(Editor's Note: The following opinion column does not constitute an endorsement of any political party, or candidate, on the part of Newsmax.)
The Roof Sheltering Our Dignity and Freedom Is at Risk from Tyranny's Storms
Is it a sin for an American Christian not to vote?
According to a recent Barna research study, half of churches are not teaching about the importance of voting.
Consequently, 41 million Christians plan to abstain from voting in the 2024 election.
As this country founders and occasionally ponders the meaning and value of humanity and government’s role within it, from abortion to transgenderism, from the economy to crime, nearly half of all evangelical Christians are leaving their cultural capital on society’s bargaining table.
If that isn't a sin it certainly is a shame.
Given that the previous Trump vs. Biden election was decided by narrow swing state margins accounting for 40 electoral votes, Barna highlighted the fact that Christians represent the swing vote.
Stepping away, Christians are collectively sinning by refusing to influence the nation’s policy and culture.
Founding Father, President John Adams said, "Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
So why are the moral and religious people abandoning their basic civic duty, passively watching the crud of our current polity to circle the drain?
Those non-voting Christians indicated that they are demoralized by the current political situation, giving reasons such as they don’t like any of the candidates, most of whom do not reflect their views.
Additionally, they feel that their vote won't matter anyway, believing the results are skewed.
But aren’t these concerns, all the more reason to step in rather than step out?
- Is it true that the individual candidates offered are personally unpalatable to people of faith because the candidates themselves are morally and religiously unmoored?
- Is it true that election fraud is rampant?
- If so, shouldn’t those things represent fire alarms, signaling the house of our Democratic Republic is on fire?
Because if our constitutional rule of law is subjugated to a godless materialism, through secular candidates voted into office by secular voters, the roof sheltering the dignity and attendant freedoms of everyone is at risk from the tyrannical storms of the rule of man.
Once American society loses sight of the biblical bedrock upon which the Founders fearfully staked their Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, how long can it continue upon the shifting sands of the appetites of man?
Either "all men are created equal" and "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life . . .," or we are slaves beholden to the dictates of oppressors masquerading as a liberators, fabricating rights at a whim to purchase power from the politically favored while demonizing and dehumanizing the politically disfavored.
The bedrock of barbarism is the abandonment of the belief that all people are inherently valuable, as made just a little lower than God.
Scripture mandates, "Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God,"
(Romans 13:1). So, what happens if we as Christians find ourselves placed by the hand of God into a governmental structure that President Lincoln described as, "Government of the people, by the people, for the people . . . "?
Therefore Christians are obligated to influence culture and politics.
It means that Christians must exercise at a minimum their most basic civic duty and vote.
It means that to shirk one’s duty in this regard is a sin, an offense against a future stable society, an offense against the future security of our families, an offense against our own conscience that we did everything we could to stand against the flood of moral decay, and worst of all, an offenses against God who miraculously permitted a nation to escape a tyrannical monarchy to self-government via a representative republic.
But the concern today is unchanged, as Benjamin Frankin proclaimed we have a republic, "If you can keep it."
It may be that our once and great U.S. Republic may not long survive the ravages of a rabid atheistic malaise.
This is no reason to shrink back.
Quite the opposite.
The only way we will overcome our nation’s current predicament is to become again what John Adams described as a "moral and religious people."
This starts not with the elected but with us, the electorate.
But Christians know that government license to do wickedness does not equal liberty.
And if we recognize the God-given right to religious belief, then there is a God-given mandate to evangelize.
If we believe mankind is created in the image of God, that means we are designed to reflect God’s character and nature back to him and to each other.
Each of us must take responsibility for ourselves and for each other under God, no matter how inconvenient, unproductive, or expensive our fellow man is perceived to be by secular society.
Christians must vote.
Vote for policies, candidates and administrations that will respect the dignity of all people without qualification, protecting national sovereignty through border security and legal immigration, safeguarding domestic tranquility through local and state law enforcement, protecting the personhood of all people — including preborn children under the 5th and 14th Amendments.
If you as a Christian commit this sin of voter omission, you may feel a sense of moral superiority, but it will not assuage your guilt of not having done all to stand for that which our nation’s Founders fought and sacrificed for you to enjoy.
As Shakespeare famously wrote of the consequences of the apparently insignificant person shrugging off action while under the shadow of a colossus Julius Caesar, "Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
If we act like underlings, we will never know what God might have done to save our nation from ourselves, and our sin.
The Rev. Jim Harden, CEO of CompassCare, an anti-abortion medical network based in Buffalo, New York, is married with 10 children. He passionately exposes unequal enforcement of the law and immoral public policy. Read more of the Rev. Jim Harden's Reports — Here.