Counterculture

Why Christians Cannot Be “Values Voters”

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Casting a voteWe have another American election coming soon. If you are a Christian, you are probably well aware of the “this is the most important election in the history of our country” mantra of fear that gets trotted out by various Christian groups every election cycle. We will certainly hear a verse shared most often today in conjunction with politics, 2nd Chronicles 7:14. We will hear about Judeo-Christian values and saving them from whichever evil political party is deemed most diabolical at this time.

“We have to preserve our way of life! If we don’t, what will happen to our nation?”

There’s a problem with that line of thinking though: It’s the same belief and chant that resulted in Jesus’ crucifixion. The Pharisees were the “values voters” of their day.

The problem with voting values is that values exist in a vacuum. Whose values? Which values? In Christian circles, we hear typically that stopping abortion, halting same-sex marriage, and safeguarding religious freedom are the top three. I will not dispute that those are valuable and worthwhile issues to address. However, the Bible speaks far more often and more boldly about economic justice, yet evangelical Christians balk at talking about economic justice because fixing that problem would probably disrupt our personal little kingdoms. Love for the “alien” and “sojourner” is also mentioned repeatedly in the Scriptures, but that’s not a value most of us consider at the voting booth.

Values change too. Remember that ridding our country of “demon alcohol” was once the most important value the American Church held dear.

Here’s the essence of this post…

These are the two most important questions of life:

Who is God?

How can He be known?

As Christians, the Bible is our book, and it exists to answer those two questions. We as Christians are to embody the answers to those two questions. And as the embodiment of those answers, we are to align everything in our lives to presenting those answers always and in everything we think, say, and do. Our lives are intended from the second we are justified by faith in Christ to be the living response to the two most important questions of life.

Think about that. Then think how we are to live as a result.

Politics is a nasty business. In a democratic republic, we Americans are given some say in our government. For those of us Americans who are Christians, our participation in that government must reflect the answers to the two questions. We are not allowed to answer falsely or to hedge our bets. The answers to the questions cannot be compromised because what is at stake is the truth about the character of God and His revelation.

Nothing the Christian does should question the character of God because no “value” matters more. All answers in life proceed from who God is. Our response to any predicament or issue always must come from who God is is and how He can be known.

This is how we live. And this should be how we vote.

I wrote that the Pharisees were “values voters.” Recall how they were unable to properly answer the question of who God is and how He can be known. This is the failure of values voting. It can’t work back from the “answers” depicted by the “values vote” and determine the truth of who God is and how He can be known. For this reason, Christians can’t vote based on values.

But people try. And this is how we end up with the political mess we find ourselves in.

Yet if we are to move beyond ever-changing values voting then we must always vote with the answers to the two essential questions in mind. They must inform everything we think, say, and do.

How then can we support any politician who distorts who God is and how He can be known?

How then can we support any politician who answers the two questions with lies in both word and practice?

Our task as believers is to reflect the answers of who God is and how He can be known in every aspect of life, including voting.  If we don’t do this, then we send a confused, broken, and destructive set of answers to a world dying for truth.

God has not given us a spirit of fear, has He? And yet we vote out of fear, not out of answering the two questions. We are fearful over the loss of values, but never over the loss of proper answers to the two questions. This is grossly wrong.

As Christians, we are to vote for those people who can answer the two questions properly in both word and practice. Anything else is not of faith and not of truth. God puts few burdens on us, but properly dealing with the two questions is one of those “burdens.”

But here’s the thing: God is in control of the outcome. He asks us to boldly uphold the answers to the two question and then trust Him to handle whatever the outcome of doing so will be. We should never fear to answer those two question boldly and without regrets.

What if this means that in answering the two questions of life boldly and without regrets we vote for a political candidate who answers the two questions correctly but who will certainly lose the election? Well, that may be what is asked of us by God, because answering the two questions properly is what we are about—always.

Do we truly trust God for election outcomes? Does He not say that He is the one who raises up and tears down a nation’s leaders? Do we believe that He knows what is best? If we do the right thing and vote for upholders of the proper answers to the two questions, and those candidates lose, have we not done what God has asked of us? If the “wrong” candidate makes it into office, are we to judge God because He asked of us one crucial thing and now we have regrets over His sovereignty? Are we that faithless?

We Christians say we want things to change in our country. Voting values, for all intents and purposes, has been a miserable failure at changing anything. It was always doomed though. Unless we vote according to the answers to “Who is God?” and “How can He be known?”we will never change anything.

A Powerful Delusion

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The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
—2 Thessalonians 2:9-12 ESV

After an evening of gaming at our friendly, local game store with my son and his friend, we did the mandatory munchies run. Unable to cope with the odd collection of rambunctious folks inhabiting the dining room of the nearby McDonald’s at 10 p.m., I decided we would eat in the bed of my pickup out in the parking lot. A fair, lovely, clear night…why not? Overhead, a half moon blazed brightly, but the night sky was a curiously empty canvas of unrelenting black.

Where were the stars?

From the corner of my eye, I could barely make out Mars, but Venus was nowhere to be seen. One expects those two planets to be visible, but the emptiness of the sky was still startling. I live in the countryside, and even though southwest Ohio is one of the worst spots in the nation for stargazing, I still get a decent view of the night sky at home, with the Milky Way band clearly visible.

