ActiveFaith.us
I can’t believe it’s been, like, ten months (!) since I posted anything here. I have lots of excuses (such as running for Congress - and no, I didn’t win), but I intend to skip them and dive right back in (including getting back to my book). Here’s the query that drove me back here again:
Should Christians vote for the “lesser of two evils”?
I had an interesting (to me, at least) conversation on my radio show this week with Michael Cromartie, a Christian political analyst and the VP of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. In the middle of the interview, I brought up how Cynthia McKinney (a perennial favorite radical leftist here in Georgia) has announced that she’s seeking to run on the Green party ticket for President.
His response was one of glee, but when I asked him about the whole concept of third party candidacies, he said, “I think that third party candidacies are very, very bad and irresponsible.” He called the well-ballyhooed reports a couple of months ago, about conservative leaders saying they might support a third party candidate if Rudy Giuliani is the GOP nominee, “utterly irresponsible talk on the part of religious conservatives.”
In his explanation for those remarks, he talked about how Ralph Nader was responsible for George W. Bush’s election over Al Gore (since he took votes from Gore), and how Ross Perot was responsible for Bill Clinton’s election (since he took votes from Georgia H.W. Bush). When people “waste their vote” on Candidate X in order to “feel more pure,” then everyone else gets the choices that are “left behind,” and this “dilutes” the chances for the better candidate to win over the worse candidate (relatively speaking).
Most interesting, though, was his statement that, “politics is the art of making choices between relative goods and lesser evils... the candidates that we have to choose are not always the ones that we’d like most to have.” He concluded by saying that when he looks at Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate compared to any of the Republicans, he’ll vote for any of them instead of her.
OK, I get it -- it’s the standard argument of voting for the “lesser of two evils,” because if you vote third party, the candidate you really don’t want to win is more likely to win, and you’re really in trouble then. But the first thought that comes to my mind when I hear that argument is: If you vote for the lesser of two evils, aren’t you still voting for evil?
I heard someone (I think it was Alan Keyes) say once that if my choice for dinner is between a poison that will kill me quickly or a poison that will kill me slowly, “I’ll starve, thank you very much.” It would seem to me a more Biblical position to take -- although, admittedly, what appears to be a less pragmatic one -- for a Christian to vote their conscience (guided by Scripture), regardless of whether the person they’re voting for actually has a chance of winning.
If this were the Presidential election of 1860, and the choice was between a man who said “I support keeping Negroes as slaves, but I’ll appoint judges who will send that issue back to the individual states,” one who says “I’m personally opposed to slavery, but it’s a personal choice for slave owners, and we should send the issue back to the states,” or one who said “Slavery is wrong, the U.S. Constitution supports the right to freedom, and I will fight tooth and nail to get slavery outlawed in America,” who should we vote for? What if that third candidate had very little chance of winning -- should Christians still vote for him?
Well, this is the Presidential election of 2008. If the choice ends up being between a man who says “I support the right to choose abortion, but I’ll appoint judges who will send that issue back to the states,” one who says “I’m personally opposed to abortion, but it’s a personal choice for women, and we should send the issue back to the states,” or one who says “Abortion is wrong, the U.S. Constitution supports the right to life, and I will fight tooth and nail to get abortion outlawed in America,” who should we vote for? And what if that third candidate wasn’t a Republican or Democrat?
As a Christian, there’s no way I could compromise and support a candidate who believes slavery is OK, or even that it should be a “personal choice.” And as a Christian, there’s no way I could compromise and support a candidate who believes killing babies in their mother’s womb, or even that it should be a “personal choice” to kill your baby.
And if the Republican party nominates someone like Giuliani, the Republican party is dead in the water. What then?
William Greene is the author of Christian Political Activism: Biblical Principles for Active Faith, a “work in progress.” Read the latest chapters at ActiveFaith.us.
“And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.” (Joshua 24:15)
Thursday, December 13, 2007
The Lesser of Two Evils
