Voting Your Faith - Is it Possible in 2008?

A political discussion group on Blog Catalog has a great carnival going on all this month, looking for posts on "The Biggest Obstacle to Electing the Right President". I'm departing in a couple of ways--first, because I don't usually talk politics on this blog, and second because the issue I want to talk about isn't the universal answer to the question. It's only an answer that applies to people who are concerned with voting their faith, and who happen to be of the Christian faith.

"Vote your faith" has, unfortunately, become a sound bite like so many other political soundbites, full of emotion and imperative but without a lot of substantive meaning. It's easy to get swept away in the rhetoric, and to sincerely believe that one highly-publicized issue or another is decisive, but the truth is that like everything else in politics--like everything else in LIFE--voting your faith is rarely that simple. And it's become increasingly complicated as the world itself has become increasingly complicated and the issues to be determined by our elected officials have become increasingly varied and often technical.

In 2000 and 2004, many Christians supported President Bush because they were "pro-life" and Bush's opponents were in favor of keeping abortion legal. However, those same people overlooked the fact that President Bush, as Governor of Texas, had signed a futile care bill into law--a bill that allowed hospitals to withhold critical care from patients even over the objections of the patients themselves and/or their families. That, it seems to me, puts the Christian who wants to vote his faith in a bit of a bind: neither candidate respects the sanctity of human life in the way that most Christian religions--and certainly Catholicism--would require. I've often heard it said (in sound bites, of course, and on bumper stickers) that you can't be Catholic and support a candidate who doesn't oppose abortion. And yet, it seems equally clear to me that you can't be Catholic and support a candidate who advocates giving medical professionals the power to legally decide that some lives are not worth preserving.

The issues don't end there, either. As Catholics, we have very clear doctrine on what constitutes a just war...and on when war is absolutely unacceptable. And we're meant to support the concept of marriage as a God-given bond between one man and one woman for life.

But doesn't it always seem that the political candidates who oppose abortion also oppose protections that would keep large pharmaceutical companies from determining that it's acceptable to kill a certain number of people in the interests of profits? Doesn't it seem that those who oppose gay marriage are also fairly liberal about how they'll use military force? This list, I think, could go on indefinitely.

A woman in a Catholic discussion group once said (condescendingly) that it was a question of PRIORITIZING. She meant that abortion was the number one concern and we could overlook these other issues so long as the candidate had that one right. But I don't remember seeing anything about a question of priorities in my Bible. I can't find a place in the Catechism where it says it's perfectly acceptable (let alone righteous) to encourage one evil if it allows you to combat another. And it seems to me that the complexity and diversity of the issues at hand and the mixed bag of positions each candidate carries make it impossible to vote in good faith for any of them, if voting your Catholic faith is the goal.