This has been a very busy year of crowded schedules – at least from the time of Bishop Umoette’s death on February 26, 2022 through this time in October.  I am looking forward to some respite in the not-so-distant future.

        Yet, I cannot let us go into this voting season without saying something about the importance of voting, of all of us voting, and for voting through all of the offices on the ballot.

        And so, I must ask and answer some question about what I believe God intends for me as a Christian to be doing when I vote in a democracy.  (And the key words are, “in a democracy.”)

        I will say what might surprise you:  I am not a Christian nationalist … if that word means that I believe everything about the nation I live in must be Christian.  What I believe is that God wants me, in a democractic system, to make this democracy open to believers of different faiths, and to protect the rights of individuals to practice their faiths (even if different from my own).  For the security of a place to practice the Christian faith in a democracy requires me fighting the right of every believer of every stripe to have a security of place to practice his or her faith.

        Let me use an old anecdote.  I grew up in public schools beginning with first grade in 1958, so I can say that from 1958 through 1970 almost every class knew what it was for the teacher to start the day with prayer and Scriptures.  The church era I grew up in resisted the fact that someone could go to the Courts and advocate against prayer in schools.  Our teachers then were predominantly Christian.  But I am not convinced we ever looked seriously in those days of the 1960s to see what “prayer in the schools” was going to look like when our teachers began to be not only Christian, but Muslim, and Jewish, and Bahai and other faiths? 

And there is another part to the question of whether we Christians should have continued to try to force prayer in the schools:  suppose we would have been able to continue to promote prayer in the schools and assure that the prayer in every school would be a Christian prayer rather than an interfaith or other faith prayer; do you believe God would have been pleased with people being forced to pray rather than people responding in love and obedience to God in prayers?

A teacher of mine – Dr Melvin Vulgamore – quoted in his lectures these words he attributed to John Wesley (tonight I am trusting him, not having found the quote for myself, but trusting his fastidious nature about quotes and citations:  “Forced religion stinks in God’s nostrils.”

Yes, children ought to pray in schools, but not because they are forced to; rather, they should pray because we who believe in God have taught them to pray at home and in worship and in Bible study and Sunday School.

By now you may want to say, “What does this have to do with voting?”  And my answer is that we must be on guard because there are groups of people who vote en bloc (as a block) because they have attitudes and positions that are strongly for or against whatever things they believe are not Christian:  against abortion, for capital punishment, against welfare, against any sexual deviation from that which is traditionally understood.  But I ask you, are you so sure that our beliefs on all of these issues are so clearly black or white, never gray, or so clearly “black or white” that we often speaking out of the clarity we have been taught to see or hear … or, God forbid, have been taught to subconsciously read into the Scriptures.

Many of you would tell me that Sodom’s and Gomorrah’s destruction was God’s judgment because God was against homosexuality.  I can see how you can argue that.  But tell me, friend, how can you argue that the same God on the same night that he was punishing homosexuality was in favor of the rape of two women whom the resident of Sodom had put out that night so that the men who wanted to ravish the other male visitors would rape these two young women instead?  Are you so sure of what God is saying about deviant homosexual behavior with one breath that in the same biblical passage you are comfortable being silent about the cruelty that is visited upon others?  In the same passage that carries a message about sexual deviance?

Old Testament Israel was God’s theocracy – a government in which God was ruler.  But there is no theocracy among major nations today.  Even modern-day Israel is not such a government; it, too, like the United States, is a democracy.  And so, I am saying to you that I would not want the rainbow of understandings of the Christian faith to take over this nation in the name of “Christian nationalism” and make it a nation in which Christians fight each other in the names of our differing interpretations of God while in the same breath defying anyone who does not call himself or herself by the name of Christian a place in the government.

If you can’t agree with this statement now, think about it, live, and observe, and learn, for I believe it proves itself true in many of our experiences:  sometimes the nonbeliever or the believer in another faith is closer to being an advocate of the justice God demands of us than some of the people who call themselves Christian.  Yes, and I believe that is obvious when it comes to immigration laws and advocated reforms and in issues of capital punishment and in issues of criminal justice reform; or in something so simple as people who are anti-abortion but also anti-life in their unforgiving “eye for an eye” attitudes that find no place for mercy in the justice system.

But this is about voting, and these questions and thoughts of the previous paragraphs are the reasons I vote the way I vote.  I do not vote for or against a person because of the label “Christian.”  I do not vote for or against a person because of any faith labels.  I try to not vote for or against a person simply because of his or her color.  I vote because I believe this person or that person will do his or her best to be fair and just, has the capacity to do a credible job in the office, and will be an advocate of laws that help society while also realizing that there is a place for mercy.

        And so, I admonish you to do these things which my wife and I plan to do between now and November 8.

An old accountant once said to me:  “Take care of your business, and your business will take care of you.”  I admonish you to hear his words with these adjusted thoughts:  “Take care of democracy, and democracy will take care of you.”  If we give democracy up to any one tradition, any one culture, any one social group, any one race, any one ethnic group, or even any one faith, we may give it up forever, and find ourselves living in an autocratic of some despot leader who cannot be trusted.  “Take care of democracy, and democracy will take care of you.”  VOTE.  PLAN your work, then work your plan.

Senior Bishop Lawrence Reddick