ZIONICA.com

Campaign 2012: What Voting Means

For the vast majority of American citizens, exercising prudential judgment in politics is not a matter of framing and executing public policy, but of voting. Voting, in other words, is an exercise in moral judgment. Which is to say that serious Christians, for whom love of the Lord Jesus and fidelity to his Kingdom measure all our other loves and loyalties, vote with their brains, not with their emotions.

Morally serious voters understand that casting a ballot is not an exercise in nostalgia, and that gratitude to FDR for giving grandpa a job in the Civilian Conservation Corps, or fond memories of the Eisenhower years, cannot be determinative of one’s moral judgment about the American future, and those who would lead us into it, in 2012.

Morally serious voters understand that the character of political parties changes over time, and that voting for the Democrats or the Republicans because “that’s what we’ve always done” is outsourcing one’s moral judgments to others.