God Is Not on the Ballot

On the morning of November 6, the day after the presidential election, there will be exploded heads littering the American political landscape. (I speak metaphorically, of course.) That much is scarcely deniable. As I write, the only mystery is … which heads? Will they be those of Team Red or Team Blue? I have been paying attention to U.S. presidential elections since 1960, and I have never seen the electorate as polarized as it now is. People in both camps speak of this election in apocalyptic terms, as if the fate of everything virtuous or good, including democracy, hinges on the outcome. Whatever that outcome is, tens of millions of Americans will be not just disappointed, but shattered.

Among those who profess Christian faith, the question arises: How ought we — how can we — think Christianly about the political and cultural territory through which we are navigating? What word does our faith, our identity in Christ, speak to this political moment?

My personal dilemma: Informed by the Christian value that all human life is sacred, and every human being bears the image of God, I’m concerned about those whose circumstances force them into migration, whether authorized or unauthorized. If former President Trump is elected, their lives will become less safe. I’m also concerned about the lives of the conceived but not yet born. If Vice President Harris is elected, their lives will become much less safe. These are very concrete concerns that intersect with my Christian conscience.

It is, of course, inescapable that we live in the world — the world as it is, not as we might like it to be, or as, in God’s good time, eschatologically, it will yet become. When citizens of the kingdom of Judah were beginning to live in exile in Babylon, the prophet Jeremiah counseled them to not shy away from embracing their new circumstances:

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. (Jer. 29:5-7, all citations ESV)

Seeking the welfare of the city in which we spend our exile entails being mentally and emotionally and volitionally invested in it. This entails taking one’s rightful place in its political and social structures, whatever those might be. We are part of our society, part of our culture.

St. Paul sharpens this notion as he writes to the Christian community in Rome: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Rom. 13:1). Paul clearly sees no radical disjunction between the polis of human society, with its governing structures, and the providential purposes of the missio dei to restore unity and abet human flourishing. The inbreaking kingdom of Heaven is not presumptively at odds with the culture in which those who herald its arrival find themselves placed.

The Apostle Peter also weighs in along the same lines: “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good” (1 Peter 2:13-14). As followers of Jesus the Christ, whose kingship is supreme and unique, we are nonetheless implicated with the iteration of human society and culture in which we live. Its blessings are our blessings. Its challenges and problems are our challenges and problems. The suffering of its members is our suffering.

Yet no kingdom of this world can be precisely identified with the kingdom of Heaven. There are limits; there are boundaries. From the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews: “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:4). While we are to work and pray for the welfare of the city in which we dwell, our loyalty to that city is contingent, constrained. Again, St. Peter (or this time, perhaps, his pseudonymous disciple) expresses the notion in arrestingly graphic imagery: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed” (2 Peter 3:10).

We, the pilgrim people of God, are — using the words of William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas in their seminal, now iconic, 1989 work — resident aliens. Or, in the parlance of the anonymous Christian folk song: “This world is not my home, I’m just passin’ through.” So there is a dynamic tension between the reality of our current situation in the world, in which we seek the welfare of the city, and the reality that we are yet in exile in that city. We are undeniably very much in the world, but yet not of the world, as our Lord is recorded as expressing it in his high priestly prayer on the night before his Passion (John 17:16).

As resident aliens, then, how do we approach this election and its aftermath? First, we affirm and trust in the sovereignty of God. As we have occasion, at times, to sing (Hymnal 1982, #534):

God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year;
God is working his purpose out as the time is drawing near;
nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be,
when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

Those who engage the practice of lectio divina cultivate the habit of always looking for the providential action of God — what is he up to in the passage of Scripture under consideration? Whatever the outcome of the election, God is not absent! God is always up to something. Resting in the knowledge of God’s providential presence enables us to take a high-altitude view of political developments. We realize that there is no need to panic. This does not mean that we are less passionate in our advocacy for justice and righteousness in the political order, but that our eyes are free to focus on the bigger picture. “God is working his purpose out.”

Identifying as a community of resident aliens also enables us to affirm and trust in the ubiquity of divine grace. God leads with grace and concludes with grace, and grace permeates everything in between. God is the consummate opportunist. He is not bound by human social and political structures, to say nothing of election laws, poll results, or debate outcomes. Rather, God will constantly look for ways to “hijack” such things toward his ends, even to the point of exploiting human behavior — whether personal or collective, that is in itself sinful — and channeling it toward his redemptive purposes.

“Elections have consequences,” it is said, but not for God! God is not on the ballot, and there is no way he can “lose” this election. This invites us, as the people of God, to relax a little bit, at least. Among the exploded heads on November 6, there’s no reason any of them need to be those of Christians.