How Do We Judge Our Candidates?
Christians have many ideas on how to decide the best way to express their Christian values and faith through the way they vote. Many begin by figuring out whether the candidate is a Christian like them. All the candidates in 2016 are Christian except for Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish. They come from a wide variety of denominations. Hillary Clinton is Methodist. Jeb Bush was Methodist until he converted to Catholicism. Ben Carson is Seventh Day Adventist, Donald Trump is Presbyterian, and Ted Cruz is Southern Baptist. Marco Rubio was a Mormon for a few years in his youth and now attends both a Roman Catholic church and a Southern Baptist church. John Kasich is Anglican.
Some voters look at the candidates and judge whether they express the gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as love, peace, joy, gentleness, self-control, trustfulness, faithfulness, patience, and goodness.2
Voters might ask: What is the Good these candidates have done in the world? Have they helped feed the hungry, clothed the naked, given a cup of cold water to the thirsty, and given hope to the hopeless?3 Have they cared about the ‘least of these’ as Jesus asked them to? What and whom do they care about? Have they made the world a better place? Have they built up God’s Kingdom—not just with words, but with deeds? Whom do they serve? God—or power, money, and the elite?
Christians also judge candidates to see if they are expressing qualities that are contrary to the Spirit. These include the Seven Deadly Sins of pride, envy, greed, gluttony, lust, anger, and sloth as well as bragging, mean-spiritedness, fear, dishonesty, and hate.4
Why are these sins so dangerous? Because they hook the basest part of our human nature and drag us into the pit of nastiness. We are then tempted to participate and hit back since we’ve been hit. We want to give tit for tat. The ugly mess spreads.
We only have to look at the Republican debates in the 2016 election season to see what happens when one person begins with nastiness and malice. Donald Trump set the tone for the Republicans. He attacked, Labeled. Called others names. And kept the focus on the fight, not the issues. For a while, other candidates tried to stay out of the fray—and Kasich and Carson managed to keep their cool. But others got hooked. Trump’s followers found it thrilling. Finally there was someone who spoke to their anger and fear. The more he stoked the fires, the more excited they became. He was their guy. Their savior. He was going to make America great again, in one vague way or another, and he was going to hit every bully they wanted hit, and be the Power that would stand up for them. He spoke with force, and attacked and diverted every attack against him. Jesus was right—“What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean.”5 And there is a lot of vitriol coming out of a lot of mouths this season. But it isn’t just the person attacking who is unclean, it’s the people in his way who are victims of this unhealthiness. They can easily become corrupted, either by weakening because the attack demoralizes them and strips them of their power (this happened to Jeb Bush—Trump knew just how to get his goat) or because they decide to play the same nasty game, which is happening to Cruz and Rubio. Their worst instincts have been hooked—and they exchange one blood threat and attack for another, not yet realizing that no one can out-Trump Trump. He is a master at this. And the game is like a great bullfight, or cock fight, or gladiator fight. Blood is drawn. People who are lured into the slough lose their identity as children of God. If we want to see Christian behavior, we won’t see it in these exchanges.
As this nastiness spreads out, voters get caught up in the bloody game, and at some point, the international community gets caught up too—slash for slash, burn for burn. And our world, which already teeters on the edge of disharmony and hatred, tilts toward destruction.
That is exactly what Jesus, and Paul, and the prophets, warned us about. Sin is crouching at our door, it desires to have us, but we must master it.6
As my Texan friend sometimes says to me, “Don’t get none of this on ya.”
I personally am amazed by the Evangelical support for Donald Trump, who has been called “Hater in Chief” by Esquire Magazine and whose bragging and pride are so overt. Trump knows little about the Bible; he has stumbled when asked what is his favorite verse of the Bible. He’s said he never asks for forgiveness because he’s not making mistakes. And when he speaks about the Lord’s Supper, he says he likes his little wafer and wine at communion because it makes him feel good.7 On Bill O’Reilly’s show in January 2016, Trump expressed his Christian value system as being about an-eye-for-an-eye. O’Reilly turned his cheek and said that was from the Old Testament, and that the New Kingdom of Christ brought in the idea of turning the other cheek. Donald Trump shrugged as if he had no idea of what O’Reilly was talking about.
A number of Evangelical Christians are beginning to speak against Donald Trump and to show their concerns from a Christian perspective. Russell Moore, the President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, says, “Trump’s vitriolic—and often racist and sexist—language about immigrants. women, the disabled and others ought to concern anyone who believes that all persons … are created in God’s image.” Moore discussed Trump’s “narcissistic pursuit of power,” calling it “decadent” and “deviant.” And he said for voters “to view it any other way now would be for them to lose their soul.”8
A number of noted Evangelicals have said, publicly, they won’t support Trump if he is nominated. This leaves Conservative Evangelical Christians in an ethical dilemma, since everything points to Trump as the Republican nominee. They could join the 20% of other Evangelical Christians and vote Democrat, at least for the Presidential candidate. Even Republicans would have to admit that Democrats have conducted their campaign with more civility and concern for the poor, the needy, widows and orphans, and the “least of these” than Trump. They might decide not to vote, thereby not adding their voice to the democratic process. They might decide to vote for other candidates on the ballot and leave the Presidential candidate blank or add a write-in candidate. They might decide to vote for him, but if he truly is dangerous, immoral, and a hateful force in American politics, they would be colluding with evil. Perhaps as more Christian voices express their concern during the primaries, there will be a profound turn in the direction of the 2016 campaign. But I have my doubts.
The Struggle for Unity
If we move beyond party to people, a Christian Democrat and a Christian Republican might agree on many issues. Sometimes they vote according to whom they feel they can best trust to keep promises. They vote for the person who seems to have the same priorities as they do, or the one they think can best exemplify these values in our government. Many vote for the issues, while trying to assess the character of the candidate.
Both democracy and Christianity are challenging. They challenge us to go against our seemingly natural human behaviors of hatred, intolerance, greed, and self-righteousness, or what the Apostle Paul lists as the problems when the Holy Spirit is not at work: “antagonisms, rivalry, … bad temper and quarrels, disagreements, factions and malice”9—all the traits we see daily on our television sets, read about almost daily in our newspapers, and often see manifested in election campaigns.
On the surface, there seem to be issues that are not easily resolved, because there seems to be an inner contradiction between Christianity and democracy. Churches often ask us to be homogeneous in our beliefs and actions. Churches have creeds, and dogmas, and statements of belief, and the members are asked to, at least verbally, agree with them. But our country is not homogeneous. From the beginning, settlers of our country came to America to find freedom, and soon found that there was a diverse group of others, all of whom wanted the same freedom for themselves. Early on, many of the settlers respected these differences in order to create a democratic system.
We are often in a struggle between the desire to be inclusive and the desire to be exclusive. We often feel a struggle between our natural suspicion of each