Defending a Christian Vote for Obama,

A friend recently put me in touch with an Evangelical believer who could not understand how a Christian could possibly support Obama because of his abortion stance. This is what I wrote to him.


Thanks for writing and for your honesty. I will describe my thinking about abortion in detail below, but the basic reason I can vote for Obama in spite of his support for abortion rights is that presidents have a great many important roles, powers and influences but actually very little ability to make a difference on abortion. We have seen over the last eight years that just because a president might say “the right things” in his abortion stance, it doesn’t mean that he will govern well on a host of other issues. Indeed, considering the key role that Evangelicals played in the election and re-election of George Bush, we bear considerable responsibility for the election of what is now overwhelmingly recognized as a disastrous administration. By focusing our considerable voting power so narrowly on social issues, Christians helped empower the neo-con agenda of projecting American power through pre-emptive war and the anti-regulation policy that led to an orgy of greed that is now crushing our economy. During this time there was little if any change in the abortion culture and President Bush didn’t even use “the bully pulpit” of the presidency to challenge it even when he had a degree of popularity. Of the two candidates this year, I felt that Obama was better suited to undoing some of the damage that has occurred to our nation’s reputation, economy and political climate. I didn’t believe that either candidate would do something to really make a difference on abortion because that would require much more than a change in judges.

I understand your passionate concern about abortion because I agree with you that it is an immoral practice and I would like to see it end. I think there are three things that we, as Christians, can and should be doing about abortion, and an Obama presidency is no impediment to doing any of them.

First and foremost, I think that Christians should be known for the fact that they and their children have far fewer abortions, or ideally none. Unfortunately the statistics suggest that this is not really the case. “Let judgment start with the house of God.”

Second, Christians can be active in making it possible for women to choose not to abort. They can provide shelter and they can adopt. I think that the Church is actually doing a great job here, mostly without attention. That is the Kingdom in action and it has been saving babies for all the decades when legal approaches have produced little change.

The third option depends on doing a good job of the first two. It is being the “prophetic voice” to the World making the case with truth, humility and grace that abortion is immoral. We have a legitimate reason to make that argument, not assuming that our hearers accept the authority of scripture, but appealing to the conscience that God has placed in their heart and which remains in spite of the Fall. When Christians have talked about this as a moral issue, it has frequently been in a graceless and angry tone rather than something that would have much hope of getting others to really ponder the question. But that is not the biggest problem. The tragedy is that we have let the discussion shift from a moral plane to a legal one – from what is right and wrong to whose “rights” supersede the other’s.

The concept of “Rights” is not really “Christian” having came out of late medieval scholasticism and developing mainly during the Enlightenment. Accordingly, the concept of subjective human rights is not the way that the Bible addresses moral issues. “Rights” has been a functional way to talk about what are actually moral issues in a post-Christian age, but it is not fully compatible with speaking Biblical truths. When we allow the argument to be about a woman’s “right to choose” we let people see themselves as defending her against a caddish boyfriend etc instead of sanctioning the death of a child. When we make arguments for the “right to life” we ignore the reality that life is not a “right” at all and is in fact a gift from God - not at all guaranteed for a developing fetus or for you or for me tomorrow. An argument over “rights” is unsolvable because the Constitution says nothing about how to balance competing rights, let alone these particular rights.

That is why the problem cannot be solved just by overturning Roe v Wade. As long as most abortion supporters think of themselves as defending women’s rights they will only be more motivated by that event. If you have a very large proportion of the population that has not yet been convinced that abortion is actually wrong, a legal prohibition will ultimately fail in anything but a police state. If we were to concentrate instead on making the moral argument in a way that people will listen, we could begin to reduce the number of abortions long before there is a consensus that this is something that should be the subject of a law and even if that consensus is never achieved. “Choice” is really not so much a “right” as it is an unavoidable and difficult “obligation” to make a decision if you are someone who is pregnant and does not want to be. We don’t have to wait for a court to change to say, “The choice will have to be made, now let’s talk about the morality of that choice.”

