Oct.23 | How should you vote?
Some advice for Christians, or indeed anyone, contemplating this election.
How should believers make sense of the election? Come to that, how should anyone? There’s a dizzying array of promises and politicians before us now and just a few short days to decide what to make of it all. Recently I was asked to be on a panel discussing these questions and to consider Christian engagement with politics, including offering thoughts to a number of first-time voters; below are the three pieces of advice I gave them.
To start with, some Christians ask if we should participate in politics at all. This isn’t “a plague on all their houses” cynicism, but a line of thinking with an honourable history, albeit one I think is wrong. It draws from the “two kingdoms” doctrine of the Reformers, who taught that church and state are separate spheres of authority (contra papal claims that the church is the ultimate authority and the state is subordinate to it). To some, this has meant that Christians should only be concerned with the sacred kingdom manifested in the church, and not the secular kingdom of the state. A better view, I think, is that while the church and the state have different spheres of authority, believers participate in both. As in Jeremiah 29:7, we’re supposed to seek the welfare of the city in which we find ourselves.
Thinking about our human nature reinforces this conclusion. We are, as Aristotle said, political animals, meaning that we are relational and interdependent. There are no truly individual actions; ideas have social consequences as well as personal ones. As a result, we have to answer questions about how we should live together and resolve our differences, perennial questions of human coordination. This is ultimately what politics is: public power applied to common life so that we can live together in harmony. Christians have just as much to contribute to this conversation, and just as much obligation to do so, as the next person. Participating in our politics is an appropriate act of gratitude for the incredible gift we’ve inherited, of a peaceful and constructive way to order our life together without violence or oppression, and a way to preserve and renew this gift for the next generation.
With that ground cleared, here are three pieces of advice for Christians, or anyone, engaging with this election.
First, look beyond the promises and policies to philosophy and character. The blizzard of pledge cards and 100-point plans is important, but it’s not enough by itself. For one thing, under MMP the election is often just the first act; the coalition negotiations are where we find out what our new government will actually look like and what its policies will be, and voters don’t have a seat at that table. For another, would-be governments are making assumptions about the world they’ll inherit, which usually don’t factor in things like natural disasters (think the Christchurch earthquakes or a global pandemic) or crises that the “experts” didn’t see coming (think the Global Financial Crisis). These circumstances put a spanner in everyone’s works, including those of politicians who confidently made us promises. When asked about the greatest challenge to governing, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan apparently uttered the immortal line: “Events, dear boy, events.”
In these circumstances, where politicians will hammer out deals or make calls on issues none of us foresaw, what matters most is who is doing the deciding. Are these people we can trust to do the right thing? What will they draw on to guide them? They’re asking us to follow their leadership, but who or what are they themselves following? These are questions of character and philosophy. Character is a person’s internal disposition, shaped over decades by their personal beliefs, choices, and life experience. Good character is a disposition to do the right thing; in a politician, that should mean being a servant to the nation and putting the public good before their own. This kind of character is formed by the kind of everyday experiences we all face; parents getting up in the middle of the night to their children, customer service reps greeting complaints with a smile and a listening ear, bosses who lead by example. The best way to gauge whether aspiring politicians have this kind of character is to meet them face-to-face in your local community. Go to debates, public meetings, walkabouts, and see what kind of person emerges from behind the branding and the campaign slogans.
Then there’s philosophy, or the guiding ideology of the political parties competing for our support. Despite what have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too pre-election commitments may suggest, “there are no solutions, only trade-offs” (to quote economist Thomas Sowell). What will the parties prioritise when they’re making those trade-offs? This will ultimately be shaped by what they believe about the world—to give a couple of slightly exaggerated examples, whether they think the individual is more important than the collective, or whether they think we’re purely material beings or ones with a spiritual dimension. These beliefs will be a guide rather than a guarantee—parties are, after all, subject to what one senior public servant has called the “iron rule of political conflict”, essentially that you can’t govern unless you can first get elected, which both disciplines and subverts the choices that parties present to the electorate. But the different ideologies do shape politics in a meaningful way, and it’s important to understand them, for example by looking at the party constitution or their website.
