How Should Christians Vote?
One of the great questions of our time is why Donald Trump’s divisive and incendiary rhetoric continues to appeal to large numbers of white American Christians. In the 2018 mid-term election, for example, “three-quarters (75%) of white voters who describe themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians (including Protestants and Catholics) voted for Republican House candidates,” according to National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll data reported by NBC News. Even Christians who do not identify as evangelical favored Republican over Democrat candidates at a rate of 56% to 42%, a significant margin. Support for the GOP was strongest among those who go to church once a week or more (58%) but then rapidly dwindled among Christians who attend services a few times a month or less (46%-37%), according to Pew Research. This suggests that white voters with a strong Christian faith continue to support the Trump Administration, despite its strenuous efforts to marginalize the poor and underprivileged, and its repeated attempts to deny American families a right recognized in all First World democracies: the right to health care covered by insurance.
This growing schism between right and left in the American Christian community is a great tragedy. Its roots lie in the 1970’s and 1980’s, when ministers such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson tried to align conservative Christians with a political agenda to ban abortion, to deny state recognition of same-sex relationships, and to advance Creationist education and prayer in public schools.
But we have to ask ourselves, is this what Jesus wants us to do? Are we trying to follow in the footsteps of Christ, or are we trying to impose a particular Church doctrine, or political agenda? There are many ways to answer that question, but as a biblical historian, I believe that as Christians we have lost the core message, the essential task that Jesus asked us to fulfill.
That confusion is not new. Debates about Jesus’ core message and the purpose of his ministry have haunted the Christian movement from the very beginning. Part of the reason is that for a very long time, word of Jesus’ ministry was only disseminated through a variety of oral traditions, long before church leaders agreed on a Gospel canon from the 3rd century onward. Each of these traditions emphasized an aspect of Jesus’ teachings that appealed to a particular constituency.
For example, Gnostic Christians believed that Jesus taught how to forge a path to gnosis — a secret, intuitive knowledge of the divine — by which humans could directly communicate with God, without the intervention of priests, liturgy or laws. That is why, these Christians believed, Jesus spoke in mysterious parables.
Paul of Tarsus, who never met Jesus and was largely shunned by the Apostolic movement in Jerusalem, believed that Christ had come down in mortal form to redeem humankind through his sacrifice on the cross. In so doing, Paul unmoored Jesus’ teachings from their Jewish roots so as to create a Catholic or “universal” church that would appeal to the Gentiles of the Roman Empire.
Paul’s kerygma or “doctrine” is particularly dominant in evangelical churches today, but it doesn’t always recognize the quintessential message in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. These depict Jesus as the Jewish Mashiach or “Messiah” (literally the “Anointed One,” or Christos in Greek) whose ministry was focused on establishing the Kingdom of God on earth. This idea, of recreating “God’s kingdom,” was not new. It was a deeply rooted principle of post-Exilic Judaism, especially during the growing eschatological yearning of the Second Temple period and the subsequent Roman occupation. But Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God was radically different.
Not many people realize that Jesus’ ministry unfolded in a crisis very similar to our own. The daily news footage of thousands of people who are out of work, facing eviction, battling chronic illness, or struggling to feed their families, is a world Jesus would have recognized. The reason is that after he seized power in 37 b.c.e., King Herod decided to exploit Galilee as a colony to fund his grandiose building projects in Judea and Samaria. As described in National Geographic’s In the Footsteps of Jesus, Herod imposed a huge tax burden on the Galilean peasants, which was designed to destroy their livelihood and foreclose on their ancestral lands. Research by Richard Horsley and E.P. Sanders found that Herod’s tax regimen rose to somewhere between 36 to 42 percent of the harvest, which was entirely unsustainable.[1]
As the Gospels tell us, these farmers tried to delay the inevitable by borrowing, and borrowing heavily. Luke speaks of debtors who owed their creditors the staggering amount of “hundred measures of oil” or “fourscore measures of wheat,” suggesting interest rates between 25 and 40 percent (Luke 16:6–7). Ironically, the people with the capital to give such loans were the despised telónai or “tax collectors”, who quickly foreclosed on the poor man’s land when the debt became due. These family-sized plots were then combined in what the Gospels call agroi or “estates,” and sold to the landed gentry, the chief priests, or other high officials in Herod’s inner circle. These, in turn, appointed professional managers to supervise the cultivation of a large, single-crop yields for sale. That was the whole point of Herod’s scheme: to produce a vast agricultural surplus that could be sold through the new port of Caesarea, built precisely for this purpose, rather than feeding the Galilean population.
