Now that we are in a political season, one of the statements I hear repeatedly in Christian circles is that Jesus was neither a Democrat nor a Republican. That is a little bit of a mantra that gets said again and again. People ask me what I think about that statement, and I say that it depends on what someone is doing with a statement like that. If they are simply seeing that no political party is an absolute match with everything the Bible says, that is true. In that sense, of course, we can agree that Jesus was neither a Democrat or Republican because no political party is going to be an exact fit with everything we believe and that Jesus would have believed.
Christians are obligated to do the hard work of determining which party comes closer to the Christian worldview.Oftentimes, that is not what people mean by the phrase. When they say Jesus is neither Democrat or Republican, what they often mean is that because the Bible does not match exactly with any political party, how a Christian votes is entirely a free for all. There are no boundaries or things that could determine how you vote. Whether you vote this way or that way, it does not matter because Jesus was neither a Democrat or Republican.
I would disagree with that interpretation of that phrase because we do not have a 100 percent match between what the Bible teaches and a political party. That does not mean that there are not some political parties that come closer to what the Bible teaches. I think it is the job of every believer to ask a simple question: Which political candidate or political party most closely matches the biblical worldview that I hold to?
Rather than taking the easy way out by saying that it does not really matter how you vote, I think the Christian is obligated to do the hard work of determining which party comes closer to the Christian worldview. I think that the parties are so different today that that is not as hard a question to answer as it may have been in prior years. Long ago when the parties were very similar in some ways, we saw a polarization in our world. I think it is clear now that some parties are a lot closer to the Christian worldview than others, and I think that is the way Christians should think about the way they vote.
