The Fault in Our Ballots: The Search for a Meaningful Politics

Zane A. Richer

The year is 2024. A Christian man enters a voting booth and stares at the two options before him. Both are deeply unsatisfying to him. In the solitude of that voting booth, a familiar struggle rages across his mind. What should he do? Part of him thinks it would be best to pick the party which comes “closest to his beliefs” – even though neither comes particularly close. But another part protests. Since there is no political organisation or platform which openly confesses Christ and his claims upon political life, it would be best to cast no ballot at all. Either way, he feels resigned to an evil act. But which is worse? Sweat runs down his brow. What should he do?

The currency of late-modern democracy is the ability to reconcile oneself to making bad decisions. Most frequently, the guilt-debt of these accumulated decisions is expiated by homage paid not to principle but to necessity. In an ironic reversal of the old propaganda, we vote because we have no choice. Or so we tell ourselves. Faced with the calamity which awaits us if “the other side” gets in, what reasonable person could do otherwise? The apocalyptic mania which grips our leftward and rightward base is a symptom of guilty consciences crying for absolution; a bad option becomes less bad when viewed against the worst.

Of course, given the utilitarian calibration of the modern political conscience, we should not be surprised when the lesser of two evils slips unnoticed into the better of two goods. The activist and the average person might look different ways, but they meet each other back-to-back. In the face of an endless procession of morally compromising decisions, both plead the same justificatory fiction of necessity before the tribunal of conscience. Only the partisan believes his own propaganda. What was for the ordinary person an uncomfortable and temporary truce with a bad conscience becomes for him a permanent alliance and moral crusade. Certainly, it is not unrelated that the vast surplus of political energy within the democratic process is reserved for those best able to reconcile themselves to successions of increasingly bad, yet comparatively better, decisions.

Thus, for partisans and ordinary persons alike, the experience of modern politics is one of constantly simmering and constantly self-medicating guilt bubbling up from a compounding record of bad decisions. For most people who are not activists – for most Christians especially – this accretion of guilt vents itself into feelings of profound alienation from the political realm – feelings which are only intensified as the behaviours of right and left become increasingly more erratic and visibly antinormative. Our lives are punctuated by moral catastrophes to which and from which we limp. The next election – “the most important election of our lives,” no doubt – looms ever ahead, dreaded and inescapable, a wound perpetually re-opened. The ballot box is a hungry god and must be fed.

Such a process of guilt recapitulation and reconciliation is articulable psychologically in terms of repression – though repression explained by St Paul not Sigmund Freud. According to the book of Romans, it is not the sex instincts which are repressed but the Truth – specifically, the truth of God as creator (Rom 1:18–32). In our case, this would be the truth of God as creator of politics (Rom 13:1), and the corresponding involvement of politics in the spiritual directedness of the life of the world, which centres in the human heart. Indeed, the Bible knows of no other power that can alienate one from any part of God’s creation – including politics – but sin. And sin implies opposition: a rejection of God and revolution against his creation-design (Ps 2:1–3). At the heart of the Bible’s revelation about humanity, then, is the disclosure of a radical (root-level) conflict raging between the power of sin introduced at the fall and the power of obedience secured through the redemption in Christ. This fundamental division between the Civitas Dei (the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ) and the civitas terrana (the kingdom of darkness) is therefore of central significance in Scripture. It has been described by the Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd as the religious antithesis: though humanity is one in its origin and structure, it is two in its destination and direction. Having all come from the same place, we are not all going the same way.

At the radical centre of human life, therefore, is not reason, emotion, economics, sexuality or politics but religion – one’s fundamental heart-response to the Word of God that created him. In the words of H. Evan Runner, “life is religion,” not in part but in its fullness. And this life-which-is-religion entails an all-decisive choice of allegiance: for Christ or against him in every aspect and sphere of created reality (Matt 12:30).

