With elections approaching, a plea to every tired, cynical, and busy Christian who is thinking about skipping the polls. And a reminder of what’s actually at stake.
The Socialism Series
- Socialism, Part One: Scripture and the Signs of the Times
- Socialism, Part Two: History of Socialist Regimes
- Related: The Plundering Deception: Why Support for Socialism Signals Earth’s Final Chapter
I opened this series with a sobering observation: voting a socialist regime into power is far easier than getting rid of one. Part One showed us what Scripture says about economic systems and the warnings embedded in end-times prophecy. Part Two walked through the historical record, country by country. Now we arrive at the part that is most personal. And most urgent.
What are you going to do about it?
With midterm elections just ahead, I want to make a direct appeal to every reader who is quietly thinking about skipping the polls. Maybe you’re tired. Maybe you’re cynical. Maybe you’ve convinced yourself that your single vote won’t tip anything. I understand that feeling. But I want to make the case that sitting this one out is not the neutral act it feels like, and that your reasons for staying home are exactly what the opposition is counting on.
The Most Dangerous Words in a Democracy
The most dangerous words in a democratic republic are not shouted by radicals. They’re whispered by ordinary people: What difference does one vote make?
That question has a satisfying logic to it. Any single vote is statistically unlikely to be the decisive one. Politics is exhausting. Researching candidates takes time and mental energy that feels like it could go toward almost anything else. And if you’re honest, the whole enterprise can feel like arranging deck chairs.
But consider the arithmetic of apathy. If enough people ask that question, elections don’t go to the most principled candidates. They go to the most motivated factions. And the progressive left is motivated. They are organized, energized, and they will show up. Every seat they win while good people stay home represents a slide toward the very policies this series has documented: expanded government control, diminished individual freedom, and the inevitable concentrations of power that history has shown us end in misery.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
— Attributed to Edmund Burke
Whether or not Burke said it in exactly those words, the principle stands. Abstaining from an election is not neutrality. It is a choice, a choice that carries consequences for your neighbors, your community, and the generations that will inherit the country you leave behind.
You Are Voting for Your Grandchildren
Here is the frame I keep coming back to: you are not just casting a ballot for yourself. You are casting a ballot for people who cannot yet vote. Your children, your grandchildren, and everyone who will live in the nation our generation shapes with our votes or our failure to vote.
The socialist regimes documented in Part Two did not build themselves overnight. They were built incrementally, election by election, policy by policy, until the machinery of state control became too entrenched to remove without violence or collapse. Venezuela looked like a democracy until it didn’t. Cuba had elections, briefly. The process is always gradual, and the early stages always look manageable.
What kind of nation do you want to leave to those who come after you? That question deserves more than a shrug and a rationale about how busy you are this November.
Our Responsibility Is to God, Not to the Outcome
I want to address something directly, because I know it’s in the back of many minds: what if my vote doesn’t count? What if the fraud that many suspect is real, and our votes are being discarded or manipulated before they’re ever tallied?
I can’t settle that debate in a blog post. But I can tell you this: our responsibility as believers is not to the vote counters. It is to God.
If there are men and women running for office who are doing so out of genuine conviction, who have sensed a call from God to enter the mess of public life and try to make it more just, then our failure to support them with our vote is a failure of stewardship. These people are spending their time, their reputations, and in some cases their livelihoods to serve in positions that most of us don’t want. The least we can do is spend thirty minutes casting a vote.
Scripture calls us to be faithful with what we’ve been given. A functioning democracy, however imperfect, is something we’ve been given. Faithfulness requires our participation. And if we can’t be troubled to exercise this basic act of civic stewardship, it seems worth asking ourselves whether we have the right to ask God to bless our nation.
Put the Candidate Next to the Bible
Deciding how to vote is genuinely hard. Candidates are packaged carefully. Their websites are designed to obscure as much as they reveal, and the media ecosystem makes it nearly impossible to get a straight account of anyone’s actual record.
