversell the nature of that endorsement such that, you know, by picking or choosing to vote for a flawed human being, they're essentially taking responsibility for the entire party platform or they're taking responsibility for all the future choices that this individual will actually make.

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Now, there are those who push back against this notion of you're taking responsibility for the entire platform or you're taking responsibility for every decision that the individual you vote for is going to make and basically retreat to kind of a hopeless and I would describe muddled subjectivity, essentially defining the only responsibility that you're going to take is going to be selectively determined by you, the individual.

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So you can basically, in this kind of way of calculating voting, perhaps you could vote for the

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Democratic Party and basically say, hey, I'm not endorsing child sacrifice. I'm not endorsing the homo jihad.

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I'm not endorsing, you know, maybe I'm not even endorsing all the climate change stuff perhaps or anything else.

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But then I'm voting for the Democratic Party because, you know, essentially they're going to take jobs from Whitey and they're going to give me reparations and they're going to take money from individuals who work and give it to those who don't work and they're going to essentially give jobs to people of my skin color.

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And so I'm saying nothing about the abortion. I'm saying nothing about any of the other policies.

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I'm just basically saying my vote means that I'm voting for the type of government who is going to privilege people of my skin color over everyone else.

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Now, that can happen in a variety of different ways, and so that's just one example of selectively defining the actual meaning of your vote.

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But then we do basically have to navigate these waters and ask this basic question.

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What does voting actually mean? Is voting either an endorsement of an entire political platform or all the entailments of all the decisions that the individual who we vote for is actually going to make?

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Or is it just completely subjectively determined by the individual? And I would say that both of these are short -sighted in a variety of ways.

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What voting actually is is voting is actually a normal act of decision -making, which involves picking between various options.

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And so as we think about how decision -making works in general, what we'll realize is that in general when we make decisions, we are making the kind of decisions which essentially we have to do some sort of cost -benefit analysis in the decision -making process.

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But it's not true that the only kind of analysis that we're making is a cost -benefit kind of analysis.

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So because we are Christians who are living under the lordship of Christ, when we make a decision, in general one of the things that we're going to do is we're going to look to the

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Bible, and we're going to say what are the commands and principles that God has given us that are parameters, which will guide the nature of the decision we're going to make.

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And then we're going to consult biblical wisdom in determining how to navigate a complicated decision.

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And then we might lastly just consider pure pragmatic entailments to the decision that we're going to actually make.

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But what you don't do in general in making decisions is retreat to a kind of consequentialism, which essentially determines the morality of any individual action that you're going to make solely by the entailments of it.

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So what you do is you're making a moral choice. Being Christian, you make a moral choice, meaning you're looking to God's word to tell you the parameters of decisions that you're allowed to make, and there might presumably be decisions that are off -limits for you to make.

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But then within the permissible options, then you're going to consult biblical wisdom and then just practical concerns to think how best to navigate the freedom that you're given.

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And then when you do something along these lines, one of the things that you might find is that it might be possible that there is no morally permissible option to vote for in this kind of way.

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So when you think about this as it relates to other subject matters, maybe we can turn our attention away from voting for a minute and turn it to just picking a spouse.

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And so when you think about picking a spouse, you realize that God's given us substantial freedom in who we are to marry.

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We're told to marry whom we will, only Mary and the Lord. And so when we're thinking about a potential marriage partner, there's one basic qualification, that they be

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Christian. And then beyond that, we are given substantial freedom in who to pick.

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So as it relates to that subject, there are certain guardrails that are given, and then there's freedom that you can take in between that.

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But then no one would think the meaning or the responsibility that you take in making that kind of choice is purely subjective.

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So if you make a marriage choice that's poor or unwise, there are going to be entailments of that.

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And you may bear some responsibility for the entailments of that decision in a variety of ways.

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And so if you decide that you're going to marry a woman, essentially, who has been recently addicted to crack or some kind of drugs or something along those lines.

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And then she's, you know, this was just a few days ago that she was addicted to these drugs. And then she promises you that she's clean now and she'll never go back again.

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You decide to marry her anyways. Well, it may be that she steals a lot of your property. It may be that she steals a lot of the neighbor's properties in order to buy drugs.

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And in you making this decision, no one looking on the outside would say that you bear no responsibility for the choice that you make.

