Now that we know who all the political players will be on the national stage, I thought I'd respond to the few folks who have asked me or wondered who I'm voting for this November and why. (Spoiler alert: if politics have an adverse effect on you, you'll want to skip this post and look for others featuring puppies and unicorns.)
But first, a little background and context.
I grew up in rural Illinois, one of the most Democratic states in the nation (thank you, Chicago). However, Pike County, which is five hours southwest of the Windy City, has overwhelmingly voted Republican in the previous five Presidential elections (as high as 74% in 2016), and most assuredly will do so again this fall.
My parents rarely formally associated themselves with organized politics; instead (and because in small town America - Griggsville, population 1,200 - everyone knew and/or often had grown up with at least the local candidates), it always seemed that my folks voted for people rather than parties.
And I always liked that. I liked that my Dad, as a farmer, considered the issues and candidates more than the party with which they were affiliated. I liked that my Mom, as a teacher, stuck to her guns and never joined the teachers union anytime during her education career because she (and Dad) thought it got in the way of what she was at school to do - teach students.
Perhaps as a result, politics - or at least the fixation on all things Democrat or Republican - was of little interest to me in high school and even into college. I remember taking a required political science course my sophomore year at Mizzou and seriously struggling to keep track of which party was "the left" and which party was "the right," as I had just never grown up thinking about it in that way. By the time I graduated, I had begun to develop some political convictions, but they weren't guided by party (though I perhaps felt and gave in to pressure to belong somewhere).
I liked the ideas of Libertarian thought, but eventually recognized that inevitably someone's proverbial nose was going to get in the way of my proverbial swinging fist (or vice versa), so what then? I had high hopes for the Tea Party movement and its initial attempts at fiscal responsibility (I even sent Megan and our little girls to a rally on my behalf while I was teaching in St. Louis), but that movement fizzled.
In the meantime, Democrats were giddily moving more and more down moral slippery slopes, while Republicans were cluelessly declaring wars and going into debt to do so. I became disgusted with both parties and decided I would formally declare myself an Independent in protest. Yes, I don't get to vote in a primary, but let's be honest: with the crowd of candidates for both parties that our system has produced in recent decades, it really hasn't mattered. (If you check my Facebook bio, I actually label myself a Monarchist who is beyond ready for the King to return.)
So then we get to 2016. I knew I wasn't voting for Hillary for a million reasons, but I couldn't bring myself to vote for Trump, either. So Megan and I voted for third-party candidate Evan McMullin - what some would say was a wasted vote, but what we stand by as a vote of conscience and a vote of protest against the current two-party system that is not working. To this day, Megan still says that she is glad that's how we voted.
Coming into 2020 and seeing the Democrat machinery disturbingly orchestrate things over a weekend to ensure that Joe Biden would be their party's candidate, fear got me thinking that maybe I needed to vote for Trump as simply a vote against the Democrat establishment. I thought about it for several months, mentioned it to Megan to get her take, and almost came to a point of deciding that Trump should get our support.
But fear should never eclipse conscience as a decision-maker, and my conscience (informed by Scripture) says this: I won't compromise my potential Christian witness (especially to those who politically think differently than I do) by turning a blind eye to the inflammatory words, knee-jerk actions, and at (too many) times childish and ineffective leadership of our current President. To be afraid to do otherwise - even in the face of the most infanticidal, immorality-touting, integrity-lacking ticket the Democrats have ever put forward (and that's saying something) - is to put more hope in Trump than in Christ to solve our problems. I've decided (at least for me and my house), we're not going to do that. As a pastor friend of mine has said, choosing the lesser of two evils is still choosing evil.
Megan and I are going to be voting third-party again, this time for Brian Carroll and running mate Amar Patel of the American Solidarity Party, what a politically progressive friend of mine called a "Quaker/Anabaptist" ticket. Perhaps. But their platform and their perspective lines up with our hopes for what America still could be, so that's what we're voting for (rather than against anyone or anything else).
In sharing this, I have no expectation that this post will sway the election, nor am I looking for strokes or jokes about what we're doing with our votes. I'm simply responding to those of you who, perhaps like us, find yourself with a difficult decision and have reached out to ask for perspective. This is ours, and you're welcome to do with it as you like. Agree or disagree, we trust we can still be friends.
May God (somehow) bless the United States of America, not to make us great again or to just beat Donald Trump, but simply to make us His own. King Jesus, your Church eagerly awaits your return. Until then, we'll be at work repairing the ruins of our world and awaiting your eternal reign.