Witherington :: Evangelical Voter’s Guide

For those engaged in the political process this piece from Ben Witherington is a short, worthwhile read.  Witherington is the Amos Professor of New Testament for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary.  Witherington does not tell you who to vote for, thankfully, but offers some helpful guidelines for Christians evaluating both candidates and carefully discerning for whom they should cast their vote.

Witherington speaks strongly to his readers, saying:

There is really no excuse for laziness when it comes to being an informed voter, especially when we now have such a wealth of information online, and through other viable sources of news about candidates. Do not use the ‘cop out’ of ‘they’re all just the same’, or ‘no politicians are trustworthy’ or ‘I don’t have time for this’. If you have time to enjoy the freedoms you have in this country, then you certainly have time to become an informed voter. Period. 

This November Witherington encourages us to do our homework, vote even if we are frustrated, avoid being a one-issue voter, consider character, prioritize the issues, and to think and pray before casting a vote.  He doesn’t break down either McCain or Obama issue by issue–he doesn’t need to.  Others have done the work.  We just have to tap into the resources.

I would fall in to the category of “frustrated voter.”  This comes after watching the debates, reading plenty of print material, and intense discussions with friends about the issues.  I’m particularly frustrated that an $850 bailout bill was passed by Republicans who said that the $700 billion proposal was too expensive, and am miffed that a bill which was around 3 pages when initially proposed expanded to a 400 page document in a week.  If any incumbent voted FOR the bill in my district, which I need to check in to, then they may have lost my vote.  I don’t see our next President addressing the outlandish fiscal policies which have guided Washington in recent years, likely because our elected officials are benefitting in some way.  Obama and McCain have too much at stake to offer strong words and a solid plan for how our finances are and should be managed, likely because that would ruffle the feathers of their most wealthy political supporters.

I plan to vote in November.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t think it stinks to be part of American democracy right now.

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Financial Crisis and the Upcoming Vice Presidential Debate

Over the past few weeks I’ve been consumed with following the impending financial crisis which looms large in America.  I watched President Bush’s first television address to the nation, kept track of progress on the proposed $700 billion bail-out plan on Capital Hill, and surveyed the thinking of pundits from the New York Times, the BBC, the LA Times, FoxNews, and ESPN Page 2′s Tuesday Morning Quarterback.  Even Dave Ramsey has weighed in.  I have friends who have enthusiastically backed the plan and others that have vehemently opposed it, and they have called their representatives to have their opinion heard.

When it comes to the proposed plan I remain suspicious.  I guess I’m more of a free market capitalist than I supposed, holding the opinion that irresponsible firms on Wall Street should have to pay the price for poor decision making.  I also am reluctant to herald those in Washington as “heroes,” for it seems that pressure both from the executive and congressional branches of government led the housing industry to grant questionable loans to under-resourced Americans.  It seems to me that both the government and our leading financial institutions are to blame, and the American taxpayer will carry the heaviest burden in turning this ship around.  Even if a bail-out is a necessary action, I’m still asking if this will change our economic policies and decision making process in the near future.

Considering the fact that our government has borrowed more money in the past decade than in all our previous history combined I doubt that our approach will change, and I’m not surprised that a financial crisis has come upon us.  As Paul wrote in the book of Galatians, “A man reaps what he sows.”  Our reckoning has come.  Who is to say that if our government does manage to pass a financial plan that will save our economy in the short term that in the future our country’s finances will be managed more responsibly?  That would be the voters, both in who we select and in our persistence in following the issues, staying informed, and keeping those who represent us accountable.  This will require education on behalf of the American public–we’ll have to create spaces in our communities–be they local government, church communities, PTAs, Rotary, etc.–where people can have discussions regarding how government works and exactly what is happening in Washington.  When I watched President Bush’s initial television address, I remarked to my wife, “You have to be educated in basic economics to understand what he is saying.  How many people can track with him regarding these basic economic principles, particularly when a staggering number of American’s cannot even manage their own finances?”

