Can the church declare its political independence once and for all?
Political strength lies not in attempting to force secular political institutions to look more like the church, but in being called out of the culture and prophetically speaking truth to power.
In the wake of yet another campaign season billed as the “most important election of our lifetimes,” Christians of all political stripes, whether firmly Democrat, firmly Republican or politically homeless, have no choice but to assess our strategy for changing the culture.
We have two parties that an increasing number of committed Christians see as dangerously unreflective of biblical values. Increased political polarization has escalated into violence that has reached the very halls of the U.S. Capitol itself. And perhaps most troubling of all for believers, hyper-partisanship has compromised our public witness, leading the world to ask whether we are members of a political party first and Christians a distant second.
This state of affairs and concern for solutions to these problems will be no stranger to regular readers of the Civic Update, nor to those within earshot of the AND Campaign and other groups like it. We have long sounded the alarm over the willingness of some in the church to abandon one aspect or another of the biblical witness in order to conform to a partisan metanarrative.
That said, I’ve found in our circles an increasing willingness among many who feel poorly represented by both major parties to take that unease to the point of abandoning both parties to chart an independent path. I hope the personal journey I’ve taken along those lines, which I outline below, will resonate with you and cause you to think about where your own political journey might lead you.
My declaration of political independence came in 2021 after five years of increasing disillusionment with the Democratic Party. Having been a pro-life leftist for decades, I never felt very comfortable in either major party. That said, I grew up in the Democratic Party and had more easy overlap with that party – at least the idealistic version of the party I had in my head for so many years.
That idealism started with a vote for long-shot Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in 2000, my first vote for president at 18 years old. I had hoped that Nader could get the critical 5 percent nationally that would lead to public matching funds for the Green Party, which in turn might lead to a greater voice for progressives and ultimately, a chance to push the Democratic Party to the left. My father, a left-leaning but “vote blue no matter who” Democrat, whose own love for politics led me to make political advocacy my life’s work, was none too pleased when he found out about my vote. He and many others in the Democratic Party blamed Nader for the election of George W. Bush, a feeling that has certainly not diminished in many people’s minds, even after more than two decades have passed.
At the time, I did not have the intellectual wherewithal to fend off emotionally-charged attacks on my electoral decision, especially those coming from my father, whom I obviously still hold in high regard. For many years after that, I decided to come back into the Democratic Party fold, voting for the most progressive Democrat I could find in the primary, then knuckling under in the general and voting for whatever candidate won the Democratic nomination. I’ve since come to be largely proud of my vote for Nader. In retrospect, that vote foreshadowed my abandonment of the Democratic Party, even though it took another 20 years to come to full fruition.
My idealism came into conflict with reality during the presidential election cycle of 2015 and 2016, when my support for the progressive candidacy of Bernie Sanders led me back to my independent roots. I’m still astonished by the sheer number of people I admired politically going into that campaign whom I could not stand by its conclusion. After that bruising race, I could not in good conscience vote for Hillary Clinton, and I had no intention of ever voting for Donald Trump. I settled on the Green Party’s Jill Stein, who was decidedly pro-choice but whose views mirrored my own even more so than those I came to embrace while campaigning for Bernie.
In 2018, while working for the Indiana Democratic Party, I witnessed firsthand the ways in which the party stifles progressive voices even as it pays lip service to or wholly disdains voters of faith within its ranks who feel uneasy with or downright disgusted by the ways the party and its candidates have embraced socially liberal extremism on the issue of abortion.
For me, these issues came to a head in 2020, in the midst of my own campaign for state representative in Indiana. Once Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign for the presidential nomination, I faced yet another Hobson’s choice between neoliberal, technocratic half measures and right wing, Christian ultra-nationalism. I could not stomach either option. I wrote at the time that a politics of love offered the only sane way forward, knowing then that neither party really represented that at the national level, and that few candidates in either party represented that at any level up or down the ballot.
By midsummer of 2020, I realized I couldn’t vote for either major party candidate for president, even knowing that, as a nominee of the Democratic Party engaged in a race for office, my lack of support for Joe Biden would cause friction with the local and state political establishment.
In early August, I recorded a video in front of my church that detailed how I felt neither political party represented my faith, and I posted it to my campaign’s YouTube page. Little more than a week later, I posted a meme on my official campaign Facebook page that would land me in hot water with several local Dem activists and even the chair of my county Democratic Party. The meme declared in no uncertain terms that I had no intention of voting for Joe Biden.
By that point, I had decided against voting for the Green Party’s nominee for president, Howie Hawkins. Although his platform resonated with me, the more I dug into his campaign and its conduct in that party’s primary in 2020, the more I felt he and other activists within the Green Party had rigged their primary in his favor, deciding as far back as 2016 that he was the preferred choice and arranging to handicap any alternative candidate. I wasn’t about to jump from what I perceived to be an unfair Democratic Party primary to a smaller but still unfair Green Party primary.
So, for the first time in my life, I had no idea for whom I would vote in the presidential election. By the end of that month, I had found not only my candidate for president, but a political party that I could call my home.
That candidate was Brian Carroll of California. That party was the American Solidarity Party, a party based on the Christian Democratic principles found in Catholic Social Teaching and in Protestant political theology.
Since that time, I’ve discovered thousands of people, mostly Christians, who felt the same as I do. Some had abandoned the Democratic Party over abortion. Some, like me, found the Democratic Party to be too far to the left on social issues and too far to the right on every other issue. Some had abandoned the Republican Party over Trump. Some had even deeper issues with Republican indifference over or outright hostility toward issues of economic, racial and environmental justice, and felt Trump was simply the last straw.
I knew the thousands who had jumped ship to ASP were merely the tip of the spear. I later found even more Christians whose post-partisan mindset might not yet have caused them to abandon their partisan affiliation, but who felt that they could not help but speak out against that partisanship from within their parties. The most inspiring of these groups to me was the AND Campaign.
So, imagine my joy upon getting the opportunity this year to come on board the electoral campaign of one of AND’s executive leaders, Pastor Chris Butler. I finally had the chance to work for a candidate for whom I did not have to hold my nose. At last, I had found not just a political home, but a ride-or-die political friend with whom I could co-labor for the Kingdom.
I’m not going back to unthinking political partisanship. At the Civic Update, we’re embarking with you on a journey that might make you question your partisan assumptions, if indeed your presence here isn’t indication enough that you have done so already.
You may not make the same choices I have to leave whatever major party to which you pledge your votes on Election Day. But I, for one, hope you do. I hope the whole church realizes that our political strength lies not in attempting to force secular political institutions to look more like us, but in being called out of the culture and prophetically speaking truth to power.
I encourage you with the words of Justin Giboney, who opens the AND Campaign’s Church Politics podcast with the words, “Grab your Bible, get your mind right, and prepare to think not like a Republican, not like a Democrat, but like a Christian.”
Declare your political independence. Let’s show America what a church independent of either political party can do in the culture and for the Kingdom of God.