My Only Advice for Election Season: Don’t Moralize About Politics
People of good faith will vote for both candidates this November.
One of the shortcomings of political participation is the temptation of moralism. If I am going to vote, it would be nice to have a story that makes me morally good for voting for candidate A and my opponents immoral for voting for candidate B.
But when we adopt this narrative, we deceive ourselves and misunderstand others.
Socrates offered an antidote to moralism: “No one errs willingly,” he said, in the Protagoras. Even if another person errs in her choice, she is, from her perspective, seeking what is best.
In addition to Socrates’ theory, I would add three reasons we should refrain from moralizing:
Politics is much more complicated than morality.
Politics is penultimate, not ultimate.
People who make different political choices do so from good intentions.
As a result, morally simple judgments about political matters - and especially about the motives of people who judge differently - are almost always incorrect.
This election season, vote for who you will, but do not judge, but rather try to understand those who vote otherwise.
Who Is Moralizing?
For decades, evangelicals have been criticized as America’s worst moralists. Many argued that good Christians had to vote Republican and that to fail to do so or to vote Democrat cast doubt on one’s character and religious profession. Many young evangelicals and former evangelicals report being taught, implicitly if not explicitly, that to be a Christian and to be a Republican were two sides of the same coin.
This form of moralism is alive and well. Tim Alberta is an evangelical journalist critical of the evangelical majority’s political support of Donald Trump. He articulated these criticisms in a 2019 interview with CBN. After the interview, he received word that his father, a pastor, had just died of a heart attack.
At his father’s funeral, Alberta spoke with a number of the congregants from his father’s church. Several began to criticize his political opinions:
“One man questioned whether I was truly a Christian. Another asked if I was still on the right side.’ All while Dad was in a box a hundred feet away.” (Tim Alberta, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, pp. 3, 7)
Alberta’s interlocutors were guilty of moralizing.
On the other side, many evangelicals critical of Trump have taken to moralizing about the evangelicals who support, or at least vote for him. For example, Russell Moore - who himself experienced terrible moralism from conservative Southern Baptists and other evangelicals - writes in Christianity Today that evangelicals who support Trump are living contrary to the requirements of the faith. In fact, they are even “denying the gospel.”
According to Moore, when evangelicals support Trump, they send the following message: “It says policy is more important than character. Achievement is more important than integrity. The implication from religious leaders reputedly bearing witness to the God for whom they speak is this: A man is justified by winning alone.”
Moralism shows up on both sides of contemporary politics - even among Bible-believing evangelicals.
What Is Moralism?
Moralizing occurs when we find ourselves judging those who disagree with us morally or politically as immoral.
This is very different than arguing that others are in error. In a good political debate, it is obvious that each party thinks the other is in error. But it will also be clear that there is no accusation of immorality for disagreeing.
Error is different than immorality.
We moralize in politics when we construe a particular issue, event, or action as making it entirely unpalatable for anyone to cast a vote for the other side. We judge, “It is immoral to vote for the other candidate or party.”
Note: I am not opposing serious moral and political reasoning and the conviction that results. I have strong convictions. Everything I say is compatible with deeply held moral and political convictions.
For that reason, we often find ourselves believing that there are issues of moral significance that should lead us to vote a particular way. We judge that we should never vote for a politician who supports x. Perhaps we are even correct in our moral judgment about x.
But moralism comes with the further judgment that no one could, in good conscience, support a politician who supports x.
The Complexity of Political Reality
Not all of us are single-issue voters. Some of us, whom the media call “partisans,” think that many of the issues combine to make it desirable to vote for one side and against the other. Given such a cumulative case, how could we acknowledge the legitimacy of voting for the other side?
The answer is actually simple: Given so many issues, the possibilities of reasonable political disagreement increase exponentially.
Most people do not have the time or interest to have well-formed views on any political issues, much less a dozen of them.
To arrive at reasoned political judgments about international relations, warfare, domestic economic policy, social morality, religion’s role in the public square, education, and welfare takes a good think-tank member several decades. Even then, experts usually specialize in only one or two of the issues.
The idea that the average person should be expected to hold your set of views - whatever their calling, personal history, beliefs, and occupation - is simply unreasonable.
The process of forming political judgments is complex. So are the political issues themselves.
By contrast, moral judgments require simplicity. That is why, when discussing abortion, for instance, pro-lifers speak of “killing babies.” Killing babies, even some MS-13 members agree, is wrong. (Only Ivy-League philosophers and extremists dissent.)
When discussing voting, liberal pundits speak of “saving democracy.” Americans almost universally agree that American democracy should be preserved.
If we reintroduce complexity, we have to acknowledge dis-analogies, extenuating circumstances, interweaving with other matters. Our judgments begin to soften.
Even when our “all-things-considered” judgment remains the same, our view of those who disagree becomes more nuanced.
The Penultimacy of Politics
Well beyond the bounds of American religion, many have pointed out the danger of treating politics like religion, of trying to bring heaven on earth, of immanentizing the eschaton.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer made an important theological distinction in his Ethics, written from a Nazi prison, between ultimate and penultimate things. For the Christian, ultimate things are those pertaining to salvation and the next life. But penultimate things pertain to human flourishing in this life.
Too often, Bonhoeffer contends, Christians skip over the value of this life and jump straight to the next. Christians can treat the matter of voting as one that reveals the true believers and the hypocrites, whether these are “woke” or “MAGA” hypocrites. But politics is not a test of eternal salvation, but a messy judgment of temporal reality. It is not ultimate; it is penultimate.
For non-Christians also, it is possible to treat achieving the kind of society and politics we desire as all that matters. We ignore the virtues of abiding by political processes, of living with neighbors with whom we disagree, and the necessity of living well even under adverse political conditions.
We must all remember that politics is the practice of the penultimate and, therefore, of the imperfect.
He Does So to the Lord
“Whoever eats meat does so to the Lord, for they give thanks to God; and whoever abstains does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God,” wrote Paul, the Apostle (Romans 14:6).
The Apostle Paul urged Christians in the early Roman church to acknowledge that those with whom they disagreed acted the way they did out of conviction.
Both within and beyond the bounds of Christianity, we can practice the same with regard to political disagreement with our fellow Americans. The vast majority of our countrymen vote the way they do because they think it is actually better that society move in that direction. They may be mistaken, but it is unlikely that they set out consciously to turn America into a “bleep-hole” or a “fascist theocracy,” for instance.
This is the lesson Megan Phelps-Roper, member of the infamous Phelps family of Westboro Baptist Church, learned when she began to interact with her opponents on Twitter. It was those who treated her as a person of good will that got through to her, not the two decades of bitter opposition she had previously encountered. Likewise, it was by practicing that herself that she escaped the worldview of her family and home church.
(Also, check out her stellar podcast with J. K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling.)
And so, Christian and non-Christian, Democrat and Republican, remember that your fellow American votes this November for Trump out of concern for their country, its moral fabric, justice in society, and our freedoms.
Likewise, your fellow American votes this November for Harris out of concern for our country, its moral fabric, justice in society, and our freedoms.
You, then, why do you judge your fellow American?
“You, then, why do you judge your brother or sister? Or why do you treat them with contempt? For we will all stand before God’s judgment seat. … So then, each of us will give an account of ourselves to God.”
The Apostle Paul, Romans 14:10,12
Love this man 🙌 so easy to forget that it’s not as black and white as we’d like it to be
I seem to have missed the part where you argue that in fact the question of abortion is somehow complex, that the “simplicity” of pro-lifers is naïve, mistaken, because it’s actually not a matter of simply killing babies