Mennonite Weekly Review

On my desk is Electing Not to Vote: Christian Reflections on Reasons for Not Voting, edited by Ted Lewis, published by Cascade Books, Eugene, Ore., 2008, 140 pages, $17.

Many Americans consider voting an almost sacred right and duty. For that reason, some might find it presumptuous for nine authors to question Christian participation in the electoral process. But they do. Their arguments overlap, so I will not discuss each writer separately but try to gather up the book’s general message. Most writers primarily critique national presidential elections. Local elections might call for different considerations.

To begin with, political campaigns, especially at the state and federal levels, often reflect unchristian methods — distortions and lies, personal attacks, adversarial tactics that degenerate into hatred.

As one writer says, getting caught up in a national election subtly sucks us into its mentality and methods, which we then too often bring into other aspects of life, even the work of the church.

Elections give us the illusion of choice, but the choices usually are options offered by the “oligarchies,” options shaped by lobbyists and bankrolled by corporations. Candidates make promises but then have no power to keep them. Social change shaped by Christian values usually comes outside the political process.

Elections put into office leaders committed to the use of violence. Why, asks one writer, put someone into an office such as commander-in-chief that you yourself would not accept, especially if you are a Christian pacifist? In a sense, voting incurs responsibility for the violence that a president employs.

As a Pentecostal writer puts it, why vote for a presidential candidate “who will ignore — and even violate — the Jesus way” we Christians are called to follow? To vote in presidential elections is to vote for coercion. Further, elections foster nationalism, as when a presidential candidate’s speeches promote American power, attitudes and policies in conflict with the universality of the church and with God’s non-discriminating love for the whole human race.

A Catholic writer asks, “What is a ‘faithful’ citizen to do if all the viable candidates in a particular election are not simply wrong on this or that policy but are so egregiously in error from a moral as well as a political standpoint that one cannot in good conscience vote for any of them?” In such a case, he says, not voting is only a “mild form of civil disobedience” of the kind any true Christian must engage in if the way of Christ and the law of Caesar clash.

Christians are in danger of getting enchanted with political dramas. But we are called into a much bigger drama, that of Christ’s mission to save the world. What we need is a real “regime change” of the most fundamental kind: “The cross of Jesus … is the true and lasting regime change that will redeem humanity.”

But this does not come by electing Christians who would impose “Christian values” by force of law. As one writer says, “There was not, I concluded, a political system on the face of the Earth that could produce true and lasting peace and justice; it was only the broken body and shed blood of Jesus Christ that could produce lasting peace and justice.”

I came away from the nine essays in this book with one overall impression. The clearer our understanding of the wide gulf between America as a worldly state on the one hand and Jesus, the gospel and the kingdom of God on the other, the less enchanted we will be with the charade of national presidential elections and what they can — and usually can’t — achieve in comparison with what the Christian church is called to do through the gospel for the salvation of the world.