Here is the simplest method I know: take the candidate’s actual positions and hold them up against Scripture. Where do they stand on the sanctity of human life? On the biblical definition of marriage and family? On the size and role of government? On policies that expand freedom or restrict it?
When you line up those positions next to what the Bible actually teaches, the choices often get clearer. Not always easy, but clearer. And when neither candidate comes close to biblical alignment, you’re looking for the one who causes the least harm. And perhaps working harder between elections to develop better options.
A Resource for Informed Voting
iVoterGuide offers free, nonpartisan candidate research organized by your specific ballot. No searching required. It covers positions, endorsements, and records so you can compare candidates against your own values before you walk into the polling place. (Personally, I have this site bookmarked, so I can always find it.)
ivoterguide.com →
On the Left’s Claim to Compassion
One of the most effective rhetorical moves of the progressive left is the claim to moral high ground on poverty. They’re the ones who care about the poor, the workers, the marginalized. Conservatives are greedy. Corporations are heartless. The implication is clear: if you care about the vulnerable, you vote left.
This claim deserves to be examined rather than simply accepted.
Long before modern welfare states existed, it was the church that built hospitals, founded orphanages, established schools for the poor, and organized famine relief. The history of organized charity in Western civilization is, to a remarkable degree, the history of Christian institutions. Researchers who study actual giving behavior – not political positions, but what people do with their own money – consistently find that religious conservatives give more to charity, including secular charities, than their secular progressive counterparts.
None of that means conservatives are perfect or that the poor have no legitimate grievances. But it does mean that the louder a politician’s claim to love the masses, the more carefully you should examine what their preferred policies actually do to those masses. Part Two of this series is a detailed answer to that question. The historical record is not ambiguous.
The Pattern of Power and Promises
There is a consistent pattern in the history we covered: the politicians who make the grandest promises of equality and prosperity are reliably among the last people to deliver on them. This is not coincidence. It reflects something true about human nature and the corrupting dynamics of political power.
People who pursue significant government control over an economy are rarely motivated primarily by love for the people they govern. They are motivated by what power offers those who hold it. The bigger the government, the more patronage to distribute, the more contracts to award, the more levers to pull in exchange for loyalty. This is why socialist economies so reliably produce an impoverished general population and a prosperous ruling class. The system was working exactly as its true incentives dictated.
Voting for bigger government is, in most cases, voting to hand more of those levers to people who will use them to enrich themselves and consolidate control. This is not cynicism. It is the lesson of a hundred years of documented history.
For Those Who Are Eagerly Waiting
I want to close where this series began. With the long view that frames everything else for those of us who are waiting for the return of Jesus.
Jesus told his disciples a parable about a nobleman who gave his servants resources and instructed them to “occupy till I come” (Luke 19:13, KJV). The servants who put those resources to work were commended. The one who buried his portion and waited, who decided the effort wasn’t worth it, was rebuked. We are called to active, faithful stewardship of what we’ve been entrusted with, right up to the moment the King returns.
A vote is a small thing. It takes a few minutes. It feels, in the scale of history, almost trivial. But it is one of the tools we have been given, in this time and place, to be salt and light in a decaying culture. The same Jesus who warned us about the deceptions of the last days also told us to let our light shine, to be wise as serpents, and to occupy faithfully until He appears.
The days are short. The opposition is organized. The stakes are generational. Please vote.
***
When things look impossible, read the book of Esther. God’s name is never mentioned in the book, but you can clearly see His mighty, sovereign hand at work on every page. I have told Esther’s story in Esther’s voice in an eBook and an audiobook. Both are available from Sqrindle:
a
Purchase eBook
Purchase audiobook
a
a
a
a
a
Here are links to my blog indexes, so please click one and keep reading!
My Books, Workbooks, and Fun Books
Knowing the Unknowable One
Opening the Treasure Chest
Walking Heart-to-Heart with God
Walking Heart-to-Heart with Each Other
Fighting the Good Fight of Faith
Christian Mysteries: Why I Love Them!
List of Some Nonfiction Books You Don’t Want to Miss
Index of Assorted Topics