Elections
Dear Mr. President-elect Obama:
I want personally to offer you my prayers as you embark on the enormous challenge of leading our country in a time of great crisis and crossroads. While our ultimate hope is our faith in God, we also have high hopes for your administration.
Sojourners is interested in hearing about the issues you care most about in this historic election. Take the quick poll and find out how others voted as well.
Since Mennonite theologian and ethicist John Howard Yoder's death in 1997, I have often wondered what he would have said about the events of these past eleven years.
With perhaps the most consequential election of any of our lifetimes only a few weeks away, it’s time to take a step back and reflect on what is at stake. We’ve heard a lot about personalities, seen far too many negative ads, and been spun so many times our heads are swimming. But none of that should determine our vote.
As Christians, we know that we will not be able to vote for the kingdom of God. It is not on the ballot. Yet there are very important choices to make that will significantly impact the common good and the health of this nation—and of the world. So let us all exercise our crucial right to vote and to apply our Christian conscience to those decisions. And in the finite and imperfect political decisions of this and any election, let us each promise to respect the political conscience of our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Here are 10 issues to consider in casting a ballot.
1. The economy is in grave danger. This fall, the financial systems of the nation and the world nearly collapsed. Three out of the nation’s top five investment banks were not able to weather the financial storms triggered by the subprime lending crisis, and the squalls shook the stock market as well. And now a massive government bailout of private debt is reshaping the system. Ordinary Americans are worried about their jobs, their homes, college and retirement funds, and, much worse, a downward economic spiral that affects all of us.
The upcoming presidential election wraps up months of campaigning, in which each political party has tried to outdo the other in its public storytelling. The narratives follow familiar terrain: “We are the party of change,” says one. “We will keep America strong,” says another. Each party has spent millions to present its candidate as the true “outsider” to Washington politics, the honest crusader who can fix what’s broken in America. These storylines are carefully crafted to appeal to our ideals and our frustrations—in short, they tell us what we want to hear.
Leaders the world over use their power to shape narratives—to good and bad effect. Under repressive governments, such as in China or under South Africa’s apartheid regime, storytellers of a different kind—writers—are among those who suffer when their work doesn’t conform to prevailing social, political, religious, or cultural narratives. Their work is banned, they are silenced, put in prison, exiled—or worse. Unlike politicians, writers often tell their governments, and us, what we don’t want to hear.
The death of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn earlier this year reminds us of the powerful impact of his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. This slim volume penetrated the silence of the Stalin-era Soviet Union by telling the story of Ivan Denisovich Shukov, a peasant imprisoned in a Siberian concentration camp. Solzhenitsyn—who spent eight years in similar camps himself—describes Ivan’s day, from morning reveille to evening bedtime, as he follows the petty, arcane rules of staying alive. This tiny revolution of words allowed the world to see what happened to those on the wrong side of Soviet power. For his efforts Solzhenitsyn was exiled, but not stopped; his three-volume indictment of the Gulag system, The Gulag Archipelago, was published about 10 years later.
Editor’s Note: Okay, Ed, the lawyer has finished looking through your column to make sure it’s totally nonpartisan and that it doesn’t favor or oppose either candidate. With a few minor deletions, he says it’s good to go.
As Election Day approaches, more Americans are anxious about the nnnn future. With the world economy in nnnn—for example, Afghanistan’s opium crop is down by almost 19 percent—America’s nnnnn has never been more needed. And yet, after a grueling nominating process, no nnn candidate has emerged that could reassure the world that Washington, D.C., can be anything more than a big nnn pile of scheming nnnn.
But enough about Dick Cheney’s small group.
On the nnnnnnnn side, the candidate is nnnn nnnn, except for the fact that he’s nnnn and was born in Indonesia, or possibly Illinois, and that he fathered two children with a woman in Chicago. His campaign is promising a quick, bipartisan nnnn to every nnnn problem facing this nation, except for the problem of creating false expectations for bipartisan nnnn.
And let’s be honest, he’s a little more nnnnnn than the rest of us.