Voter Accountability

Matthew Cochran has written a piece that asks the question: To Whom Are Christians Accountable for Our Votes? This topic is relevant not just for this election cycle but ongoing as tensions continue to escalate between disparate ideologies.

Matt forms his three points along the lines of Martin Luther’s teaching that we live in three God-created estates: Church, Family, and State.* The first two estates covered pertain to God and family. This makes sense within a biblical framework as Jesus explained to a scribe:

“The first of all the commandments is: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mk 12:29–31)

Matt takes an interesting take on the third estate. There he does not consider government in general, but rather the deposit that has been handed to us.

Accordingly, we have a responsibility to care for what they’ve left to us. While we need not do everything exactly the way they would have, we do need to respect their values and purposes so that we are guided by them. So are you voting in a way that will “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”? Do you even define those words in much the same way as our founding fathers did? If we want to kludge some kind of re-purposing of the government they left to us, then we must beware.

After the Constituional Convention Benjamin Franklin was famously asked what we had been given. He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Let us strive to do just that.




* For more on this, consider Bryan Wolfmueller’s helpful compilation.