Who do I want to win the election? Anyone who has read my blog or known me for any amount of time will not be expecting me to say “Jesus” or something else of that sort. Some might treat that sort of non-partisan affirmation of Jesus as Lord as deeply spiritual. Yet on even superficial inspection it is clear that Jesus is not on the ballot.
Let me say that again, to those who support any of the candidates who are on the ballot: Jesus is not on the ballot. His teachings are not on the ballot. There are, to be sure, candidates who embody more or less of Christian values. Some who long claimed that character matters now insist it does not.
Some who have read my blog for a long time will be able to guess whom I will vote for. Nevertheless, I do not support any U.S. candidate or political party in a partisan way. My views on society are akin to the European model of social democracy, sometimes rightly or wrongly labeled as democratic socialism. I have lived in a place that has universal health care. It is a place where Christianity, and a particular form of Christianity, is the official national religion. So it is ironic that the people in the United States who most often say that it is or should be a Christian nation oppose national health care for all and other things that other societies adopted largely due to the advocacy of Christians for those things.
My Christian faith compels me to support and work towards justice. Neither of the two main candidates on the ballot has a good record from that perspective, although that by no means means that they are equal. It means they have different shortcomings.
My Christian faith and my passion for education and truth lead me to highlight the way that abortion has been turned into the single important issue when a mere matter of decades ago it wasn’t a major issue for Evangelicals. It is not a “non-issue” for liberal Christians. I think that all who fall under that umbrella think the decision should reside with a woman in consultation with her health care provider. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t something tragic about it. But there isn’t a biblical basis for saying that a fertilized ovum is a human person, much less that it is a human person with the same status as a fully developed human being. It is a potential human, in most but not all cases, and a very high number of such potential humans do not develop to the point of being born into the world, not because of abortion or other human intervention but because, as most women know but men are typically ignorant of, a very high percentage of pregnancies spontaneously miscarry. There’s something tragic about that too, but not in the same way that the death of one’s adult child is tragic.
Perhaps the biggest problem in the world today is the inability of so many to engage with nuance and recognize degrees. U.S. politics is thought of as polarized and yet there are many options to the left and right of the major U.S. parties that aren’t even on the table for many.
So am I stalling, avoiding answering the question of who I want to win? No, I raised the question, but as an academic I’m also concerned with context and nuance and so cannot happily give a one word (or in this case one name) answer and leave it at that.
Most of me wants Kamala Harris to win, not only as by far the lesser of two evils, but because I want to have a basis for holding the false prophets of the religious right accountable. They claimed that a vote for Obama was a vote for the antichrist who would institute a Communist dictatorship that would end democracy. It wasn’t. They’re nonetheless using the same rhetoric again and people are falling for it. If you never call out false prophets, you’ll run after them again. If you claim to be a “Bible-believing Christian” and don’t know that then you’re not a Bible-believing anything because you don’t know what the Bible says.
Part of me thinks that if Trump wins, at least we’ll get to see two things. On the one hand, we will see him do some of the things we have warned about. On the other hand, we will hopefully see that no one person, not even a president, has the unilateral power to destroy a democracy created with checks and balances to ensure its survival.
Unless of course a preponderance of those in other branches of government support him in doing so.
Either way, a significant number of Christians are going to need to show whether they really believe they are called as followers of Jesus to love their enemies and bless their persecutors.
Who do I want to win? Justice and morality, worked for nonviolently, no matter which candidate is in office as of 2025.
Other things to read of relevance to the present moment:
How will the faithful vote in 2024?
Christians, your religious liberty really is at stake this election
From Ken Schenck’s series on the election:
Jesus Would Vote Without Hurting the Rest
Jesus Would Vote to Restrain Evil
Bob Cornwall reviews Matthew Taylor’s book The Violent Take It By Force
Election Special: Lex Luthor, Donald Trump, and the Power of Pride
From Sheila Kennedy:
Elsewhere on Patheos:
Getting information about politics from an AI chatbot is a terrible idea
Elon Musk can keep buying votes
Anti-vax doctors urge SCOTUS to open airwaves to medical disinformation
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