The Kingdom of God and Politics of the Moment

I follow a number of people of faith on social media, and over the past few days, I’ve noticed no shortage of authoritative-sounding pronouncements about who/what to vote for and how to vote.

Some go a step further, framing their political preferences as biblical imperatives and suggesting that anyone who votes differently cannot be a true Christian. Yet among these confident voices, some insist that the faithful must support Candidate/Policy X, others insist on Candidate/Policy Y, and still others argue that neither deserves their support. All claim some measure of biblical or faith-based justification for their positions.

Surely, we can recognize that these positions cannot all be right in the same way. These are, after all, human beings offering their interpretations of how faith should inform a political decision; they do not speak for God, and if they tell you or imply that they do, that should give you pause. 

These are human judgments about temporal matters, made by particular people at a particular moment in history. It wasn’t so long ago that men invoked Scripture to claim that slavery was God’s will, interracial marriages were wrong, and that women should not have the right to vote. Confidence in a biblical justification, it turns out, is no guarantee that the interpretation is right. They presume to declare God’s will on the political affairs of a particular nation, nearly 2,000 years after Jesus walked the earth, in one country among roughly 200 that exist today.

I have no doubt that Jesus cares about people, justice, and how we treat one another. But I question whether the outcome of any single election in any single nation deserves the almost cosmic significance these voices assign to it. The United States, for all its current influence, occupies only a brief moment in the long sweep of human history.

Perhaps the more important question isn’t which candidate or policies Jesus would endorse, but why so many people seem so certain that he would endorse the same candidate and policies they do. Faith should give us reasons to examine our convictions with humility, not a license to turn our political opinions into God’s commandments.