The Gospels tell us what happened next. Jesus’ parables are filled with characters that rarely appear in previous Jewish writings, such as phronimoi or oikonomoi, usually translated as “stewards” or “managers,” who are running these estates on behalf of rich landowners. Many peasants had no choice but to accept work as georgoi, as “tenant farmers”, on the same land that had once belonged to them. In one telling parable, a group of tenant farmers are so fed up with their lot that they beat the servants of the landowner sent to collect the harvest (Mark 12:2–5). Much of this tax policy was then continued by Herod’s son Antipas in order to fund the construction of Sepphoris and Tiberias in Galilee.
Needless to say, the wholesale confiscation of these ancestral lands had a devastating impact on the social fabric of Galilee. This explains the great mystery of the Gospels: why there are so many hungry, poor and dispossessed people who come to hear Jesus speak, even though they live in one of the most fertile regions of the Near East. And that is why Jesus developed his great program of social and spiritual renewal, his “Kingdom of God.” As presented in his Sermon on the Mount, it promises fulfillment to all those who are hungry, who are poor, who are ill, and who weep in despair over their condition. For Jesus, the Kingdom was not a Davidic polity but a new way in which society would operate, based on the three quintessential virtues of the Torah: social justice; compassion toward one another; and an abiding love of God. Jesus believed that a sheer grassroots movement of people power could make this Kingdom a reality. “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed,” he says in the Gospel of Luke; “For in fact, the kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:20–21).
No matter how we try to interpret the Christ of faith, this agency of Jesus of Nazareth is beyond dispute. He devoted his ministry to creating a more equal and compassionate world, just as the prophets Amos, Micah, and Jeremiah had tried before him. The core principle of that ministry, the mortar that would hold this new society together, was agapē. Often translated as “love,” today we would probably call it “empathy” or “compassion.” Empathy for our neighbor. Compassion for those who are not as blessed and fortunate as we are. Not qualities that one would readily identify with Mr. Trump, to judge by his virulent tweets about fellow Americans.
This makes Jesus’ Kingdom program so deeply relevant for the post-pandemic world we are contemplating in this election year. So let us search our hearts and ask ourselves — how would Christ want us to vote? Would he support an administration that rigorously tries to reduce housing subsidies for the poor, while raising rents for public family housing? Would he have endorsed a GOP platform that calls for restrictions and work requirements on Medicaid, food stamps, and other programs for the poor? What would Jesus have said about a government that spends $721 billion per year on defense, but allows 15 million children to go to bed hungry?[2] Would he have tolerated Mr. Trump’s attacks on non-citizens, given that Jesus himself was a non-citizen in the Roman Empire — which is why he was condemned to the cross without due process?
And as a man who devoted so much of his ministry to healing the sick and chronically ill, would Jesus have approved of the GOP’s relentless attempts to deny Americans their right to health and wellness?
As we prepare for this election, we should remind ourselves that being a Christian — that is, to walk in the footsteps of Jesus — is not about being liberal or conservative. It’s not just about debating the morality of nontraditional relationships, or whether a woman should decide what happens in her body. Above all, it is about creating the compassionate society — the Kingdom of God — that Jesus asked us to build.
Jean-Pierre Isbouts is doctoral professor at Fielding Graduate University and the author of National Geographic’s “In the Footsteps of Jesus” and “The Story of Christianity”. For more information, please visit his website.
[1] The norm in most occupied territories, including Roman Egypt, was a tax of between 9 and 12 percent of harvest yields. Given that on an average lot of ten jugura or six acres, a Galilean farmer realized a return of five times the seed planted, or roughly 1,300 pounds per year — the absolute minimum to feed a family — Herod’s tax burden was utterly unsustainable and had only one motive: to push the Galilean farmer off his land.
[2] 2018 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
