Just three weeks out from the 2024 general election, 41 million Christians say they aren’t voting. They say they don’t like their options, which might be the most intellectually lazy thing someone can assert in our self-governing republic.
As I read this study from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, the parable of the talents from Matthew’s gospel came to mind. In it, Jesus told His disciples the story of a wealthy man who entrusted his servants with large sums of money to oversee during his absence. One servant received the equivalent of 80 years worth of earnings, while another 32 years worth. A third received 16 years’ worth of earnings.
The first two essentially doubled what they had been given. The third didn’t like his choices, so he buried the money in the ground, not even bothering to put it with a banker. He said he did so because he was scared of his master.
His excuses were a cop-out. He thought that by doing nothing, he would avoid responsibility. For his cowardice, the servant was called “wicked and slothful.”
That’s how millions of Christians appear to be treating this election. They mumble self-righteous pieties about the choices—implying themselves to be the standard bearers of civic and personal morality.
They seem to think they can stand before God and smugly say, “I know you put me in this self-governing republic, but I could not lower myself to do my duty, so you cannot be angry with me because none of the candidates on the ballot met my standards.”
Is that the standard these Americans want to have applied to them? Is that the standard they hope God employs as He elects us for eternal life? I know how poorly I compare to God’s standards; I’m personally counting on His mercy through Christ!
I often hear people say that they hate choosing between “the lesser of two evils” in our elections. It is like they just emerged from a state of bliss on planet Earth! We live in a fallen world. All of us fall short of the glory of God; some more spectacularly than others, perhaps. But that’s a bit like comparing the stench in various sections of the city sewer.
In the real world, God calls us to be shrewd. We must make choices between what is actually in front of us. I would like to have filet mignon for lunch every day, but the budget says my choices range from chicken salad to PB&J. I guess I could just go hungry, but I choose sustenance over starvation.
The great irony is that by choosing not to vote in the election—for whatever “righteous” reason—the 41 million Christians are, in fact, casting a vote. They are choosing to let other, less biblically shrewd individuals make the governing decisions for them.
By refusing to consider the nuanced positions of candidates and the relative real-world good and harm each would bring, these Christians are letting those guided by destructive ideologies and even worse theologies pick a dangerous path for our republic. Wicked and slothful, indeed.
We were blessed to be given a self-governing republic. By hiding from the responsibilities of citizenship, some Christians are preparing to embrace an unbiblical foolishness.
Rather than hide from the hard choices, we have a responsibility to faithfully engage the world as it is. And, yes, that means—as Christian citizens in this republic—participating in the elections.
