My Fellow Christians, Vote from Your Heart, Even if It Means Voting “Against” Your Church
We are called to serve the Lord and one another, never a political party
Being a Christian in a cynical world can feel very isolating. We live in a culture where the religious faithful themselves and organized Western religion writ large are among the last socially acceptable targets for general ridicule. Comedians, talk show hosts, Hollywood royalty, politicians, and likely many of your friends, family, neighbors, coworkers, or bosses reason that making fun of us and our faith is “harmless.” Some even seem to leverage “jokes” or observations as a social currency to distinguish themselves as more worldly, more intelligent than “naive” Christians.
Practicing your faith or even just being known as a Christian in secular spaces or “un-churched” communities isn’t the only challenge modern Christians face. Protestants and Catholics alike are increasingly finding their churches and their fellow parishioners drifting from Christ’s most overarching call: love one another.
The last three presidential elections have both exposed and exacerbated this drift.
We’ve been called for two centuries to feed the hungry and shelter the poor but “politically” supporting any policy that fulfills these most basic of Christian duties has conservative Christians calling “woke” Christians one of the dirtiest names they’re willing to say out loud: socialist.
Living your conscience anyway can feel very lonely in a community that has come to require a very narrow allegiance to a political party that looks nothing like Christ’s teachings.
“And he said to them, ‘If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.’”— Mark 9:35
Voting “against” your church in highly consequential presidential elections can feel almost blasphemous. But what if it isn’t? What if voting “against” the current church’s strange bedfellow is exactly what Jesus would do?
The quote “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching” is often misattributed to C.S. Lewis who famously wrote Mere Christianity.¹ But any Christian can appreciate its conviction.
Bob Welch is a courageous author and Evangelical Christian. Like many Christians who find themselves questioning not their faith but their churches, Welch is something of a Venn diagram — regarded as progressive in his conservative circles, conservative in liberal circles, with integrity and love as the commonality.
“My questions began to come fast and often,” he reflected in his extraordinary book, Cross Purposes: One believer’s struggle to reconcile the peace of Christ with the rage of the Far Right.
It is the most underrated encyclopedia of current Christian frustration with American Christian nationalism, its hypocrisies, and hostilities. It comforts the grieving Christian and guides seekers back to the light, to the foundational peace of Christ.
As a longtime journalist in a liberal-skewing university town, many Evangelicals viewed his industry with suspicion. But for almost thirty years as a columnist for one of the U.S.’s longest-running family-owned newspapers, he wrote with a journalistic objectivity that now seems like a relic from a bygone era. He calls his life “a duel existence.”
In his private life, incongruities in the wider Christian community had started to quietly nag at him. Welch’s doubts got louder when televangelist Pat Robertson blamed Haitians for the 2010 earthquake that devastated their island.
Instead of calling upon his fellow Christians to aid with disaster relief, Robertson claimed the Haitians had made an 18th-century pact with the devil to free themselves from French colonization. According to Robertson, the devil conceded. But for colluding with evil, Haitians have been punished by poverty and natural disasters ever since.²
Welch remembered medical mission trips he’d taken to Haiti, the good people he met there, and the desperate parents who begged strangers to take their children so they might have a better chance at survival. That a man of God, with one of the most influential Christian platforms would say the least Christlike thing about innocent people suffering stunned Welch.
Robertson also publicly blamed the 9/11 attacks on Americans because they banned prayer in schools and allowed abortion.
Robertson’s strain of Christianity was a compounding milestone in the slow-fomenting and unlikely hybridization of the political Far Right and Christian conservatives.
Welch doesn’t blame anyone. His memoir is explicitly not an indictment of our fellow Christians who voted for Trump. Instead, he sought to understand them by scrutinizing his own motivations and loyalties. He leads with his shortcomings and his deeply spiritual and Biblical self-examination. He invites us to do the same.
