Christians and Voting: A Matter of Conscience [Selected Excerpts from the December 9, 2024 Theologically Speaking Podcast]
The companion insight piece to the December 9, 2024 episode of the Theologically Speaking podcast (link) featuring Dr. Greg Stiekes is his Theology in 3D blog on Christians and the political process, entitled “The Welfare of the City: A Rationale for Voting in Public Elections.”
This week’s Viewpoint, in turn, consists of key excerpts from the podcast provided as a further resource to pastors.
Takeaways:
- Christians differ as to whether even to participate in voting, and whether pastors should speak out to advise members how to vote.
- For Christians, how to vote is a matter of conscience, and church members should respect the opinions of those who differ and approach each other with love and humility.
***
Dr. Sam Horn (SH): This election cycle … has been one of the more difficult times for us, as shepherds and people doing soul care, to try to help people navigate because of the complexities of this past election.
Dr. Stuart Scott (SS): (E)ven among God’s people, some are very full of joy … there are others that are distraught, thinking that the end is near… and that affects families. You have married couples that the spouses think differently, the children think differently. So it’s not always a unifying topic.
Dr. Greg Stiekes (GS): I don’t remember really ever feeling the necessity before to answer biblically, “Why are we voting anyway? And should we be talking about who we’re voting for?”
We have quite a spectrum of views in the church…. People come from different walks of life, and they all have a trail, and it’s not the same trail….
We did have those who said we’re just not voting at all…. and so it drove me to say, Okay, how do I counsel these people? I did not stand up publicly and say anything about the election, except … on a Wednesday night I tried to tell the whole body, ‘(L)ook, we’ve got to respect everybody’s opinion. A lot of this is a matter of conscience, and we cannot ask anybody to violate their conscience….
(Some members) said, “We understand why it’s good not to make a big deal about this, but I just don’t understand why you couldn’t, with a clear conscience, get up in the pulpit and tell everybody to vote for Donald Trump” …. maybe not that that bluntly, but “Why can’t we just encourage people to go to the polls?”
SH: You brought up the word “conscience.” Stuart, why is that such a big deal?
SS: God’s ally in our souls is the conscience. I like what was written by JD Crowley and Andrew Naselli in their little book on the conscience: our conscience is not our guide, but a guard, and it doesn’t produce light, but it lets light in, the light of Scripture…. We don’t want to violate our conscience, but we want to educate it with Scripture.
GS: appeals to conscience when we’re wrestling with some of these issues among believers. And actually, I feel like the whole political issue is one of these “meat-offered-to-idols” kinds of issues, Romans, 14, right?
You’re reading Scripture written in the time of the Roman Empire, that the apostle Paul seems to tell everybody, look, you get along with those guys…. (even though) you were risking your life to preach the gospel and to share your faith. We doing a lot better than that so far in the United States of America, and it’s not like everything’s going to come crashing down and the gospel is going to stop because a particular person got in politically.
And so It’s really hard, I think, for a pastor to stand up and say, I know for sure that it’s God’s will that we vote this way…. we really need to leave that up to the individual.
SS: So did you men just instruct your people vote with your conscience?
GS: I’ve never been as forthright as I was this year about it, because it was such a public election, everybody had it on their mind….
SH: It was so it was so much in front of people all the time, right? I mean, it was so incendiary. There was no neutrality in this, right? Nobody was trusting anybody…. everybody was suspect.
I think COVID sort of fed into this…. good pastors were put in really tough spots because there was not this agreement that we’re going to let people do according to their conscience. And now, what we’ve discovered is that we were actually lied to in many cases…. We were lied to by our government. We were lied to by the medical community… And so now there’s a culture of suspicion that’s in the pew.
Our elders got together at the end of last year and recognized we’re going into an election year, how do we get our church ready so that we preserve unity? That was our real goal…. not to shape the way people voted.
We happen to have in our congregation a family relationship to Andy Naselli…. and so we hit on the idea of asking Andy to come and take a Sunday with our congregation and walk through the conscience. What is the conscience? How does it work? What do we do when we have issues that seem to be matters of conscience, and we’re trying to decide between the lesser of two evils…. (His book) really does help frame up the way you have the discussion. Because I think the way you have the discussion is sometimes as important as the discussion itself.
SS: In the church at Ephesus – I was even thinking as well the Christians in Rome, the epicenter politically and of the church – the exhortation to the church was about love, loving one another. Live in harmony with one another. Among Christians, don’t be haughty, because pride is going to get in there. Associate with the lowly. Never be wise in our own sight. Then it says, if possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.
The only way I think that we can achieve that is in Christ and keeping our eyes on Him, that if we get our eyes off Christ onto our country, our and then our hope kind of goes where our eyes go, and now we’re going to be up and down, rather than that steady anchor that really holds right in to Christ. And I would just say everyone, just keep reading, meditating on scripture, keeping our eyes on Christ, and truly be living out these exhortations in Ephesians r and Romans 12.
Resources:
- Romans 14:1-23 on conscience and the weaker brother
- Ephesians 4:25-32 on unity in the Body
- Andrew David Naselli and J.D. Crowley, Conscience: What It Is, How to Train It, and Loving Those Who Differ.
- John MacArthur, The Vanishing Conscience: Drawing the Line in a No-Fault, Guilt-Free World
- William Ames, Conscience with the power and cases thereof
- William Perkins, The whole treatise of the cases of conscience