Alisa Harris

In the last GOP primary the evangelicals had Huckabee–a jocular ex-Baptist pastor so likable that even The Liberal Media had to remind themselves they thought him insane. This year, the most obvious evangelical choices–Bachmann and Perry–limped along with little support until their candidacies died. Scrambling to anoint a candidate, a group of evangelical kingmakers met to choose one and picked the most evangelical of the non-evangelical GOP candidates: Rick Santorum.

At this point, Santorum should be the obvious choice for a family values voter. He has a perfect family, an impeccable record of not just opposing abortion but actively fighting it, and lets none of the Catholic Church’s teachings on social justice and compassion besmirch his staunch conservatism. He even has, as David Gibson and many evangelical leaders point out, an evangelical style.

So why, if Santorum is the perfect evangelical candidate (despite not actually being an evangelical), did South Carolina evangelicals go for Newt instead, a serial adulterer of the ilk they loathed in the 1990s? Why did they overwhelmingly favor someone who embodies the very disease they want to stop–the destruction of the heterosexual family?

Because electability matters to evangelicals. In South Carolina, nearly half of evangelical voters said the ability to beat Obama mattered most to them as they made their choice–and over half of them decided Gingrich was their guy–not Santorum, the “squeaky clean family man.” Electability matters a lot–more, it seems, than character (only 21 percent of evangelicals said it mattered most) and more than fighting for the candidate who actually perfectly represents and fights for their views in every way. This will carry over to the general election: if Romney wins the nomination, evangelicals will vote for him despite knowing he doesn’t give a damn about abortion or gay marriage and lacks any core of integrity. When it comes to Romney and Obama, they’ll choose the lesser evil.

But why? Why always vote for the lesser evil?

I’m becoming interested–as I look at the political field and see almost no one in either party who represents me–in treating my vote not as a choice between two evils but as an honest reflection of my own principles, my own values, and my own priorities. I’m tired of seeing my vote as an opportunity to carefully balance various interests and win the most amount of good while doing the least amount of harm. I would like to see my vote as a principled stand, even if casting my vote means “throwing it away” on someone who can’t win.

In a country where corporations get many, many more votes with their millions of dollars and where Super PACS hold the power to dictate debate, a vote is all we little ordinary citizens have left. It’s the one last reminder that we are supposed to live in a democracy where everyone holds the same amount of power–a single vote–to express their views. We should use it to protest the establishment.

And I’m tired of an establishment where we have two voting options. Particularly if you’re a left-leaning liberal or a center-leaning conservative, there is no fair option at all. As Ryan Lizza pointed out in his recent New Yorker article, analysis shows that House Republicans have moved six times as far to the right as House Democrats have moved to the left. Senate Republicans have moved twice as far to the right as Senate Democrats have moved to the left. This means we have a system that represents only the far right and the somewhat left leaning center. Our “assymetrically polarized” two party system gives no option for the rest of us–except to vote outside the two party system.

A record high 40% of Americans identify as Independents. We should vote independently.

Few people watched when the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America fell apart two years ago in Minneapolis, but I did.

One convention delegate said he was, for at least a few more hours, a pastor in the church and that he stood “broken, mournful” over what the assembly was about to decide. Another pastor spoke, opposed to the first man, with the same heavy sorrow, and pleaded for sympathy without judgment: “I so want to be understood.”

They debated. They prayed. They voted, with 559 in favor of allowing openly gay clergy, and 451 against it. Then they sang a hymn and prayed once more — some for the very last time together — and then they fell apart.

Battles fought in the public square are eventually fought in church. When, as a former culture warrior, I lost the fervor to tell other people how to live their lives in the public square, it was only a matter of time before I lost the fervor to tell others how to act out their faith in church. When I changed my politics, I found I had to change my church. And so the stories about how I left behind conservatism and tales about how I left behind evangelicalism are intertwined.

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As several reviewers of Raised Right have quite fairly pointed out, the subtitle of my book suggests that I “untangled my faith from politics,” but reading the story will give you a different impression. They have a point. I had reservations about the subtitle myself; the publisher and I ran through dozens of alternatives before consensus formed around this one, which makes an imperfect attempt to distill a book and a life into seven words. So here’s a little more about what I mean—and don’t—about “untangling faith from politics.”

First, I had to realize that the Bible does not contain a political platform for the 21st century, a dramatic departure for someone raised in political theology like I was. Although it has plenty to say about broad principles like justice, power, oppression, and mercy, the Bible does not spell out exactly how the the United States tax code should be structured or what we should cut from the FY2012 budget. We don’t know whose taxes Jesus would cut or whose platforms he would endorse, in part because Jesus repeatedly turned down political power, lived in first-century Israel, and hasn’t yet released his jobs plan in either paperback or full-color Kindle form. But despite this uncertainty, the Christian right takes it as self-evident that God supports their crusades against gay marriage, for instance. To a somewhat lesser extent, the Christian Left co-opts religious language to attach Jesus to a very particular political agenda. I think it strips religion of its transcendent meaning when we reduce it to partisan proof texts and the lowest-common-denominator language we need to make everyone feel that God would approve what they’re voting for. Religion should not be another hammer in our political toolbelts.

Second, I’m no longer trying to turn America into a Christian nation again. My politics was once premised on the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation, that our laws should reflect a Christian sexual morality and that we should enforce the ascendancy of Christian principles through displays of the Ten Commandments and prayer in schools and government acknowledgment of our reliance on God. While I still strongly believe in religious freedom and oppose any effort to squelch religious expression, I had to learn that America is not a Christian nation and never was in the sense that the Founders I loved were not evangelicals like me, and they created an explicit separation between church and state. Since the Founder’s culture was less diverse than ours is today, that separation of church and state looked different then that it should now. But the principle remains the same: the separation of church and state is in everyone’s best interest–Christian, Jew, Muslim and atheist.

For politically indoctrinated young Christians, just realizing God may not be interested in your political agenda is a major step on the religious journey. Before you can reach any kind of solid conclusion about what your politics are and why, you have to wade through the messy swamp of figuring out just how much of the political dogma you’ve been taught is actually part of the Christian faith—and possibly wrestle with the unsettling fact that very little of it was. It requires a deconstruction of your entire view of the world. So that point of “untangling” is a crucial one, and it’s where I suspect many of my readers may be. They’re not necessarily on a theoretical journey, but a visceral one where they have to make a painful decision about what to do with politics their conscience knows are wrong and even immoral, but have undergirded their worldview for many years.

After I separated Christianity from the old politics, I was able to see scripture’s political promise differently, in a way that is both less specifically political and more generally radical. Its clear, constant teaching on equality and individual dignity are still very radical. They’re ideas that turn traditional power structures on their heads. The Bible preaches the insanity that the poor will inherit the earth. It unwaveringly sides with the defenseless, the low, and the powerless over the strong, the high and the powerful. These principles are inescapably political, but they are hardly partisan in a liberal-vs-conservative or Republican-vs-Democrat sense. They make me deeply passionate about politics, to the point where I still read, tweet, and yell about it every day. But no longer do I take for granted that God is on my side in the voting booth, or that Jesus would endorse my imperfect, infallible struggle to make the world a little more fair.

I realize it’s unavoidable that people will say I merely exchanged religious conservatism for a religious liberalism. That’s not entirely inaccurate. But the point of telling my story was neither to promote a utopian politics-free centrist Christianity nor to suggest that leftist politics are God’s politics. It’s to show the trajectory of one brainwashed girl who realized her faith and her politics didn’t fit together, and to tell what happened when I began to untangle the two.