In other news, I’d recommend tuning in to the Vice Presidential Debate tonight.  This piece on the debate from the LA Times was interesting.  This quote really struck me:

Also discouraging for the McCain camp must be the finding of a new Marist Poll, described by the Swamp’s same Silva. It reveals that while a plurality (45%) expect Biden to perform better in the debate and a majority (61%) expect him to show a greater understanding of issues, compared to Palin’s 36% and 28%, nearly two out of three expect Palin to come across as more likeable, compared to Biden’s measly 23% anticipated likeability. (emphasis mine)

What disturbs me most about this poll is that I have yet to gain enough faith in the voter to believe that “likeability” is not one of the most significant factors in our image-driven culture.  As Winston Churchill once remarked, “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.”  I’m not quite that skeptical, but I might be close.

I still need to watch the whole of the Presidential Debate which took place last Friday, though I’ve read plenty of reviews and know not much of note took place.

At this stage in the game, I’m still measuring the candidates and assessing their strategy, plan, and vision for our country.  As I’ve said, I want to cast an informed vote that takes into account the content of the candidates words in written and in spoken form.  I’m also working hard to try to understand where we as a country currently stand, which is quite difficult considering that state of our media.  

If you have a thought, opinion, or question concerning the candidates and the upcoming election, weigh in, write a blog post, and further the discussion.  I’m game for talk of politics.

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Election 2008

One of my relatives has bounced a couple of email forwards my way this election season, and those are always fun.  He’s a young, committed Republican who isn’t so much for McCain as he is against Obama.  That seems to be a common posture during this election year, much like the 2004 Presidential campaign–a contest between those strongly for and vehemently opposed to George W. Bush.

This past week my relative passed along an email from a soldier alleging that Barrack Obama “blew off” soldiers during his recent visit to Afghanistan.  As with most emails of this kind, I searched for some of the key words to ascertain the validity of this email, and ended up at Snopes.com.  You can read the email which is circulating and check out of some of the evidence to debunk the allegations here, if you’d like.  Snopes has found that the claims made in the email are false.

During the same week I received another note from the same person with a link to an anti-Obama video which can be found at www.phforamerica.com.  The video includes portions of a speech Obama had given at the Call to Renewal Conference in June, in which he posits which portions of the Bible should be used in public policy.  I personally thought this paragraph of Obama’s speech was careless, though I did not see his rhetoric as “mocking” the Bible or those persons who read it as did those at pH for America.  As I said, I didn’t care much for Obama’s comments which made the video, but I wouldn’t go quite so far as those who produced this video.

Obama’s entire speech can be found here, and I recommend that you read it.  It is quite good.  Because my family member asked me for my thoughts, I’ll quote the email below.  Feel free to agree or disagree with some of my points.  I think Obama’s speech brings up a number of important points thinking Christians who happen to live in America should be taking into consideration.  Obama’s argument, at times, is quite sophisticated.  Check it out and think with me about it.

As for the email, here it is:

Dear Friend:

I did receive the email you sent with the anti-Obama campaign ad, featuring a portion of his speech at a Call to Renewal conference on faith and politics.  I’m pretty familiar with Call to Renewal, who’s leading figure is a man named Jim Wallis.  Wallis has commented extensively on American politics and Christian faith.  He considers himself an evangelical, but focuses his agenda on a broader range of issues than the traditional hot button topics.  He is opposed to the war in Iraq, and was at it’s onset.  He focuses more on the environment.  Most importantly, however, Wallis is a champion of the poor in America, and for this I applaud his efforts.  More Christian people need to be vocal concerning their care and concern for the poor.  Guys like Rick Warren have been convicted of just how much the Bible says concerning care for the poor in recent years and has proclaimed just how much is demanded of God’s people concerning care for the poorest of our neighbors.  I hope that we as the church take these words of the Bible more seriously than we have in recent decades.

