Values-Based Voting Not an Option, but a Scriptural Mandate
Posted by: Dwayne Hastings on July 15, 2004 Classics •
By the time the polls closed on Election Day 2000, 56 million American adults with the right to vote had not. Over half of those individuals (37.3 million) hadn’t even bothered to register to vote.
Those numbers concerned Richard Land and were the impetus behind the development of iVoteValues.com, an initiative to register and educate voters launched by the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. Land is president of the ERLC.
The goal of the “grassroots voter mobilization and education effort” is to register two million previously unregistered but qualified Americans for the 2008 election cycle. The initiative also will work to promote an awareness of the immediate and long-term importance of “values-based voting.” The effort’s linchpin: iVoteValues.com
While voter turnout among registered voters in 2000 bounced back from a modern-day low of 82 percent in the presidential contest between Clinton and Dole in 1996 (86 percent of registered voters cast a ballot in 2000), just over 66 percent of Americans who were actually eligible to vote voted in the last presidential election.
Land also is convinced many voters who are voting don’t consider scriptural precepts when they vote. And a survey of American voters proves his point. Just over a third of Americans say their faith guides their voting decisions, according to a recent study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
Another study confirmed that most Americans leave their faith out of their voting decisions. Only 39 percent of adults surveyed by the Gallup organization in November 2003 said their personal religious beliefs were very or extremely important in making choices in the polling booth. A similar study by the Pew Forum discovered 38 percent of respondents considered their faith having an impact on how they vote.
Interestingly, the Pew Forum survey found four out of ten Americans (41 percent) believe there has been too little reference to religion by politicians. Twenty-one percent of people said there had been too much reference to religious faith by politicians. Just under a third of those surveyed said there was the “right amount” of expressions of faith and prayer by political leaders.
The biblical footing for iVoteValues.com’s call to civic engagement by Christians is solid, according to Land, noting Jesus urges His followers to be “salt” and “light” in the culture. Land says participation in the electoral process should be an important element of every believer’s life.
Looking to Scripture, Land is confident God expects Christians to register to vote and vote for the candidates whose positions most closely square with His values. That is the intent of the iVoteValues.com resources, he says, particularly the effort’s Web site that allows citizens to begin the voter registration process, details elements of the two major party’s platforms, and delineates the Bible’s position on many critical issues.
Yet he knows it is an uphill battle to engage that segment of the U.S. adult population that declines to take part in the country’s electoral process.
This section of the American public came under scrutiny in the “Vanishing Voter Project” of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where the “public’s waning interest in political campaigns” has been examined at length.
The project discovered that in 1960, 60 percent of the nation’s televisions tuned in to the October debates between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy; in 2000, fewer than 30 percent watched the debates between Gore and Bush.
Why the drop-off in interest and the resultant tendency to leave one’s faith at home when going into the voting booth? More media alternatives (cable channels); increasingly bitter and longer campaigns; media saturation (24/7 news and analysis on TV and the Internet); diminishing party loyalties; and an increased number of so-call “independent” voters, reports the Harvard-based project.
In a June 2000 Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll of Americans who acknowledged they don’t usually vote, 44 percent said it wouldn’t make much of a difference whether George W. Bush or Al Gore was elected president.
A Census Bureau study after the 1996 election, which saw turnout at record lows, determined the primary reason registered voters didn’t vote was because they couldn’t take time off from work or were simply too busy.
But Land believes this apathetic behavior is fueled by something other than people having too much to do on Election Day. He says too many people—voters and nonvoters alike—lack appreciation for the fact that one’s faith-based values should be impacting their decisions in the voting booth.
Once Americans understand that the Bible has something to say about contemporary issues, and by extension the positions of the candidates, Land believes more Americans will register and vote and those who already are voting will consider more carefully the policy positions of the candidates.
This is at the core of the iVoteValues.com effort, he insists. It is why well-known figures such as Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council are slated to join Land on visits to key cities for iVoteValues.com rallies this summer. The initiative will be well represented by a specially outfitted iVote.Values.com 18-wheel tractor-trailer that will be touring the country to aid in voter awareness and voter registration efforts.
