Why I'm Not Voting

The first thing to say is that I’m not thought-out on this issue. I don’t know exactly why I’ve chosen not to vote. But I do have some idea, and I’m actively working on understanding my action better. In this I comfort myself with the fact that I have more reasons not to vote than the average voter has for voting.



Next, I stand among many, many people who choose not to vote. My primary inspirations have been the many abstainers in the Catholic Worker tradition (see Autobiography of a Christian Anarchist by Ammon Hennacy) and the German and Dutch Anabaptists of the so-called radical reformation – the Mennonites and the Amish. But there is also a large amount of non-Christian literature on the topic (see http://www.strike-the-root.com/vote.html), most of which I have not read, but which represents another throng of abstainers (Tolstoy, Thoreau, inter alia) from various points of view.

But why am I not voting?

I am a Christian personalist. This is to say that I am Christian who tries to embody the Sermon on the Mount and the call to see every person as Christ in view of the fact that Matthew 25 says that what we do to the least of our sisters and brothers we do to him, and what we don’t do to the least of them we don’t do to him. This was the driving theology behind the work of Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, and it continues to animate the Missionaries of Charity and the Catholic Workers today. This “personalism” means that I must see in every person “Christ in his distressing disguise,” and I must receive and interact with that person as though she were Christ. And I must extend to the disguised Jesus all of the practices outlined in the Sermon on the Mount. On this, says Jesus in Matthew 25, my salvation depends.

This personalism (and simply my experience) tells me that the only way that people are changed and transformed, as well as nourished, is by real relationships of mutual vulnerability where material, emotional, and intellectual gifts are freely given and freely received, often at great personal cost. The practices of this self-sacrificial, forgiving community (even if its just between two people) are the only context it makes sense to use the word “love”. This sort of vulnerable community is therefore what everyone needs. I guess its goofy, but I’m saying its true that what people, from Hitler to St. Francis need, and what the gospel calls Christians to, is love (defined this way). All change and human transformation depends on it, though paradoxically we cannot have a goal in real relationship other than the friendship itself (i.e., I am not talking about counseling, since there is no mutuality in that.).

This means, I think, that I am committed to a sort of Christian anarchy. I cannot accept or support (by vote) the way that the state and institutions deal with people because they do not deal with them as Christ. They do not see him in his distressing disguise. They see a means to an end. The end is some version of the greatest happiness/ prosperity for the greatest number of people. Concrete the homeless man is not Christ whom I should take into my home and get to know, open up to and eat with. He is a person who has certain needs to be filled so that I don’t have to deal with him anymore, at least not in the state he is in. The state deals with everyone impersonally, as a number, as a project to finish. War is of course the greatest example of this. It so utterly denies Christ in the other, the other becomes so depersonalized, that they become a means to some greater end and hence expendable to that end. The growing world corporation-state is of course just a war with money (which is the most impersonal abstraction), and in practice it cannot be separated from the literal wars our nations fight for money.

But this personalism commits me not just to pacifism and anti-consumerism/capitalism, but also it does not allow me to endorse even a police state or penal system. So Ralph Nader might appear a good candidate for me because he favors retraction of all US overseas military personnel, and crackdowns on corporations. But he still is not going to treat the criminal as Christ. He is not going to forgive the murderer, but punish him. The police state and penal system does not open up forgiveness and true gift-exchange as the solution to sin, and it does not see the lack of the former as the solution to, and the reason for, the latter.

So, Colin, you really want child molesters running around and terrorists blowing us up? First, this Christian personalism entails that safety is a non-issue. Christian perfection is achieved in martyrdom, not in living a long life of comfort. Second, this is the only way to really make the world safe: when those of us who have love are willing to enter into relationships with those who do not, and are maybe even willing to see thereby that we lack something (or many things) that they have. Only then will we all be remade. Concentrating the need for love in prisons and shelters will not work. Opening our houses and lives to prisoners, strangers, and enemies will make them our friends.

Of course, this is hopelessly idealistic. But it is the way of Jesus. I don’t think that I am called to make the world a more nearly just place if thereby I am unable to follow what Jesus says. He tells me to live seeing everyone as him, and not to tell other people to do otherwise, and so I cannot vote for any candidate on offer. As Hennacy says, to vote is to lift your neighbors arm to strike the other, and thus to deny the Sermon on the Mount. Voting is always coercing another's action without any relational resources in place.

Further, I don’t think I can support the lesser of two evils (say, Obama), and then later, when he tells me to shop, or go to war, or testify against Jesus in his distressing disguise, dissent from those very practices I voted for. I cannot vote for Obama and then be a conscientious objector. There is no integrity in that.

Of course, this position will make no sense to utilitarian calculus. It may or may not secure the more nearly just world. But it may: we simply will never know because we will never try. My action does not seek to be effective, it seeks to be faithful.

I am of course, hopelessly compromised. I pay taxes. I drive a car from time to time. I get a pay check from Duke University that gets its money from investing in multi-national corporations. My wife works for the City of Durham for crying out loud. And in a million other ways I contribute to the system that I stand against. I don’t always have patience for the homeless, I don’t always give the time and money and emotional gifts that I could. It is this stuff, if anything that would commit me to voting.

But I am trying to progress along the road of virtue. I confess these sins to my priest. I am trying to get to a life of voluntary poverty that would take care of a number of these compromised practices. I am trying to spend some time in real relationships with the poor. And I am looking to the Saints to figure out what to do next. I am trying to be faithful.

That is why I’m not voting.

C