God’s Candidate

I was recently interviewed by a small Brooklyn media outfit on how evangelicals see the current election. Several times I was asked, “So who is God’s candidate?” I didn’t give a straight answer because it’s a complicated question. But it’s one that Christians are required to ponder.

On one level, “God’s candidate” means the one who perfectly conforms his policies and judgments to the mind of God. But there is not, and cannot be, such a candidate. Only King Jesus fits that description.

But the question can also be asking which of the candidates, given what God has revealed of himself, does God want us to select. In the past, that question has seemed deceptively easy to answer. In 1980, the choice was arguably the Moral Majority backed Ronald Reagan, despite his divorce and irregular church attendance. In 2000, it seemed to be George W. Bush, the born again Reaganite. In 1976, the Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter was the evangelical choice. But some of these weren’t so obviously the godly choice further into their presidencies.

In 2016, however, God has really stirred the pot. Donald Trump says he’s Presbyterian, but he has spent his churchless life in the pursuit of mammon, and not for charitable giving or serving people through commerce – just filling bigger and bigger barns. Hillary Clinton is nominally Methodist but shares this obsession with self-enrichment and adds the progressive agenda of radical human autonomy, a religion of its own.

Bernie Sanders, though Jewish by birth, is an atheistic socialist. Interestingly, a poll revealed that more people see his policies reflecting the ethics of Jesus than see it in any other candidate. (Admittedly, all the numbers are low.) Surely they have in mind his concern for the poor. But he cares in a way that God has not instructed us to care for them. In fact, his proposed remedies undermine our ability to love them biblically. Vastly higher taxes leave people with less money to give either directly or through churches and charitable organizations. This is true of the well-to-do and ordinary income earners alike. We would also have less inclination to give. “The government will provide.” It should come as no surprise, therefore, that such policies actually end up hurting the people they attempt to help.

But all three candidates share in that spirit. Hillary Clinton is a statist for whom the federal government is the answer to every ill, though she is less convincingly concerned about the poor. Donald Trump has lived his life based, as he says, on three principles: grab, grab, and grab. Now he is promising to bring the rest of us in on the deal. But what does it profit a nation of voters if they can grab even a whole world of mammon but lose their eternal inheritance.

On yet another, quite unavoidable level, God’s candidate is the one he will raise up by our democratic republican system to govern us, and who is perhaps none of these three. But that’s his business (Deut. 29:29). Ours is to know his word, to know our world, and to apply the one to the other in the exercise of our civic duty on Election Day, whether it be to vote or abstain from voting.