Published July 8, 2024
With every passing week, the election we face this fall seems more surreal. One major candidate is now a convicted felon while the other appears to be in cognitive decline and struggles to complete a sentence. With the stakes so high, Christian voters find themselves inundated with impassioned warnings on how they must vote, and some find themselves tempted to sit this one out and hope for better nominees in 2028.
Is such an abstention a sinful abdication? The short answer is not necessarily. Voting is a blessing and a privilege, an opportunity to use the gift of citizenship to register our views about what our nation needs. We should not scorn this privilege, but we should not construe it as a compulsion. Anyone who has the right to vote (whether on a church committee or a legislature) also has the right to abstain if there is no good option or they cannot determine which option is best. If some Christians honestly feel too conflicted to vote, there is no sense in guilt-tripping them into recklessly pulling the lever. The decision not to vote, after all, is still a way of making your voice heard: “Give me better candidates next time.”
That said, we ought not simply throw up our hands in resignation without an earnest effort to vote wisely. What, then, does it mean to vote?
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Brad Littlejohn was a Fellow in EPPC’s Technology and Human Flourishing and Evangelicals in Civic Life programs from 2022-2025. His wide-ranging research and writing encompasses work on the relation of digital technology and embodiment, the appropriate limits of free speech, the nature of freedom and authority in the Christian tradition, and the retrieval of a Protestant natural law ethic.