Still, nothing here compares with the overhead view I witnessed in northern Ontario in the early ’80s. I was on a lake so remote, I think the human population density was about a dozen people per 10 square miles. The stars there? Well, you could read by them. They were that bright. And the reflection of that star-laden heavens in the lake surface was simply glorious. Wow.

But sitting in a McDonald’s parking lot 25 miles from my house, near a shopping mall flooded with unnatural light, the manmade daytime overwhelmed the celestial story intended by God to speak His praises.

The Holy Spirit nudged me then, and I could not escape the words of 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12.

If I had never been to northern Ontario, never lived in the country, if my home had always been somewhere near this shopping mall ablaze with electric light, I would have no idea that in that murky blackness overhead, billions of suns burned with fusion’s fire. The heavens that declare the glory of God would be silenced, a dark cloth stretched across the expanse of sky, save for the solitary punctuation of the moon.

How would anyone know that stars lay beyond the cloak of artificial darkness? Unless all the manmade lights were quenched, one never would.

How would you convince someone that anything bright existed in that unremitting blackness? Don’t the eyes alone reveal the truth?

A powerful delusion.

People in the grip of a powerful delusion do not know any better. They cannot understand anything beyond what that deception allows. It informs all parts of their personal experience.

“Pinpoints of light so widespread and bright that you can read a book by them? In the night sky? Nah!” And someone laughs at your stupidity and fanciful imaginings.

I offer some thoughts and questions following. Nothing fully formed. I’m not sure that all of them are worthwhile. I simply offer them.

I wonder sometimes if even “church folks,” people like you and me, are caught in the powerful delusion. I wonder if we are seeing clearly, if the figurative stars are visible, or whether we are creating our own unnatural light to compensate and making matters worse.

The star-filled nighttime sky in Ontario was more than bright enough for me to go about my business after dark. Reflected in the lake, it was even more powerful. The night was aglow.

Are our efforts to be light in this world manmade? Artificial? Unnatural? Are we reflecting the true, natural light? Or are we creating a fake alternative that only serves to wash out the true, natural light, effectively replacing the heavens that shout the glory of God with an empty canvas?

Are we contributing to the powerful delusion?

Should we partner with God to enhance the delusion He has sent? Or is our task to do what He asks and keep telling people that there is more to this life than they can see?

Can people caught in the delusion ever break free of it? Or are they doomed to an empty night sky, devoid of the praises of God?

What of “church folks” who receive perpetual doses of artificial light? Does it blind them to the natural light? Will they ever see the natural light amid the washout created by all the fake spotlights we throw up in an effort to draw attention to what we think is genuine, but which may not be?

What if you and I are caught in part of the delusion, even a bit? Would we know? The passage in 2 Thessalonians says the delusion will look remarkably like the genuine. Would we be wise enough to discern that there is more than what we are seeing? And that our own efforts to recreate the light may in fact be blinding us to the real thing?

Somewhere overhead, there are stars burning in the void. And their message is that of the angels. More than anything, God, please, help us to see and hear only that which is of you, and which persists eternally beautiful, filled with the One True Light.

The Question Ignored By Christian Authorities, Leaders, Pundits, and Bloggers

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The Internet is filled with words. The Christian section of it too.

To waltz into the Christian ghetto online will get you beaten about the head and neck with every sort of opinion, doctrinal refinement, and thought balloon. Yet it seems to me that for all the punditry and supposed solutions to all of life’s problems that the online Church says it answers, almost every source of solutions ignores the foundational question that most people in the world today ask:

Does anyone care that I exist?

Sadly, that’s not a question we are answering well in the contemporary Church. We can say “God loves you,” but we don’t offer most people much flesh and blood proof of that truth.Lonely in a crowd I suspect it’s all too common for a person to walk into a typical church on Sunday with that question burning in the heart and leave an hour later with it unresolved—and perhaps even unadressed entirely. That a person can be utterly alone in a church packed with people…well, it happens, doesn’t it?

So what difference does all the talk on the Internet make if all these authoritative voices have so little impact on that most pressing of all inquiries?

The tangential issue that bothers me most about that unresolved question is that I wonder if any of the Christians behind the voices on the Internet (and outside it) even bother to wonder what it is like to be someone else. Do we ever put ourselves into the lives of other people? Do we consider how they live, struggle, cope, and adjust?

It doesn’t seem as if we do. What else explains the hamfisted way in which we deal with others? What else answers how agendas, programs, and initiatives steamroll real people? Or how people can encounter us and not be changed by the Jesus we say lives in our hearts?

Other people simply are not on our radar.

I am convinced that the only thing that will snap us out of our cocoons of self is personal tragedy. We have to suffer greatly before we begin to wonder how other people live, especially if we find ourselves alone in the midst of that suffering.

I would think that it wouldn’t have to go that far, that the Holy Spirit would be enough to enlighten us to the need for dealing with humanity’s brutal question, but it doesn’t seem as if He is getting through to us. Not that He is somehow insufficient, only that we stuff our ears with “our lives” so as to block His shouts.

Someday in the American Church, a group of people will wake up and help others answer the question of whether or not anyone genuinely cares if they exist. Those pioneers will demonstrate that care too.

It can’t happen soon enough. More power to ’em.