Until the last day, the validity of this choice may never be revoked, although it is often repressed. Human beings, in their sinful apostasy from God, may so formulate their social, economic, ecclesiastical or political decisions in such a way that one spiritual allegiance is systematically excluded. This makes a false choice, both in the sense that (Christianly speaking) the remaining options are inadequate, but also in the sense that the choice itself is no longer real, no longer meaningful, no longer existential. To be meaningful, our choices – whatever surface issues they involve – must bottom out in the antithesis between faith in God and faith in idols. When one of these options is missing, the decision is removed – alienated – from the authentic and existential centre of human life.

You and I are living out our political existence in the wild and neurotic guilt-throes of just such a collective alienation. The democratic situation to which we have come rests upon a fund of repressions designed to winnow from the range of acceptable decisions any open consideration of “religion,” any public theology. Consider, for instance, a sampling of our perennial political questions:

· Are people sovereign in their capacity as individuals (individualism) or in their capacity as a collective (collectivism)?

· Is the national community absolute in its claims upon human life (nationalism), or is the international community (internationalism)?

· Do human beings construct the norms for their political life ex nihilo from their own reason (liberalism), or piecemeal over a long process of accumulated custom and tradition (conservatism)?

In each case, an alternative is presented wherein either choice commits one to the root premise of mankind’s absolute autonomy in the political sphere. In no option is to be found the open confession of God as sovereign creator of politics who has laid down for it a law and a King to which are owed the obedience of faith.

Modern Christians are therefore correct to feel a deep sense of inarticulable ambivalence about taking up their positions – let alone their identities – within the collapsed dichotomy of decisions so formulated. A true answer cannot be given to a false question. The way out of an invalid choice is not to pick sides. Being false, such choices can only falsify the conscience of those who make them, alienating them further from the truth of human existence. Yet it is equally wrong for Christians to embrace this very alienation as normative, thereby turning their backs on politics altogether. It is not politics which has falsified us; it is we who falsified politics. The fault, dear believer, is not in our ballots but in ourselves.

This fault, which originates from an uncritical acceptance of false problems, is at least in part responsible for the rapid overheating of our political climate. When Christians accept the basic validity of false problems, and resign themselves – in conformity with the world – to the necessity of making bad decisions, they simultaneously reflect and reproduce the conditions of their own alienation. The guilt-soaked conscience which emerges from these conditions demands the increasingly turbulent and neurotic set of justifications that underlie the twin development of polarisation and apathy.

In such conditions, the obligation of the body of Christ is not to accept this dilapidated situation as is, but to reform it from within by asserting the principle which hitherto has been missing (repressed). It is a mistake to see in “the existing situation” a condition which is static and unalterable. The gospel of the kingdom which Jesus proclaims is not stasis but dynamos – an explosive power that propels society in a process of inner re-formation from out of its radical religious centre. It must not accept the present situation as it finds it, but like leaven, transform it by heralding the true antithesis. In this way, society as a whole – including political society – is revitalised by the ability to make a meaningful choice.

The reformulation of politics in light of the true antithesis represents a monumental task. It is a call to Christian people everywhere to take up – likely for the first time – our responsible stewardship for the political realm in the form of an organised public witness. Such a thing cannot happen overnight. It will take much careful reflection upon both the foundations of the current crisis and the way forward. In these preliminary steps toward the establishment of a Christian political consciousness, I have been delighted to participate through KLC’s excellent new doctoral programme, studying the religious foundation of political polarisation. This work has taught me a powerful lesson: contrary to the world’s bleak prognostications, it is a thrilling time to be a Christian in politics. For, as is so often the case, the Lord’s healing comes in the form of a scalpel. Its incisions, though painful, are not purposeless. Let us humbly submit to his chastisements, and rise to seek afresh in the political realm the goal assigned to us in our Lord’s petition: Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Zane serves as a Professor of Government at Liberty University, VA, where he received an MA in Public Policy. He is currently a member of KLC’s PhD programme, studying political fragmentation and polarisation, especially in the American context.