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You made such a foolish choice in that way that most reasonable people would look at you and say,

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Hey, you bear some responsibility for this kind of decision that you're making.

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In a similar way, if you think about an individual like a building contractor who's building a building, there is a certain responsibility that you take in building a building.

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And so if you build a building that's structurally flawed and it collapses on a bunch of people and kills them, you're going to get sued.

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Now, if you build a building that was structurally sound and, you know, an earthquake happens and knocks it down, there's certain things that are beyond your ability to protect.

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No one's going to hold the building maker responsibility for that, provided that it was up to code and everything else.

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But, you know, if it was made in a shoddy way, certainly everyone would say that. What did you what would you expect to happen?

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So you're making a certain decision. You're making a foolish decision. And that foolish decision that you made cost people their lives.

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And so there's some sense in which you're going to be held responsible for that choice. And so this is the way that normal decision making actually works.

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So in normal decision making, you can't just throw your hands up in the air and define, you know, your intention in making a choice and only be held accountable for the limited intention that you actually have.

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As it relates to normal decision making, what you have to do is you have to say, what would a reasonable person assume would be the entailments of this decision that you're making?

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And then we're going to hold you accountable to what a reasonable person should have known in this situation and should have calculated and should have predicted.

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And then that's going to allow for some sort of unforeseen situations and circumstances. And so to think about how the voting metaphor actually works, if you think about yourself as living in Nazi Germany and you're voting for Hitler, it's assuming that you were allowed to vote or something like that.

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But then you vote for Hitler in this kind of calculus. And Hitler's campaign promise is that he is going to enact the final solution and finally put an end to all these troublesome and meddlesome

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Jews. And then you notice the socialism that's present within the arrangement.

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You notice the final solution element. You know that they're experimenting on people. And let's say that you were allowed to democratically pick someone else and you decide to pick

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Hitler because he really likes the German people and wants them to advance in the world.

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Well, no reasonable person looking at that would allow you to basically say, hey, you know,

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Germany maybe has a good public education system or something like that, even if you believed it was a good public education system.

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No one would allow you to just cop out and say, well, I'm voting for the public education system.

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I'm not voting for the concentration camps or the experimentations or the world conquest or anything else.

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Because you are literally giving a person power that has promised to do certain things, and you can't ignore the overwhelming negative effects that this choice is, that you're actually giving to this individual.

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Just like if you were to see a drunk person on the street who is desperate for food and you hand him a gun and then he goes and he robs a convenience store.

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Everyone would look at you and say, hey, you empowered him to do that. You empowered him to shoot the people in the convenience store and to grab the money and to steal things.

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This is partly your fault. And you can't say, well, hey, no, I was giving him the gun to defend himself.

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I wasn't giving him the gun to go shoot everyone up.

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There's a sense in which you should have known what kind of person this is, and you should have known that there are entailments to doing this.

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And so when we think about decision -making, we think about voting, the thing is that when you are, you know, if you're going to consider voting for the

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Democratic Party platform, one of the things you have to do at that point is you have to think, what are the entailments of this choice?

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And you can't just isolate one positive benefit that you want to happen from this and then say that's your intention in the voting act.

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This is an act of decision -making, and with all acts of decision -making, you do have to consider what are

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God's parameters for doing this, what does God's Word say about it, and then you also have to factor in what are the entailments of this choice and what can a reasonable person predict.

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Now, as it relates to politics, you can't always predict every possible entailment, and no one is going to predict every possible entailment.

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Just like you build a house, you can't possibly predict that, you know, a tornado may come and knock it all down.

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But you can make reasonable preparations. You can get the thing up to reasonable standards that everyone agrees that are safe and wise.

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But then you can cut corners and you can build something that's structurally not sound, and you're going to be held accountable for those choices.

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And so as it relates to the act of voting, what I'm trying to say is we should treat it like a normal decision -making process.

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And in the normal decision -making process, you are making a certain choice to sign off on, you're making a certain choice to hand this individual power, and then if they're telling you what they're going to do with this power, and the vast majority of what they plan on intentionally doing with this power is trying to destroy everything the

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Bible says, you can't cop out and escape and essentially say, hey, you know, all

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I wanted to do was give him power to exercise in one area and not all of these things. But then what that might lead you to do is, if you actually think of voting as a normal decision -making process that you're going to make, it might be that you find yourself in situations where there's no good answer.

