Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. -- Matthew 12: 30 (ESV)
In 2016 I wrote a true biblical voting guide based upon the bible not carnal politics. I did this because of the horrible behavior of Christians who were lying and ruining their witness for Christ by conferring righteousness upon their political messiah at the time. The faux Christian voting guides of that day and today are just useless unbiblical propaganda, designed to prop up a carnal political party. Certain issues are focused on that magically correlate to their electoral choices while ignoring crucial matters for God because they do not comport with those choices. What is also never addressed is that these guides focus solely on "platforms" or "promises" and ignore the fact that most politicians never follow through on those promises. The only cogent argument one can ever make for voting for a specific candidate is a perceived lesser evil. The problem is that our perceptions may not be correct, and we should never be found defending evil. All other arguments are entirely carnal in nature. Sure, from a secular perspective, things like the economy or immigration are important but, they have nothing to do with the church. God does not care one whit about our forms of government or national economic theories. Instead of rewriting a guide for the 2024, I dusted off the one from 2016 and gave it a new paint job, updating it for this election. So, let us reason once more beloved:
It's the silly season again in America. Election 2024 is upon us and as usual those that claim leadership in the church are losing their collective minds. They are abandoning the Gospel in pursuit of idolizing the country we live in. Perhaps they do so unconsciously. That matters not to God. It is stunningly sad to see Christians everywhere leave common sense behind in chasing their political goals while pretending that God somehow approves of them defending what they have deemed as "less evil" in their own eyes and through their own wicked hearts. To accomplish this there are plots and schemes dressed up in Christianese to bully, cajole, and sucker Christians into voting for someone they are selling as "God's choice." One such tactic which is common is the "Christian Voting Guide" strategy where candidates are compared on the basis of a pre-selected traits and/or positions that have an air of Christian values while ignoring others that do not support the candidate they are trying to sell. For example, in the late 1990's all Christians cared about was character. The sexual foibles of President Clinton were offered up as a disqualifying factor for Christians by leadership. "Character counts" was all that was heard. Fast forward twenty-five short years and suddenly character appears to not even be considered because the candidate being offered up as a political savior does not fit that narrative well at all. So, instead of "character counts" we now have "we are not electing a pastor in chief." Major hypocrisy that is not lost on the world. We always hear the mantra however of trying to figure out which of the candidates is somehow closest to "Christian values"; with wedge issues offered up as the determining factor, while ignoring glaring Christian problems with the candidate of their choice. Remember, the purpose of these fake guides is not to support Christ but rather to dress evil up as good for the sole purpose of co-opting your vote. So, in response, it has been suggested to me to create what a real Biblical voting guide should look like.
Plank Number One -- Render Unto Caesar -- This line of course is what Jesus says when asked about paying taxes to Rome. There is a deeper application Jesus was trying to teach, however. The disciples were all convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, but they were expecting Him to deliver them from earthly oppression of the Roman occupation of their people. Jesus had a much larger mission of course in delivering mankind from the oppression of sin and reconciling them to their Creator. Yet as we continue to read the Gospel accounts this is continually missed by the disciples right up until the Day of Pentecost even. They constantly mixed up their carnal, earthly desires and goals with their eternal, spiritual ones. Past is prologue beloved as the modern church continues along this same path today.
What was the attitude of Jesus Christ when He walked this earth towards the things of this earth? Towards the governments of man? Towards the politics of humanity versus the realities of the Kingdom? Total and utter apathy. He could have cared less beloved. You want the Temple tax? Go catch a fish! While you are worrying about the oppression from the hands of Rome, you miss the oppression the devil has you under and his is a yoke that will have eternal consequences. Do not worry what man can do to you! Worry about your eternal soul! Plank number one in the platform of a true Christian voting guide is to not mix the holy with the profane. America is not a theocracy, and it never has been. It is and always has been a pagan nation. Was it once "more Christian?" I suppose but that does not mean it was under covenant with God. It does not mean that if we can just return to some version of the late 1800s that then God would stay His coming judgment. Spoiler alert - He won't.
This false belief system stems from very poor false teaching that has pervaded much of modern Christianity in this country. It is jingoism and idolatry of this country over our Biblical understanding that our citizenship is now in heaven. Like Lot before us, we pitch our tents towards Sodom and before we know it, we are living in it. And we like it. We like the sin and excess of this country. We like the 50 choices of luxury automobiles and the 100 choices of breakfast cereals. We revel in the culture, while pretending to rail against it. God weeps when He sees the starvation across this small planet and people called by His name who turn a blind eye towards it while spending five bucks on their morning latte. This false teaching is central to the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and the vast majority of churches across the landscape. The beliefs of the NAR focus on what is known as the "Seven Mountain Mandate." This teaching says that Christians must take over the seven cultural mountains in this world before Jesus can return. That He literally cannot return until we conquer these mountains, such as media, government, and entertainment. This is why you see so many Christian leaders obsessed with inserting Christianity into the political realm. So much so that in 2012 they were willing to pretend that the Mormon candidate was somehow "God's choice." That was when political operative Franklin Graham removed Mormonism from the list of cults on the Billy Graham Association webpage. There is no end to the depravity of the Faustian bargain the NAR demands we make. This is why you see so many in Christian leadership pushing Christian themes in movies and television, regardless of how horrific the doctrine is. The Chosen, for example, is one of the worst Biblical accounts ever but look at how the Christians organizations line to lap it up. There is no "revival" coming to America because that implies that it was once alive. This is plank number one because it is foundational. We must understand that as Christians we are sojourners and pilgrims in this country. We must understand that the apostate church wants to talk about how the candidates will improve their lives in Sodom as much as the disciples wanted to be constantly focused on deliverance from Rome. Jesus had a different focus and so should we.
Plank Number Two -- Voting is a Secular Responsibility, not a Christian Imperative. Once you understand the foundational issue, the others become clearer and easier to grasp. A dominionist pastor just recently preached that Christians choosing to not vote are in open rebellion against God. How utterly stupid. Likewise, we have seen in the past month several faux-Christian leaders from Dr. Michael Brown to Jack Hibbs to lunatics like Greg Locke and Mario Murillo all teach that if you vote Democratic at all you are going to hell. I just covered a new heretic from Texas yesterday name Landon Schott and he too has preached any Democratic voter is not really a Christian. This is all ridiculously absurd. There is no transference of sin. Can you imagine if we had to stand before Christ and answer for other people's sins as well as our own? For everyone we supported in our life that was a sinner or did something wrong? We have enough to worry about with our own sin beloved. We also will not be judged on voting. As if when we stand before Christ He will say, "Well, I would like to let you in but c'mon! Clinton in 96?" We need to get a check on our theology because it gets wackier and wackier when we are trying to advocate for evil as good. When we try and entertain the notion that our preferred candidate is secretly the second coming of King Jehu, with an Elijah mantle and a Deborah anointing we cheapen the word of God. It is this type of false thinking that also leads to Christian Electoral Myopia. This is when Christians think they cannot vote for a given candidate because they support one position, we have decided is the only thing we will look at. When we do that, we refuse to look at the myriad of other issues we just voted for in the name of Jesus. We vote for war and poverty even though the number one Biblical topic in the Bible after salvation is taking care of the least in society.
