Though all elections have consequences—some more than others—they are moments in time. As such, they reflect more than they determine. Their outcomes matter, at times, greatly. Still, these outcomes result from larger trajectories. In other words, elections tend to be downstream from the rest of culture.
The fact that this election will be so immediately consequential for so much and so many—for preborn humans and the future of pro-life activism, for children and their parents, for public safety, for education, for the integrity of the republic, for the direction of the world’s wars, to name but a few—is a serious thing to consider. And it reveals the kind of nation we are and the kind of church we’ve become. All elections are instructive, like mirrors, but this one is like a big yellow “you are here” arrow.
As we await who will be the next to move into the White House, we face the real prospects of a disputed election, of rioting, and of international instability. It’s one thing when a nation largely agrees on where it should be headed but disagrees on how best to get there. It’s another for a people to not only lack a shared vision for the future but also shared definitions of essential concepts such as freedom, virtue, human dignity, family, citizenship, and marriage. In our country, the factions are not merely misaligned; they are antagonistic.
Christians are in a unique place to offer a way forward. This will not happen if we fall captive to what Jacques Ellul called the Political Illusion. This is the idea that all problems are, at the root, political and, therefore, must have political solutions. Politics has, in our day, overtaken too much of our lives. Everything has been made political. Elections ought not to be this consequential. When they are, it indicates a deep crisis of identity and meaning.
How Christians have navigated this political season—from Evangelicals for Harris to parishioners begging their pastors to say something (anything) from the pulpit to shofars and prophecies, to pundits who believe they can “save conservatism” by voting for the most radically anti-Christian anti-American, and anti-human administration in the history of our republic—exposes the holes in Christian discipleship.
C.S. Lewis warned against a “bits and pieces” kind of anemic Christian faith in Mere Christianity when he said, “We shall never save civilization as long as civilization is our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.” That “something,” he explained, was Heaven. Those whose minds were most focused on the Eternal have, in fact, accomplished the most good in the world. In other words, neither a privatized nor politicized nor a pietistic vision of the Christian faith is big enough for the moment we are in. Christians must, instead, Lewis said, aim at Heaven to get Earth thrown in.
Our national future does not depend on the outcome of this election, though this election directly correlates to what it does depend on. It is the pre-political realities, especially the recovery of truth and meaning and the recovery of civil society, that must be rebuilt. Politics plays an essential role for a nation like ours, as does the state it ushers in. However, flourishing requires that these roles be limited.
Indeed, this election is the most important of our lifetime, and that’s the problem. The warnings of Western decline, voiced over the years by Solzhenitsyn, Schaeffer, Colson, and others were obviously true. This nation is in crisis.
Most true is that all authority in heaven and earth still belongs to Christ, Whom God raised from the dead and Who presides over human history. He is sovereign over elections and the rise and fall of nations. He has placed each of us in this cultural moment, for this place and time, and has prepared good works for us to do.
So, whatever happens today, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work. That begins with voting today if you have not yet done so. Thank God, it doesn’t end there.
Photo Courtesy: ©ChatGPT/DALL.E 2024
Published Date: November 5, 2024
John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
