Here is where we are. American Christians who care about the lordship of Christ in the political realm are in the following position. The Democrats, because of their pro-abort, anti-life, anti-fruitfulness stands, are out. The Hillarybot is simply an ambition machine with a pro-death agenda. Obama seems like a normal human being, but his policy positions are beyond reprehensible. Simply use the abortion issue as the litmus test. Do you think chopping babies in the womb into little pieces is a mother’s constitutional right? If so, then this is why they invented phrases like “when Hell freezes over.”
So that means vote Republican, right? The obvious unacceptability of the Democrats has led many Christians into the “lesser of two evils” mentality, and so they get involved in partisan Republican politics (and by “involved” I mean “up to the neck”), trying to elect “anybody but Gore,” “anybody but Kerry,” or “anybody but Hillary.” I am talking about more than holding your personal nose and voting on election day — I am talking about the kind of involvement that makes Christian leaders become public cheerleaders for political paganism. Such realpolitik endorsements of convenience are never honest.
Full disclosure: I live in Idaho, which is one of the reddest states in the Union, and so casting principled third-party, alternative, write-in votes is really easy for me. There is no way that the Democrat, whoever it is, is going to carry Idaho. That means I can have my fun on election day. But if I lived in Florida, I know that I would blink a couple times — but what follows still seems right to me.
On the Republican side, the heavy involvement of evangelical Christians in Republican politics for thirty-five years appears to have gotten us a Hobson’s choice between McCain and Romney. We’ll know more in a few days, but this appears to be how it is shaping up. McCain is no conservative, and has gotten his reputation as a “maverick” the easy way — pleasing The Washington Post and The New York Times. He has delighted in affronting principled Christians for a long time. In the meantime, Romney is angling for the conservative vote, and his current positions are calculated to please the religious right. But he has all the believable gravitas of that packing foam that came in the box with your refrigerator. So here we are, metaphor in transition, huddled in the corner of the chessboard, the corner where we didn’t really want to be. Vote for the phony Mormon, and do it for the real Jesus. Yay. Checkmate.
The Church is not yet in a position to have a mature, prophetic word. We need to focus on reformation within our own ranks. We need to learn how to worship, how to live in community, how to love one another, how to live like Christians in the world. This will have an impact on our politics — if hundreds of thousands of Christians do it for fifty years. But as it stands, our schools of the prophets have no incoming freshman. The lordship of Christ does apply to the political realm — and the Church should have something distinctive to say. But we don’t, and this means that whenever we step into the realm of politics, we get immediately coopted by the raging torrent that was already flowing to the sea. The river is in full flood, and Ron Sider’s canoe is swept down the left side of it and Ralph Reed’s is swept down the right side. Somebody needs to invent a jet boat.