The effort also calls for churches to observe two National Voter Registration Days: Sunday, July 4, and Sunday, September 26 (the final Sunday before the voter registration deadline in most states). iVoteValues.com will provide churches with non-partisan voter registration and voter awareness resources that are well within the Internal Tax code restrictions for 501©(3) organizations, explains Land, saying once individuals are registered to vote, statistics show they normally make it to the polls on Election Day.
“Most people who are registered to vote actually vote,” agrees Amie Jamieson in a U.S. Census Bureau release. “Historically, the likelihood of actually voting, once registered, has remained high, with the peak at 91 percent in 1968.”
If Richard Land has his way, the 2004 elections will go down in history with the highest voter participation ever and more Americans of faith than ever will understand the Bible does have something to say about their voting decisions. “How America votes has a tremendous impact on the future of the nation and its citizens,” Land concludes.
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Is The Religious Right Really Right?
Posted by: Albert Mohler on July 13, 2004 Classics •
With the 2004 presidential election looming before us, the secular media are sure to begin issuing ominous warnings about the influence of the so-called “Religious Right.” Every four years or so — roughly following the pattern of presidential elections—the media rediscover conservative Christians and set out to warn the rest of the population of the supposed threat posed by evangelicals active in the political sphere.
The Religious Right emerged on the national political scene in a big way in the 1980 presidential election, when Ronald Reagan was elected President with the overwhelming support of evangelical Christians. The evangelical support for Ronald Reagan — who, after all, defeated a “born again” Southern Baptist president—caught the national media by surprise and led to an avalanche of analysis. What would this new evangelical involvement in politics mean for the country? Were the evangelicals here to stay?
This election year promises to be no different, at least in terms of media scrutiny. With issues like same-sex marriage on the national agenda, the values-centered voting patterns of conservative Christians will play a big part in the presidential election. A fascinating look at the Religious Right and its critics is offered by Christian Networks Journal in its Winter 2004 issue, “Religious Right or Wrong?” The issue features an exchange of articles between Rev. Matt Fitzgerald, pastor of Epiphany Church in Chicago, Illinois, and Dr. Ronald H. Nash, professor of Christian Philosophy at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Fitzgerald, representing the religious left, and Nash, a prominent conservative philosopher, present a lively exchange focused on the influence of the Religious Right.
In, “Why the Religious Right is Wrong,” Fitzgerald aims a broadside attack on the political involvement of conservative Christians. Fitzgerald, we might note, does not mince words. He identifies all evangelicals as fundamentalists, and charges that “belief in the inerrancy of Scripture saps God of majesty and mystery.” Fitzgerald claims that his church takes the Bible “too seriously to read it literally,” and argues that though “the Christian story speaks God’s truth,” this story is not to be limited to the Holy Scriptures. As he argues, “the doctrine of Biblical infallibility wants to trap the Divine inside texts that God’s power ultimately transcends.” This misrepresentation of the doctrine of biblical inerrancy is eccentric, to say the least. Doctrines do not have “wants” and are incapable of “trapping” the Divine.
Though Fitzgerald is predictably opposed to evangelicals on the basis of political judgment, he is remarkably candid in addressing his critique to the Gospel as preached and taught in evangelical churches. As he explains, “Conservative churchgoers are taught to believe that they deserve judgment, but that Jesus comes rushing in to save them.” Evangelicals, Fitzgerald asserts, believe that humanity is “doomed” by its sinfulness and must be rescued from without, by the intervention of God in the person of Jesus Christ. According to Fitzgerald, conservative churches grow because conservative Christians “flock” to churches which tell the story of redemption and rescue. According to his analysis, “the threat of judgment plays a necessary role in the story that shapes their lives.”
Amazingly enough, Fitzgerald is bold to announce that liberal churches no longer believe in the threat of divine judgment and thus no longer look to rescue by a divine Savior. Even as evangelical Christians experience the radical transformation that comes by faith in Jesus Christ, “few people in the mainline church experience this sort of transformation.”
Fitzgerald explains that the liberal churches embraced a protest against “rigid and controlling religious orthodoxy and political tyranny.” Attempting to keep one foot in the modern world and the other in the Christian tradition, the mainline churches have accommodated themselves to a modernist perspective—a position Fitzgerald describes as “a very honest stance.”
