Published November 5, 2024
The first thing that Christians should contemplate in this election is the fact—the tragic fact—that we live in a fallen world. That means that our politics is not about building toward an earthly utopia. It is about mitigating the effects of evil. Utopian politics of the left and right have always ended with tragedy, sometimes on a scale that is hard to imagine. And as we live in a fallen world, political life, rather like the tragic dramas of ancient Greece, involves contexts where moral norms are often set in conflict with each other at the ballot box. Indeed, German theologian Helmut Thielicke—a man who lived at a time and in a place where political choices were as stark as they were dark—drew on the analogy with Greek tragedy several times to express the difficulties Christians face in the realm of politics.
Given this reality, while the “lesser of two evils” argument has been dismissed as a lazy way of foreclosing discussion about candidates, it is hard to see how a Christian might think otherwise about casting a vote. Purists might perhaps support the old Reformed Presbyterian attitude whereby no Christian was supposed to vote for someone not committed to the kind of principles found in the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. But then the result is that one never votes and thus plays no role in how the outcome of the election might lessen the effects of evil. Such people may feel themselves to be innocent and uncompromised, but, in rising above the process, have they not merely acquired guilt of another kind?
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Carl R. Trueman is a fellow in EPPC’s Evangelicals in Civic Life Program, where his work focuses on helping civic leaders and policy makers better understand the deep roots of our current cultural malaise. In addition to his scholarship on the intellectual foundations of expressive individualism and the sexual revolution, Trueman is also interested in the origins, rise, and current use of critical theory by progressives. He serves as a professor at Grove City College.