“I realize it was my own ignorance that enabled such self-righteousness to take root, my silence that allowed it to spread, my lack of courage that encouraged it to thrive,” Welch says. “For decades, I’d been quietly complicit. Then, in June 2016, I prayed a prayer that triggered a major refocusing of my beliefs. It was as if I’d assumed that wherever the motorcycle of faith ventured, the sidecar of ‘Far Right’ had to come along. [emphasis mine] I no longer believe that.”
This book reads like a friend in faith giving you permission to follow your heart instead of a political party that many Christians now see as strategically using religious conservatives rather than aligning with them ideologically or truly representing them.
If you too are feeling isolated within your own religion, bewildered by the obsession with vanquishing our “enemies” instead of loving one another, I promise you — you are not alone.
Beth Moore, the famous evangelist and author who became infamous for denouncing Trump and sexism in the church, must have felt like she was risking everything. She must have been so scared before publicly sharing, “I am still a Baptist, but I can no longer identify with Southern Baptists,”³ She must have braced herself for the inevitable backlash but she followed her heart. She followed her conscience.
“I do not believe these are days for mincing words. I’m 63 1/2 years old & I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism. This Christian nationalism is not of God. Move back from it.”⁴
Most of us are not public figures. We do not feel called to radical advocacy from a global platform. Most of us just want to live a quiet life of service and fellowship with our friends and family. But voting for a “liberal” candidate, especially for the president of the United States of America can feel like “betraying” everything we’ve known, everything we’ve come to believe. That can feel radical.
It’s ok to be scared. It’s ok to feel pulled in conflicting directions.
Whether your heart has been whispering to you or your conscience is sounding every alarm, Christ calls us to be brave.
“Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms.”— 1 Peter 4:10
Christians struggling to reconcile the power-hungry smite-thy-enemies Far Right with the humility and wildly universal love and acceptance of Christ can still speak the truth. Many in professional ministry have risked their reputation, relationships, endorsements, and platforms. Because they knew there was no greater call than to use their gifts for the greater good.
My friends, we too have been given many gifts — and opportunities. It is our blessing to share them.
Theologian and pastor Reverend Benjamin Cremer is a vibrant presence on social media. He is rooted in an Evangelical background. He says of his current ministry, “My desire is to discover how we can move away from Christian nationalism, religious fundamentalism, and church hurt to reclaim the Gospel of Jesus together.”
He tackles the painful collusion of politics and organized religion in modern America.
“Beware of any Christian movement that insists it has so many enemies to conquer rather than so many neighbors to love.”
“Beware of any Christian movement that demands the government be an instrument of God’s wrath but never a source of God’s mercy, generosity, or compassion.”
As we American Christians cast our ballots, I humbly encourage you to consider voting for the candidate who will sow the least hatred. I know she does not check all your boxes. I know she stands in direct opposition to one of the tenets you cherish most. And we are all tired of being told to settle, to choose between the lesser of two evils. We want more. But in the simplest of terms, we only have two candidates — one of wrath and one of compassion.
It might feel counterintuitive or even self-defeating to vote for the “liberal” candidate. But this liberal candidate is the only one advocating for the least of these. And we must put the least of these before ourselves.
“But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” — Romans 7:6
We don’t have to die to our communities to reform them from within. We can serve in new ways. Because we believe in deeds, because we believe in grace and works we are not bound to any candidate just because he calls himself a Christian.
Heaven-bound Christians, from my heart I thank you for even considering what might feel heretical to you. I close with this timeless reminder from Bob Welch: “This Earth will never be my home — and no president will ever be my savior.”
We are absolutely free to vote for the candidate who will best serve the sick, the poor, and the hungry. They are not the enemy. They are our neighbors. And we have the opportunity to serve them as ourselves by casting our ballots.
As the Most Rev. Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church says, “The principle on which Christians must vote is this principle: Does this look like love of neighbor?”
Remember, your vote is private. It can stay between you and your God.