Second Verse, Same As The First

For the past few centuries, Church History in the West has had many examples where the predominant branch of the Church in a given nation has sided with wealth and power.  Examples include the Roman Church's siding with wealth and power in France and Spain during their respective pre-revolutionary times as well as the Orthodox Church during the times leading up to the Russian Revolutions of 1917.

In the United States, the predominant part of the Church is the Protestant branch in general and white evangelicals in specific. They have show that support for wealth and power through their support for the Republican Party even though the reasons for their support center around the abortion debate and culture war issues. Still, of the two major political parties that first serve the interests of those with wealth and power, the Republican Party has demonstrated that it is far more willing to sacrifice the welfare of the American people while catering to perceived needs and even whims of Big Business.

Just recently, Reverend Stephen Spinnenweber (click here for a bio) wrote an article which was posted on the Reformation 21 website which not only gladly proclaimed that he is a one issue voter and that issue is abortion, but strongly encouraged other Christians to do the same (click here for the article).

On the one hand, I sympathize and even agree with Spinnenweber on his stand against abortion. After all, abortion takes a human life. Some attempt to minimize the significance of that by denying the personhood of the unborn. Personhood is used there to redirect the assignment of human life to those stages of the unborn which we can either directly interact with or more easily relate to or can perceive as being human life. And I understand his main reason why he is voting on a single issue. That reason is that some issues are weightier than other issues.\ Abortion is among the most important issues because each abortion ends a human life. Thus abortion is a dealbreaker for many in terms of voting for a candidate.

Where I struggle with Spinnenweber is his analysis of the situation. Now Spinnenweber also speaks of racism as being a dealbreaker regarding for whom we vote. He rightfully speaks against Jim Crow era and laws as being horrific. And he also includes policies that would deny any 'societal group' of rights recognized by The Constitution or their God-given  rights. However, because abortion is the murder of a child, he believes that it is an issue that stands above all other issues.

But is abortion the only issue in which human life is taken? The answer is no and I am not referring to capital punishment. For example, according to the AJPH, just in the year of 2000, the following estimates were made about America (click here for the reference):

• 245,000 deaths were attributable to low education
• 176,000 deaths were attributable to racial segregation
• 162,000 deaths were attributable to low social support
• 133,000 deaths were attributable to individual poverty
• 119,000 deaths were attributable to income inequality

The article from which those statistics come from was based on a review of literature. Also, couldn't we very well say that some of those same conditions that are contributing to premature deaths mentioned above also contributing to either infant mortality or the decision to get an abortion? So should a candidate's positions on those subjects become dealbreakers.

We could also add that scientists are estimating that between 2030 and 2050, we will see 250,000 around the world will die per year (click here for the reference) from the effects of climate change. So should a candidate's position on climate change become a dealbreaker? Of course, it isn't just climate change that should cause us to be concerned for the environment. Pollution also causes premature deaths. One study stated that 9 million people around the world prematurely died because of pollution in 2019 while another study claimed that 53,000 premature American deaths could have been prevented if 'all energy emitted emissions' were done away with (click here for the source).

In addition, if we want to talk about a candidate's positions on issues where premature death is involved, then shouldn't we also include a candidate's position on wars, military and other interventions, the selling of military arms, gun control laws, and nuclear weapons be dealbreakers in terms of the candidates we will vote for?

If we want to talk about racism being a dealbreaker, then shouldn't the denial of systemic racism, such as is fallibly described by CRT be a dealbreaker even though that systemic racism is not at the level it was during Jim Crow?

Also, if the denial of God-given or Constitutional rights is also a dealbreaker in terms of voting for a candidate, then should any candidate who favors a dictatorship in place of a democracy also be a dealbreaker? After all, the January 6th Hearings are revealing just how close we came to losing what we have left of democracy and falling into a dictatorship.

Narrowmindedness is not a good way to describe the single-issue voter. But reductionistic would be. And the problem with being unnecessarily reductionistic is that it leads to unnecessary black-white thinking. Not only can black-white thinking lead to authoritarianism, it requires that we ignore pertinent information. For example, Spinnenweber's emphasis on abortion would cause him to ignore a candidate's other positions that contribute to other causes of death and issues listed above which either an anti-elective abortion or a pro-choice candidates have. But if he does that, he becomes inconsistent because it was the premature causing of death which caused Spinnenweber to make abortion such an important issue.

All of that returns us to the beginning. To vote on the single issue of abortion, either intentionally or not, is to support the Republican Party and side with wealth and power for religiously conservative Christians who oppose the legalization of elective abortions. And thus one has to wonder because of a single-issue approach to voting we are seeing a repeat of history despite all the dealbreakers listed above which many Republican lawmakers support.

Even With The New Jargon, Are Prolife Voters Still Being Urged To Be Single-Issue Voters?

For as long as abortion has been deemed a constitutional right,  religiuosly conservative Christians have been accused of becoming single-issue voters. The concern here is abortion of course. Those candidates who supported a woman's right to choose were shunned at the polls by many religiously conservative Christian voters regardless of the candidates' stands on other issues. Those who opposed either all or elected abortions would all too often secure the votes of many  religiously conservative Christians regardless of their stands on other issues. Since the Republican Party has more Prolife candidates than the Democratic Party, the Republican Party  has used this issue as a way of not only keeping religiously conservative Christians under the Republican tent,  it made us Christians into their base. I grew up in a religiously conservative Christian home with Republican parents and so when I voted, I use to vote for Republicans almost exclusively--here, a bad memory caused me to insert the word 'almost.'