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Where, you know, if you were in a democratic election and you're trying to choose between Mussolini and Hitler, it might be that, like, there's neither one of those choices seem to be fundamentally a moral choice or an ethical choice.

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And if that's the case, it might be that a

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Christian might say that, you know, I'm looking at two parties that are overwhelmingly evil and there's no good choice here.

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And it might be that the moral response at that point is to say I refuse to participate in this.

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I'm not going to pick between Mussolini and Hitler. Give me a better choice. Until you give me a better choice, I'm not just going to, in a blind, you know, religious sacramental way, give my allegiance to Mussolini because he's, you know, marginally better than Hitler.

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You give me a better choice and I'll vote and I'll participate. And that may actually be a meaningful calculus.

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Now I'm not trying to suggest that the only faithful option in America right now is to refuse to vote.

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I'm simply saying that if you treat it as a normal decision -making process, then what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to look at both parties.

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And you're going to have to look at their stated intention for their use of power. And you're going to have to ask is their stated intention honoring to God in the main or is it dishonoring

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God in the main? And then you have to put some thought into what they're actually going to do as well.

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And as far as that's concerned, you know, related to the discussion of is it, you know, possible for Christians to vote

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Democratic, well I would say that in most areas of life we wouldn't think it would be reasonable to hand

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Hitler power. In most areas of life you wouldn't think it would be reasonable to give a drunk, you know, a gun with the hope that maybe perhaps he would use it in a helpful way to protect his fellow drug addicts or something like that.

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You have to ask like what would a reasonable person assume that this political party is going to do with this power?

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And then make your decision as it relates to that. But certainly if you return to the marriage partner metaphor in terms of trying to select a marriage partner, one of the things you'll realize is that every marriage partner is flawed to some degree.

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So there's basic qualifications that the Bible gives to picking a marriage partner and then there's wiser choices and there's poorer choices.

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And certainly if you pick a really, really poor choice, you're going to be held responsible for some of the entailments of that.

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But there's no perfect choice. And so picking a marriage partner involves like thinking through what's permissible as far as that's concerned.

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But then it involves thinking through what is wise. And if you're looking for perfection, you're just simply never going to get married.

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And the same thing is true of certain political parties or certain political leaders. There's going to be no perfect political partner.

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And picking a good political leader does involve some sort of ability to weigh the pros and the cons and to think about the possible good that's going to come from this in comparison to the possible evil that's going to come from this and be thinking in terms of those kinds of issues.

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And so the kind of individual who says that, you know, essentially every single issue on the political party platform

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I have to sign off on or I have to be able to anticipate every single possible outcome of this scenario is just being unrealistic.

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And that's just not the way that normal decision -making actually works. In normal decision -making, there's a lot of unknowns, and you're going to have to often make the best decision that's among available options.

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But then there are times in which all I'm trying to say is that there are times in which overwhelmingly all the options are bad.

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And at that point, you just refuse to pick between two horrendous options as far as that's concerned. Now, if you look at the lay of the land as it relates to political politics in America, I think one of the things that you should be able to come away with is you should be able to come away with realizing that the

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Democratic Party is way worse than Nazis, and there is no conceivable morally permissible reason to ever vote for them.

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And then at the same time, the Republican Party on the opposite end has a party platform that's remarkably different from that and has a lot of good things on there, and there's still some fundamentally flawed things in there.

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It's not a perfect platform. But then individuals are going to have to look at that, and they do have a contrast in these two party platforms.

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But then at the same time, they have Republican leaders who really refuse to carry out the promises that are made in their party platform.

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And so you're going to have to figure out how to interact with that and what the best kind of choice is to make there. But whatever you say, looking at the entailments of giving a drunk power or giving a drunk gun or giving

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Hitler power, you can't just in some simplistic way define the meaning of your vote as selectively determined by whatever one outcome you want.

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You do have to bear responsibility for what a reasonable person would view as all the rest of the outcomes as well.

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This has been another episode of Bible Bashed. We hope you have been encouraged and blessed through our discussion.

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Now, go boldly and obey the truth in the midst of a biblically illiterate world who will be perpetually offended by your every move.