Christian, You Don't Owe The Republican Party a Thing.

Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

To the Christians reading or listening to this, I hope you’ll take a few minutes and hear me out because this matters to me, because you matter to me.

I’ve been a Christian for most of my life and a pastor for more than half of it.

I’ve spent thousands of hours in worship services, Bible studies, prayer gatherings, youth group meetings, weekend retreats, and in quiet moments of study and prayer.

My faith journey has led me into the lives of beautiful human beings from the side streets of South Philadelphia to the mountain communities of Puerto Rico to the tin-roofed slums of Nairobi to the gleaming suburbs of Charlotte.

My spiritual pursuits have given me countless moments of wonder, of joy, of revelation—and many of those experiences have come alongside you or people like you.

And though you might not believe it, I understand you.

I know what you’ve grown up believing, the communities you’ve been a part of, the things that matter to you—and I know the power of your origin story.

I know that your journey (like mine) has been shaped by your families, by the places in which you were raised, by the pastors and ministers and priests in the faith communities where you spent your Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings.

And I know that you have quite likely grown up, as I did, hearing the message (either implicitly or explicitly) that Christians vote Republican.

And while it was never explained precisely why they do, that idea was imprinted on my heart and embedded in my story.

And it’s for this reason that I need you to hear something that someone should have told you long ago, or perhaps something you know but need to be reminded of:

You are not required by God to vote Republican. Really.

The Republican Party is not a church, it is not a religious tradition, it is not a spiritual community, and it is not a monolith. It is filled with flawed and failing human beings; some who may embody the teachings of Jesus and some who are the antithesis of those teachings.

There is nothing redemptive or sacred about aligning with all of them out of some sense of duty or obligation.

To vote Republican (or Democrat) simply because, is to discard everything that the Bible tells us we are given by God: wisdom, discernment, empathy, and free-will.

And to claim blind allegiance to a political party is to minimize Jesus.

His life and words were left to us so that we could recognize the things in this life that were truly worth partnering in:
love of neighbor without caveat or condition,
welcome of the foreigner and the outsider,
generosity toward those who have less than we do,
feeding those who live hungry,
healing of the afflicted in body or mind,
protection of the vulnerable and oppressed,
respect for nature and all life that calls it home,
words that speak love and encouragement and invitation.

As people of faith, those things are supposed to be expressed as we raise our children, as we interact with our spouses and partners, as we do our daily work, as we navigate traffic, as we traverse social media—and as we vote.

Soon, you and I will step into a voting booth or sit in our kitchens quietly filling out a ballot, and that will be both a tangible act of worship and an embodied prayer.

We will participate in the political process of our nation, and in those moments we will testify to what our personal faith calls us to be do and be, the values we hold sacred in the deepest recesses of our hearts, and to the kind of nation and world we seek to build.

We will declare partnership with candidates who we believe truly demonstrate the kindness, honesty, gentleness, and goodness of Jesus, whether those people have an R or a D next to their names.

We will testify to the hope we have and the future we reach for, and we will, in a very real way, bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice or away from it.

They say that we are in the voting booth alone but that is completely untrue.

You and I will be there with the women in our lives whose lives will be irreparably changed in beautiful or terrible ways by the choices we make; women not unlike those who found respect and protection in Jesus’ presence.
We will be there with the sick and the poor around us who, just as in the time of Jesus, need our help and healing and rest.
We will be there with refugees and immigrants and foreigners who seek the kind of open table Jesus provided them when he was walking the planet.

They will be in the voting booth with you. Most important, Jesus will be there, too.

And in that moment with you and the author and perfecter of your faith and the lives of a vast multitude some of whose names you know and some you will never meet—you will stand before a list of the names of other human beings and you will make a decision.

I truly don’t share these words to convince or guilt you into voting a certain way. I simply want you to remember what your spiritual journey really means:

You don’t owe the Republican Party anything.
You don’t owe a candidate anything.
You don’t owe your church or your family or your friends anything.

You owe it to yourself and to the Jesus you follow, and to the billions of people made in the image of God, to vote your values and convictions and aspirations.

May you not choose obligation or expectation or precedent or tradition or pressure or habit.

May you not choose anyone else’s faith but your own.

May you step into the voting booth and may you elect a Love that conquers all.