What about the threat of divine judgment? “As people who believe that humanity has the answer to its own problems we no longer believe we’re doomed,” he explains. As Fitzgerald parodies the evangelical understanding of the Gospel, he accuses us of forcing a “rescue” on persons who are only standing in knee-deep water, and thus in need of no rescue at all. Liberal churches see the situation otherwise: “We think we’re splashing around in the shallow end of some motel pool, but Christian songs, scripture and stories treat us as if we are drowning in a storm-tossed sea. Because its liberal Protestant listeners no longer subscribe to the notion that humanity is in grave danger, the message of salvation is rendered nonsensical. Jesus has become the answer to a question we are no longer asking.”
Fitzgerald is not at all pleased that conservative Christians are now politically organized and involved in the political sphere. He declares that his church welcomes people “of all sexual orientations.” He identifies his vision of Christianity with the political left and charges the Religious Right with an “arrogant conflation of God’s will with American military might.”
Dr. Ronald Nash doesn’t beat around the bush in his response to Fitzgerald’s critique. One of America’s most prominent Christian apologists, Nash accuses Fitzgerald of demonstrating “either a defective grasp of American church history over the past fifty years and/or an emotional problem that makes one wonder if he knows what he’s talking about.” Take that, Mister “I take the Bible too seriously to read it literally.”
Turning the question on Fitzgerald himself, Nash accuses the Chicago pastor of harboring ill will towards evangelicals, who are simply following the example set by religious liberals in organizing themselves politically and seeking to influence public policy. At the same time, Nash understands that Fitzgerald’s agenda goes beyond politics.
“Suddenly the shoe is on the other foot,” Nash observes. “Religious conservatives have discovered the social dimension of the Gospel—although some never really lost sight of it. Now the liberals like Rev. Fitzgerald wish conservatives would go back into their churches and forget the political arena. Well, perhaps that sentence is too simplistic. Rev. Fitzgerald, it appears, would also prefer that they stop preaching their Gospel.”
Religious liberals conveniently force all evangelicals into their concept of fundamentalism, and then warn the nation of a horde of unwashed conservatives seeking to force an extreme vision on the nation. The scare tactics aren’t working.
Nash knows an evangelical when he sees one, and he defines an evangelical as “a Christian believer whose theology is traditional or orthodox, who takes the Bible as his ultimate authority in matters of faith and practice, who has had a religious conversion, and who is interested in helping others have a similar conversion experience.”
As Nash explains, evangelicals are deeply concerned about the nation’s moral crisis, the state of public schools, the mounting death toll of abortion, as well as a host of other issues including racial and social justice, poverty, and the environment. He points to evangelical ministries directed toward the alleviation of poverty and human suffering around the world. A published author and expert in the Christian analysis of economics, Nash also asserts that evangelicals generally oppose liberal social programs “because they are often counter-productive and they hurt the poor.” With wit sustained by wisdom, Nash observes: “With friends like the religious left, America’s poor and disadvantaged do not need any enemies.”
Finally, Nash accuses Fitzgerald and fellow leaders of the religious left of harboring a deep and dishonest hostility toward Christian conservatives, treating them as “bare-footed Neanderthals living in the fever swamps of Tennessee.” As Nash laments, “I think we have a right to expect a minister to be trained in the church history of the past fifty years and speak the truth.” According to Nash, “Fitzgerald owes an apology to the millions of faithful Christians he has maligned in his article.”
I wouldn’t wait long for that apology, for Fitzgerald and his fellow religious liberals see the Religious Right as a formidable threat and one they cannot dare to take seriously in terms of an intellectual argument. Liberalism’s arguments are now threadbare and worn, and conservatives have been offering the most compelling policy proposals put forward in the public square over the last several years. Political liberalism is on the retreat, even as lifestyle liberalism is now on the ascent in America and in other advanced nations.
Nevertheless, Fitzgerald’s acid attack is useful in helping evangelicals to see how the “other side” sees us. Nash’s article should remind evangelicals that this fight is not going to be won with pithy platitudes and public politeness. Here’s hoping that Professor Nash is right when he argues that religious conservatives are not about to turn on their heels and retreat from the political arena. The next few months should show us where we stand.
Sources: See Christian Networks Journal
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