Becoming sensitive to this criticism, religiously conservative Christian leaders are now trying to introduce nuance into what it means to be a single-issue voter. To more and more people, it is no longer appropriate to base one's vote on the abortion issue alone. That is the message of two blogposts by such leaders, Joe Carter (click here for a bio) and Denny Burk (click here for a bio). In their respective articles, both argued that we can no longer vote for a candidate simply because of their stance on abortion. However, do both propose that Christians could vote for any candidate who does not pass their Prolife litmus test? The answer to that question is found in recent articles they wrote to their readers (click here for Denny Burk's article and click there for Joe Carter's article).

The two articles by Burk and Carter are similar. Both advocate a qualified single-issue approach to voting. The approach is qualified in this sense, there are other issues and practices which should bar Christians from voting for any given candidate. Borrowing from an article by John Piper, Burk lists the following traits or positions of  racism, fraud, or bribery as deal breakers in terms of whether any Christian should vote for a given candidate. Carter's list of traits or positions is more narrow in that he focuses on issues of justice in terms of how one recognizes the human dignity of another. Here he  at least acknowledges there are other issues that should be used in determining whether a given candidate has an adequate concern for justice and human dignity. In other words, before judging someone to be Prolife, that person must be concerned with those who have been born as well. So we must be concerned with how those politicians who claim to be Prolife would be truly Prolife by how they view and try to help children who live in poverty or refugees from nations like Syria. 

In contrast to Burk, Carter suggests that no candidate who supports a woman's right to choose could have any legitimate concern for human dignity and justice in other situations. He wrote:

 If a candidate is unwilling to protect children in the womb in America, why should I believe they care about the plight of children in Darfur?

Now after that quote, Carter demonstrates some vagueness as to whether a Christian could vote for any candidate who supports a woman's right to choose. He seems to argue for the allowance of voting for non Pro-life candidates when he quotes Clark Forsythe in saying:

there is no moral compromise when we make the aim of politics not the perfect good but the greatest good possible

And yet, how can one vote for a non Prolife candidate since, according to the first quote, such a candidate may not possibly have any legitimate concern for human dignity and justice?  Perhaps with the latter quote, Carter is giving an out to those Christians who have no real Prolife candidates to vote for. Or perhaps Carter was expressing similar sentiments as what will be expressed next by this blogpost.

It has been the position of this blog that if we wreck the world by waging war or destroying the environment, and we could add failing to adequately address poverty, then abortion becomes a moot issue.  And while Carter's suggestion that those who would allow unborn children to be destroyed in the womb may not be trusted to be concerned with human dignity and justice in other situations needs to be tested on a case by case basis, we should note, and Carter seems to agree, that protecting life in the womb does not imply that one is consistently Prolife. So in the end, Carter's position is superior to Burk's, but the ambiguity expressed in whether a Christian should be allowed to vote for Pro-choice candidates based on other issues needs to be cleared up.

Now if we were to limit ourselves to voting for Presidential candidate's from the two major parties, we should find that, outside of the abortion issue, no available candidates could be properly classified as being consistently Prolife. Certainly the Republican candidates are disqualified by their lack of regard for our environmental problems and direction. In addition, with their criticisms of Barack Obama, their patriotic approach to American foreign policy seems to mean never having to say we're sorry. Combine that with talk of carpet bombing and American "leadership" in the world, the aggressiveness that Republicans seem to be embracing will unnecessarily trigger more wars than the foreign policies proposed by their Democratic Party counterparts.

But the views expressed by the Democratic Party presidential candidates are not much better. Take the positions expressed by the "most progressive" of the two candidates, Senator Bernie Sanders. He viewed our invasion of Iraq is being wrong because of the destabilization it caused. In other words, he views the Iraq War as being a mistake. He didn't apply any moral judgment to that war. This is a similar position to that of Barack Obama when he campaigned for President in 2008. And because of that lack of moral position, I wrote somewhere that Obama would have no problem with waging wars that were not deemed to be mistakes. And what policies did Obama pursued? The overthrow of the Libyan government which required America to work with terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and the expansion of the use of drones to assassinate people regardless of the Middle East nation in which they resided. There is also a possibility that the US was involved with the coup that occurred in Honduras in 2009. There is documentation showing that the US did work to control the aftermath of the coup.

We should further note that the Republican candidates approach the alleviation of poverty by promoting economic freedom for businesses. "Economic freedom" is code for the abolition of social responsibilities for businesses. Such will mean that poverty or near-poverty conditions will at least maintain, if not increase, their current levels. And here we should note how poverty visits injustice on innocent people in a variety of ways.

So the question becomes whether these articles are freeing religiously conservative Christian voters from being single-issue voters so that they should feel free to vote for candidates from the other major party. Burk's article answers that question with a definite 'NO!'  Carter's article possibly answers the question with 'yes.' But it's hard to tell.