This topic was brought up in a discussion I was having with my cousin, Rhett, my friend Charl, my roommate JoAnna and my friend Tiffany. There is need to read this article and carefully consider its contents…even if they may seem to contradict your political stance.

(Disclaimer: This entry is a mere reproduction of Keith Drury’s writings. I did not add to it or change it in anyway. I also do not claim to agree with all of Drury’s writings, I only accept that he brings up good points on both “sides” of the issues.)

Could a Christian vote Democrat?

 They say the safest way to keep people happy is, “Never talk about politics or religion.”  I break half of these rules every week since my columns are almost always about religion.  I am about the break the other half of the rule. 

 When most Evangelicals discover that I often vote for Democrats they go ballistic—including my students if they discover it (they’re about to).  The joke on our campus is “The Young Democrats club will meet in the closet on the second floor of the food center—unless the other member can’t come.”  Same is true for faculty.  One faculty member I used to teach with (now deceased) once told me, “If you hear that I teach you can’t be a Christian and vote for a Democrat it isn’t true—I think it is possible.” (I always thought was saying under his breath, –“about as possible as a Camel getting through the eye of a needle”)   I don’t know many Christians who vote for Democrats. The same is true for most evangelical churches—they are almost exclusively Republican—the “Christian party.”

 So when people find out I often vote for Democrats they are aghast—as if I have confessed to doing abortions on weekends. This is especially true of my students who have been raised “since Ronald Reagan” and thus have never known a time when most all the Christians they know were not stanch Republicans.  It doesn’t fit in their schema of things.  (The 1960’s to them are as ancient history as 1919, and most don’t even know about Richard Nixon any better than President Buchanan.)  I usually don’t try to defend myself and I won’t be able to with this piece either.  It is an almost-hopeless situation in the current atmosphere. But recently I did answer an email and state my “apology” for being a Democrat.  I am not trying to convince anybody—just setting out my personal views which most every other evangelical thinks are wrong.  But I am not “wrong” because I am ignorant and have not thought about it. I have tried to develop a careful position rooted in my faith.  You may disagree on where I come out, that’s fine.  Do your own homework—make a list of issues as I have done and decide where the Bible and your faith lead you.  If you do that you’ve satisfied me for I think our faith should inform our politics, not the other way around.

 So, to my tenzillion Republican friends who can’t imagine how a person might be a Christian and vote for a Democrat, (and to my three Democrat friends who are hiding under the pews in our churches) I offer the following as my own stance of personal political apologetics:

Actually I don’t believe there is a “Christian party” in my country.  Neither of them satisfies me as far as “Biblical Christian Values” go.  On one issue one party is closer, on another the other party is closer to Christ-like values as I see them and on many issues neither party is Christian.  And I admit that on some issues there is no “Christian” stance at all.   But I don’t vote Democratic because I’ve “just not thought through the implications of a “Biblical worldview”.  I vote that way often because my Christian conscience demands it.  Like my Republican friends claim their “Christian worldview” demands they vote Republican, my own reading of the Scripture and history often takes me the opposite way. 

(more…)