Anyway, back to the Obama address.  I just took a few minutes to read through Obama’s entire speech–it is interesting reading.  Obama draws from a pretty broad range of theologians and even some political philosophy (John Rawls, is one example) in his speech.  He also includes important historical examples from American history where faith and politics intersect.  Among his examples are Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural Address” and MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which both invoke religious (specifically Christian) language to elevate our nation onto a higher moral plane.  He alludes to Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist Association–an important historical document for our thinking on the relationship between our government and religious bodies.  Obama’s speech, on the whole, raises many of the key issues concerning the current state of our religiously pluralistic nation’s dis-ease with religious speech as part of our public discourse.  It’s undeniable that faith has been privatized.  Obama’s rhetoric at least suggests that the religious beliefs of Americans have a place in public discourse, though he suggests certain guidelines in an effort to establish some form of “public reason.”

The paragraph in question, which is integrated in to the two minute commercial, is one which I’m uncomfortable with.  I think that it misrepresents basic principles of biblical interpretation, and belittles thinking Christian people who fall in to the category of theologically conservative.  

Is he mocking those people?  I don’t think so.  Is he mocking the Bible?  I don’t think so.  I do think his statements represent his naivete concerning how the Bible is read, how it should be read, and even how the overarching narrative of the Bible plays a part in public political discourse.  

His statements regarding Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and our Defense Department were the most interesting to me. pH for America seems to think that Obama is wrong in his assertion that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount would seriously disrupt our Defense Department’s policies on war and combat.  They claim that Jesus’ “Sermon” can somehow be read to support such American campaigns as the “War on Terror,” and that Jesus’ would surely support American efforts to violently retaliate against agents of terror.  I would like to see how they plan to substantiate such a claim on the basis of the text, and how they might construct a politics of the people called “Church” in a way that could justify actions of bloodshed and violence.  I’m not saying that a case cannot be made for Just War.  I am saying that pH for America’s representation in this ad lacks sophistication and raises more questions than it does provide answers for serious, thinking Christians who should be deeply disturbed by acts of violence and bloodshed against people, no matter how depraved, for whom Jesus died and now sends us (his church) to be his ambassadors of reconciliation to the world (2 Cor. 5).

To be truly forthright, I voted for President Bush in the 2004 election, so I supported him.  In 2000 I didn’t vote, which was wrong, but my vote would have counted in Texas, which was in hand.  During his two terms I have seen his speechwriters invoke biblical language in ways that are manipulative of the text as well–sometimes in ways that Christians should have been downright outraged.  Most of the time we didn’t notice.  For example, I recall Bush using language from John 1 to justify the War on Terror.  He chose to use phrases such as “the light came in to the world, and the darkness has not overcome it,” equating darkness with agents of terror and America as “the light,” setting up what I believe is an incredibly dangerous paradigm.  We both know that the “light” in John 1 is Jesus himself, the word made flesh, who not only exposes the darkness in the hearts of terrorists, but exposes the darkness made manifest in certain aspects of the American political landscape.  According to the New Testament witness, it is God, not nations, who rules the world, and one day we will all be held to an account standing before the throne of the lamb who was slain.

Sorry for the long reply.  It was probably more than you were hoping for.

Thanks for the greeting.  Hope you are well.

I linked to Bush’s Ellis Island speech, which you can feel free to read.

It is high time in America that we took seriously the shifts which have taken place in the nature of our public discourse.  The church should recognize that the culture we have created in the West has now become the culture which we must respond to missionally. In the meantime we must figure out how we are to navigate public political discourse in something called democracy.

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The Republican Campaign Trail: Choose Your Action Icon

When Mike Huckabee received an endorsement from Chuck Norris, I thought it was brilliant.  I first encountered the politcal ad on YouTube and found it clever, funny, and it at least made Huckabee a person of interest.  You can view the Norris’s endorsement here:

Norris/Huckabee

This week Senator John McCain picked up his own celebrity tag along, Sylvester Stallone.  Obama was endorsed by Oprah, and when Senator John Edwards appeared on Letterman last week he appealed for a similar endorsement.  In many ways this is a sad commentary on the decline of American public discourse.  I would suppose that these celebrity endorsements will be the sole criteria by which some voters cast their ballots.  You can check out coverage from FoxNews here:

McCain/Stallone

Just for fun, here are a couple of video I enjoyed:

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