On voting

As a Christian who also happens to be a U.S. citizen, I'm very frustrated by both McCain and Obama. More so, I'm frustrated by Christians who think McCain or Obama will solve all the world's problems. Of course, they'd never put it that way, but the stories they tell about each candidate betray no deviation from the plain old boring party line--whichever party it happens to be.

As an Anabaptist by conviction, I've mentioned to several folks that I've thought about not voting in the fall. I didn't vote in the primaries, why would I vote in the presidentials? Needless to say, the outcry has been overwhelming. Civic duty bla bla bla, abortion bla bla bla, war bla bla bla. Right-o, not only is it my 'civic duty' to vote, it's also obvious which way I should vote. For McCain. For Obama. Of course, of course.

So here are my thoughts as they stand.

I am a Christian. I don't really care about my U.S. citizenship (or my French citizenship for that matter)--though of course in many ways I profit from it. As a Christian, I do not have a 'duty' to vote. I do not believe in the nation-state, whatever that nation-state happens to be--I believe in Christ's Reign. (Or to put it in biblical language: "Take your share of suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one in military service gets entangled in matters of everyday life; otherwise he will not please the one who recruited him."--I Tim. 2:3-4, NET. Voting, I would suggest, may well count as getting 'entangled in civilian affairs'...)

Nevertheless, I don't believe in principled nonvoting either. Paul, for example, though he says "Do not become partners with those who do not believe, for what partnership is there between righteousness and lawlessness, or what fellowship does light have with darkness?" (II Cor. 6:14, NET) is also unafraid to use his Roman citizenship to his advantage, as in Acts 22:25, when, being whipped, he asks: "Is it legal for you to lash a man who is a Roman citizen without a proper trial?" (notice how gentle this question is however--this is hardly the patriotism it is sometimes made out to be).
Christians cannot be 'pure' by opting out. Though we are as good as 'saved', we are not yet 'sanctified', and so we aren't 'pure' in the first place. It would thus be inconsistent to pretend to be more pure than we are. Besides, the kind of purity God has given to those in Christ is not a fragile purity, one that would be easily 'contaminated'. No, rather we are freed from contamination logic to be contagiously pure. Jesus touched corpses, menstruating women, and lepers. He embraced them. Christians, to the extent that they actually are pure, have this kind of purity. It is a purity which transforms the world, not one which shies away from it.

At the same time, the Christian logic of contagious purity cannot be used to baptize party platforms (e.g. Donald Miller's unfortunate prayer at the DNC--cf. here, HT: JT). So where does that leave us? As it stands, I think Christians can allow themselves a form of ad hoc voting, where this is justified by one candidate's being far superior to another. This presupposes two things.
(1) First, it presupposes that there is a legitimate distinction between casting a vote and endorsing. A Christian cannot endorse any kingdom of the world. But I do agree with those who suggest that voting need not signify endorsing. If I could be shown that this distinction is a false one (as Mark of Jesus Manifesto believes), I would be unable to vote.
(2) Second, and perhaps more dramatically, it presupposes that there is a reasonably easy way to tell that one candidate is better than another. And that, my friends, is one very optimistic presupposition.

So let me part with the following. I am neither 'pro-life' nor 'pro-choice', as the parties define these terms, because I am not an essentialist concerning human nature (having a certain genetic code does not unilaterally make us 'special'). And so the abortion issue is not enough for me to tell which of McCain or Obama is better. I am a pacifist. But the war issue is not enough for me to tell which of McCain or Obama is better, because both men want to beef up the military, and even Obama, who is against the Iraq war, wants to continue on in Afghanistan, and in the so-called 'war on terror' in general (sigh). Both men are unwilling to raise critical questions about the U.S.'s 'support' of (read: giving loads of weapons to) the state of Israel.
Energy: both men are roughly on the same page here.
Social policies: I don't have a PhD in economics, so I have no idea what's good for the poor. Nevertheless, as a Christian who believes that the Fall is deep, I'm incredibly wary of the naive idealism required for so-called 'free markets' to work. So I naturally lean to the left here. The trouble, of course, is that governments are made up of people too--so corruption can happen there just as easily as it can in big corporations. Perhaps this is something I need to think more about.

Finally, and here there IS a big difference between McCain and Obama: so far as I can tell, only McCain seems to have an uncritical, quasi-Bushian view of evil (see the Civil Forum transcript here, or specifically this file). And I quote: "Of course evil must be defeated. My friends, we are facing the transcendent challenge of the 21st century: radical Islamic extremists."
Yes, it's those damned 'Islamic extremists' who are evil. They, them. Over there. Not us. Never.
Right, McCain... right.

Compare with Obama's answer (see this file): "... one of the things that I strongly believe is that, you know, we are not going to, as individuals, be able to erase evil from the world. That is God's task. But we can be soldiers in that process, and we can confront it when we see it [...] but you know a lot of evil has been perpetrated based on the claim that we were trying to confront evil."
For all the rest of Obama's mushy liberal theology, here he reveals himself to have a solidly Christian understanding of evil (which means, in passing, that I would rather attend Obama's church--even given his former pastor, that scary black man Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright--than McCain's church).

This post is dragging on, so I apologize. My main point is this. Things being what they are, I'm considering voting for Obama in the fall. Or rather, I'm considering voting against John McCain in the fall, because he scares me. A man with that kind of power and that kind of worldview can do a whole lot o' damage. God have mercy on my soul--and on the world.

As an aside, I have good friends who are voting Green, for Cynthia McKinney. And while I appreciate their (and her) perspective, given the fact that she won't be elected (just trying to be realistic here), voting for her really does seem to me to embody some kind of trust in (or endorsement of) the system--the kind of trust that sits oddly with Christian commitments in the Anabaptist tradition.

That's all for today folks. I'd love to hear some of my readers' reasons for voting, or not voting, or voting for candidate X, Y or Z.

God's peace.
-Daniel-