Yes, Vote, but Resist the Political Illusion

Though all elections have consequences—some more than others—they are moments in time. As such, they reflect more than they determine. Their outcomes matter, at times greatly. Still, these outcomes result from larger trajectories. In other words, elections tend to be downstream from the rest of culture.    

The fact that this election will be so immediately consequential for so much and so many—for preborn humans and the future of pro-life activism, for children and their parents, for public safety, for education, for the integrity of the republic, for the direction of the world’s wars, to name but a few—is a serious thing to consider. And it reveals the kind of nation we are, and the kind of church we’ve become. All elections are instructive, like mirrors, but this one is like a big yellow “you are here” arrow.   

As we await who will be the next to move into the White House, we face the real prospects of a disputed election, of rioting, and of international instability. It’s one thing when a nation largely agrees on where it should be headed but disagrees on how best to get there. It’s another for a people to not only lack a shared vision for the future, but also shared definitions of essential concepts such as freedom, virtue, human dignity, family, citizenship, and marriage. In our country, the factions are not merely misaligned; they are antagonistic.  

Christians are in a unique place to offer a way forward. This will not happen if we fall captive to what Jacques Ellul called the Political Illusion. This is the idea that all problems are, at root, political and therefore must have political solutions. Politics has, in our day, overtaken too much of our lives. Everything has been made political. Elections ought not be this consequential. When they are, it indicates a deep crisis of identity and meaning. 

How Christians have navigated this political season—from Evangelicals for Harris, to parishioners begging their pastors to say something (anything) from the pulpit, to shofars and prophecies, to pundits who believe they can “save conservatism” by voting for the most radically anti-Christian, anti-American, and anti-human administration in the history of our republic—exposes the holes in Christian discipleship.  

C.S. Lewis warned against a “bits and pieces” kind of anemic Christian faith in Mere Christianity when he said, “We shall never save civilisation as long as civilisation is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.” That “something,” he explained, was Heaven. Those whose minds were most focused on the Eternal have, in fact, accomplished the most good in the world. In other words, neither a privatized, nor a politicized, nor a pietistic vision of Christian faith is big enough for the moment we are in. Christians must instead, Lewis said, aim at Heaven to get Earth thrown in. 

Our national future does not depend on the outcome of this election, though this election directly correlates to what it does depend on. It is the pre-political realities, especially the recovery of truth and meaning and the recovery of civil society, that must be rebuilt. Politics plays an essential role for a nation like ours, as does the state it ushers in. However, flourishing requires that these roles are limited.

Indeed, this election is the most important of our lifetime, and that’s the problem. The warnings of Western decline, voiced over the years by Solzhenitsyn, Schaeffer, Colson, and others were obviously true. This nation is in crisis.

Most true is that all authority in Heaven and Earth still belongs to Christ, Whom God raised from the dead and Who presides over human history. He is sovereign over elections and the rise and fall of nations. He has placed each of us in this cultural moment, for this place and time, and has prepared good works for us to do.

So, whatever happens today, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work. That begins with voting today, if you have not yet done so. Thank God, it doesn’t end there.