Second, think of the common good and not your short-term self-interest. There’s a famous campaign contest from the 1950s that sums up not what to do. National promised voters a tax rebate of £75 if elected; Labour one-upped them and their Party newspaper ran the headline, “DO YOU WANT £100 OR NOT?” It’s reasonable to think about how policies will affect you and your family, but not to the exclusion of all else and not to the extent that you allow parties to buy your vote. Maybe they’re promising you extra services or extra dollars now, or promising to relieve you of the burden of certain responsibilities, but what will the longer-term consequences be? What will this do to the society your children will inherit? If the policy gives you some short-term gain but only at the cost of undermining key social institutions, is that really worth it? The famous Anglo-Irish statesman, Edmund Burke, said that society is like a “partnership … between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”. We should think of our descendants’ interests, as well as our own, when we head to the polling booth.
Bringing this lens to our decisions also helps moderate the excesses of identity politics. MMP encodes this logic, incentivising parties to segment the electorate and appeal to voters based on what smaller and smaller slices of us want rather than what we have in common. This just accelerates the existing cultural momentum towards fragmentation and mutually uncomprehending blocs. But if we all, as Christians believe, share in a common humanity then we’re united by more than we’re divided; simply put, we have more in common. If that’s the case, when we weigh up our choices in the election, we should identify the things that are good for all of us and not just some of us.
Third, practice hopeful realism. Politicians will not save you (there’s only one world leader who can do that—spoiler: it’s Jesus) and they won’t end poverty or homelessness or crime, because none of us can. But politicians can make things better (or worse). That’s not because any of them have the definitive set of answers, and there’s no straight line from the Gospel to any particular brand of politics. There are, however, better and worse responses to the world we’ve been given and the truths that have been revealed to us. Some of these are divine truths—that this world was made good but became broken, which is why ills like poverty or crime can be palliated but not cured, or that every person is made in God’s image and therefore has incalculable dignity and worth regardless of their stage of life or their contribution to the economy. Others are temporal truths, like evidence on whether particular policy interventions actually work.
So it’s important to pay attention to the policies on offer and to evaluate them carefully. While I believe you shouldn’t focus solely on the parties’ prescriptions, understanding what they believe and what they’d do, given the chance, is a good place to start. Just don’t finish there as well. When you look at policies, it’s reasonable focus on a set of issues that you think are most important (without falling prey to self-interest). Even professional policy wonks can’t keep up with the entire array of policies on offer from every political party, so it makes sense to narrow the field somewhat. Perhaps you’ll do this by thinking about the biggest challenges facing our society, or the biggest opportunities, and checking out what the contenders have to say about them. Or perhaps you’ll do it by asking which policy suite gives you the most confidence that the party in question has a good handle on our reality and good ideas about how to make things better.
At their best, politicians and politics should give you a sense of hope that they really can make things better. Not because they promise utopia—anyone who offers such a false hope should automatically disqualify themselves as a contender for your vote—but because they will do their best to protect what’s good and to help restore what’s broken and, most importantly of all, they know which is which. But they won’t always get it right, and nor we will ordinary voters. So the Christian contemplating this election should be both challenged and comforted by these words from Reinhold Neibuhr:
Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
It’s real easy for me Chris.
Co-Governance is racist & undemocratic.
It destroys suffrage equality.
All New Zealand Citizens should be equal.
1 man, 1 vote.
That is not co-governance.
Indeed co-governance enables Tribal Apartheid by codifying undemocratic race based laws, by-Laws, Rules & quotas.
Laws should be based on need not race.
All New Zealand Citizens are equal.
No matter how or when their forebears got here.
Similarly Maori aren’t indigenous.
They proudly name the 7 Waka they came to NZ on.
Winston & David Seymour are correct.
Therefore by supporting Co-Governance some parties are racist & undemocratic.and ignore or weaken democracy.
Mike