One of the frustrations with this year’s presidential race is the selection of candidates. No matter whom a person votes for, the outcome is bound to be futile or worse. The leading candidates hold to immoral values, and the other candidates stand little to no chance of being elected.
It’s certainly been a rocky election season. Emotions have been running high. Rumors, broad smear attacks, finely crafted speeches, and a media circus have created quite a show.
Who should win and who should lose? According to Eric Gorski of the Associated Press, “the loser in this election is religion.” The one point that seems to be a constant source of put-down, and never esteem, between candidates is their religious views.
As a Christian, a Seventh-day Adventist, a person of faith—how should I vote? Should I vote for the economy? To end the war? To prevent socialism? To stop gay marriage? To prevent civil war?
A thoughtful article by Candice Watters of Boundless, “What Matters Most in the Ballot Box,” makes a case for being a single-issue voter. And what is the single issue? Not any of the things the media has been frenzied about lately. It’s the decades-old platform position on abortion.
Quoting Tony Woodlief:
Those other issues certainly affect a country’s safety, prosperity, and greatness. But I’ve come to believe that a nation that tolerates destruction of innocents deserves neither safety nor prosperity nor greatness. We’ve descended into barbarism, and it poisons how we treat the elderly, the incapacitated, even ourselves. We shouldn’t be surprised, having made life a utilitarian calculation, that more and more humans become inconvenient.
When you think about it, it makes sense. If someone does not have the moral intelligence and courage to stand up for a single obvious moral principle which can be agreed upon by almost anyone who believes in objective morality, how can that person be trusted on any other moral issue?
Here is an interesting chart from Doug of Vision Forum:
I don’t know anything about Chuck Baldwin, and this is not an endorsement of him. But it should be obvious to most of my fellow Adventist Christians that neither Obama nor McCain are champions of virtue.
Every Christian has an obligation to use their influence on the side of righteousness. If you take the pragmatic position of the lesser of two evils, what will you say to God when He asks whom you voted for? “But, God, he wasn’t as much a child of the devil as the other guy….” What will you tell your children and grandchildren? “Well, yes, mommy voted for someone who supported abortion….”
Of course, at this stage, it seems highly unlikely, to the point of impossible, that any other candidate would win. But that is the result of a larger war we have already lost, or hardly even fought. To cap one failure with a vote of confidence in a man who opposes the sanctity of human life is a monument to depravity.
Life is mysterious and sacred. It is the manifestation of God Himself, the source of all life. —Ellen White, The Faith I Live By, 167
Our laws sustain an evil which is sapping their very foundations. Many deplore the wrongs which they know exist, but consider themselves free from all responsibility in the matter. This cannot be. Every individual exerts an influence in society. In our favored land, every voter has some voice in determining what laws shall control the nation. Should not that influence and that vote be cast on the side of temperance and virtue? —Ellen White, Gospel Workers, 387
Politicians cannot be expected to be theologians, and neither can we hold them to see eye to eye with us on every fine point of moral principle. (We can hardly see eye to eye with one another!) But when a man ignores a moral value that is as plain as the sun in the clear sky, it should be obvious to you and to me that he cannot have our vote.
Many people will vote wrong tomorrow. Even many of those who lose will probably vote wrong. Please don’t be one of them. God can forgive you for playing party to sin, but the damage can never be fully undone.
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