Christians don’t have to elect a Pro-life president to do the three things I’ve described (Being a good example, support and adoption to give women options, and being a prophetic voice). It actually makes it easier to break away from the futility of a “rights” debate when the woman’s “right” is not under threat. Christians can even pray that Obama could be convinced to use his considerable speaking skills and influence to talk about the morality of abortion in the way that he has talked about fatherhood responsibility in the black community.

As members of the Kingdom of God, we have great power to overcome evil with good. The power of the state is nothing in comparison. Throughout history, whenever the Church tries to rely on state power it almost always comes out compromised. We see that happening today because the American Evangelical Church aligned itself so closely with the “Republican Brand” which is now so tarnished. I wouldn’t want to see the Church align itself with the “Democratic brand” either or even the “Obama brand”. I’d just like to see us wrestle with our voting decisions based on what we think will be best for the country while we pursue Kingdom concerns like abortion with Kingdom tools.

Culture Wars

The Culture Wars are not over and if anything I expect them to get uglier. As a Christian, it is the ugliness that is my main concern. At both ends of the political spectrum there is a strong tendency towards conspiracy-theory-thinking which renders rational discussion impossible and raises demonizationism of opponents to a virtue. This is all reinforced by selective filtering of information sources so that the hyper-partisan world-view will not be challenged by contrary input. All this may be a common propensity of people, but that Christians would be at the forefront of it is not OK.

In Roman’s 2 where Paul is challenging the self righteous Jews who, “…are proud of your God, and know his will, and tell right from wrong because you have been taught by the Law (17b),” he points out that they too violate the law and thus “bring God into contempt.” He finishes with the quote from Ezekiel 36, “It is your fault that the name of God is held in contempt among the nations.” Paul is not challenging the truth of the Law but rather the arrogance of its would-be promoters. That, to me, is disturbingly similar to the situation with today’s Christian Culture Warriors. I’m not saying this is true of all or even most politically involved Christians, but one need only look at the comment threads about editorials on the web to see graceless dogmatism and alarmism phrased in ways that are as far from Christ-likeness as one can imagine. The same tone was abundantly demonstrated in the anti-Obama emails that so many Christians were forwarding and in the interviews conducted with people at Palin rallies. The later may have been over-represented by the media, but the fact that it was so easy to find such voices among Christians should be of great concern to the Church. Over the past few decades, the broader American Church has evolved a theology of the relationship of the Church to the World that makes it imperative to use human political power to pursue Kingdom goals. Rather than having the effect of Christianizing political discourse and methods, the result has been to transform the Christian effort into the standard hyper-partisan language and tactics of politics.


There is no doubt that the Gospel message will always face opposition in the world and there is no excuse for the Church to avoid that reaction by watering-down the Truth. That kind of opposition is; however, completely different from the hypocrisy-driven contempt that Paul is talking about in Romans and from the contempt that is being generated by the ugly forms of our Culture Wars. It may only be a small subset of the Church that is so vitriolic, but my fear is that far more of the Church is sympathetic and that the leadership does not seem to be working very hard to help its people find the line between being “salt and light” and representing a “gospel” which is unacceptably mixed with political ideology and a contemptuous attitude. This mixed-gospel-Christianity is so pervasive that it is isolating to those who are fully orthodox in their faith, but not aligned with the particular brand of Republicanism so widely conflated with “Evangelical Christianity.” I know many Christians who were reluctant to let others in their church know that they supported Obama in the last election because to do so is considered heretical by many of their fellow believers.

Now Obama is going to be the President and hopefully most Christians will be praying for him as the scriptures command and as our enormous challenges demand. Some Christians will almost certainly ratchet-up their Culture War efforts believing that is the only way to prevent something like the apocalyptic vision of 2012 presented by the Dobson organization. Unfortunately, some of this will be ugly and if the Church as a whole continues to acquiesce to these voices, we will be guilty of causing God’s name to be held in contempt.