Brian Hamilton

To Vote or Not to Vote?

I’m struggling to decide whether or not to vote. Earlier Anabaptists refused to vote, though I’ve never heard any of the rationale for it; my theology, markedly Anabaptist itself, has caused me to rethink the Church’s role in a national election through natural progression.

The reason, succinctly and provocatively: I fear that the church is so determined to save the world that it is willing to compromise the Kingdom of God to do it. And only the Kingdom can save the world.

Many Christians at Messiah have expressed to me this concern, that if we don’t vote, we’ll have let the world be more effective than the church. The primary emphasis, it seems, falls on effectiveness. How faithful we are is measured by the number of lives we save. And in a sense that’s true. But the Church saves lives by being the Church, by living an alternative where death and violence and poverty and sickness have lost their power, by offering the world a taste of heaven. Christians are in danger of being convinced that the Church has no means of saving lives other than those the government can offer; Christians are in danger of becoming humanists, because they are in danger of forgetting the fierce particularity of the Christian witness and the awesome creativity of the Holy Spirit.

This in itself, of course, is not a reason not to vote. This is a reason to broaden our horizons, to push beyond catalogued methods of salvation, but we need not reject a way of helping the world simply because it did not originate in the Church. What we need to examine more closely, I believe, is not how effective voting is—for it is certainly quite effective, especially now—but how faithful to the kingdom.

(There would be cause, I think, for the church to refuse to vote not because it was wrong, but to make the statement that the Church can function outside of national politics because it is rooted in the politics of Jesus. Of course, this would demand enormous unity, and an incredibly creative act of agape to perform while the world voted to demonstrate our commitment. Not for now, but maybe for one day.)

24 September 2004 |
tags: Political Theology