By Phoebe Farag Mikhail
Your vote is important. It matters. But it is not sacred, or as important as prayer, or any other poetic metaphor about voting you might have read on the internet, or heard in a speech or sermon, or read on someone’s law sign. If you are a citizen of this country and you participate in the election process, you are exercising your constitutional right to vote and fulfilling your civic responsibility.
Your vote is not sacred. It is true that blood has been shed in the fight for the right to vote for every citizen of this country. But it is the blood spilled that was sacred. Your vote certainly might honor the blood of those who have fought for your freedom to have it, but your vote itself is not sacred.
Your vote is something you can do once a year, maybe more if you vote in primaries. There are things you can do every day, multiple times a day, however, that are sacred. For starters, you can pray.
Yesterday someone sent me a YouTube link to a sermon by a preacher at a large Protestant mega church. In that sermon he quoted the 19th century English Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon as saying “You should give as much attention to your vote as you do your prayers.” I cannot confirm the veracity of this quote – an internet search does not bring up Spurgeon saying any such thing.
Whether Spurgeon said it or not, the idea that one should give as much attention to their vote as they do to their prayers is dead wrong. How tragic for a Christian preacher to say such a thing to a congregation.
Our prayers are infinitely more important than our votes, and a Christian who believes in the power of prayer, should be “attending” to their prayers with much more attention and care than to their vote. Anything else isn’t Christianity, but some sort of civic piety, perhaps even a form of civic idolatry.
The desert and urban monastics all over the world prayerfully prostrating themselves night and day for the peace of the earth are doing more for the peace of the earth than my vote ever will. Even more importantly, they’re doing much more for their own salvation than voting will ever do for my salvation.
The closest quote I could find about prayers and voting from a preacher came from Georgia Senator and Reverend Raphael Warnock saying, in 2020, “A vote is a prayer for the future. And we must ensure all our prayers are heard.” He’s just as wrong as pseudo Spurgeon. Friends, if we believe in God, we can believe that our prayers are heard when we actually pray. If we think our prayers are heard when election officials count our ballots, we’re not praying to God at all. We’re praying to some civic deity.
But I don’t worship a civic deity. I worship the Living God.
In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes:
If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment.
Christians believe that through Christ we can have eternal life. As Lewis observes, even a thousand year civilization, then, pales in importance to an individual who might live eternally. Attending to our eternal lives, then, is much more important, and much more urgent, than the temporal and increasingly fraught action of voting. Let us not mix the two.
Today I got on a very long voting line, very sure that some people on that line were going to vote differently than I. And while I might disagree with them fundamentally about why and how they voted the way they did, I can agree with them that they voted because they thought the people they were voting for would make our country a better place, or at least, not a worse one.
But do you know what else can make our country a better place? It’s not something that we can only do once a year, but something we can do every day: Love our neighbor. After we’ve cast our votes, let us put behind us the political division and acrimony and instead look around and see how we can show care and kindness to those in our local and global communities.
“And who is my neighbor?” You might ask, the way the lawyer in the Gospel of Luke asked. If you’re a Christian, you’ll want the answer from Jesus Christ Himself:
A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, who stripped him of his clothing, wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a certain priest came down that road. And when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. Likewise a Levite, when he arrived at the place, came and looked, and passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was. And when he saw him, he had compassion. So he went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; and he set him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two denarii, gave them to the innkeeper, and said to him, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, when I come again, I will repay you.’ So which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?
The lawyer said, “He who showed mercy on him.” Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:29-36 NKJV).
No matter what our roles are in life—whether we work in government and policy making, whether we work in various professions that have nothing to do with governance and policy, or whether we stay at home to care for family—what we do every day to show love for those around us, especially those who are different than us, is infinitely more important to our homes, communities and souls than voting ever can be.
If this election, or any election, has sown disordered passions within us, now is the time to repent. Now is the time to repent of our judgment and condemnation of others. Now is the time to repent of our slander against others, even against famous politicians running for office. Now is the time to repent for our arrogance. Now is the time to repent because we have forgotten that gentleness, kindness and self-control are fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23).
And then, now is the time to look our neighbor in the eye and say, with authenticity and sincerity “I love you as I love myself.” I love you even if the sign on your front lawn is a different color than the sign on mine.
I love you, my neighbor, even if you hate me.
Yes, if I’m a Christian, that’s my job. We’re supposed to love our enemies, and that includes our political enemies. If we don’t, how different are we from the rest of the world? If we attended to our prayer lives more than we have our votes, we might get the power from God to love our enemies. In the words of Greek Orthodox saint Mother Gavrilia, “God loves your enemies as much as He loves you.”
If you haven’t already, and it is your right to do so, today is the day to go out and vote. And then, go back to prayer and loving your neighbor, not just this one day, but every day. Voting is for the here and now. Loving our neighbor is for eternity.
My forthcoming book, Hunger for Righteousness: A Lenten Journey Towards Intimacy with God and Loving Our Neighbor, comes out in January 2025. It is available for pre-order now.
Axia Women is giving away stickers with that beautiful quote by Mother Gavrilia with a donation to their work. Learn more here.
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