Previously I made the point that religious people cannot, and should not, separate their faith from their politics. In other words, what we believe as religious people should influence the way we vote. At the same time, what politicians stand for is what we are saying we stand for by virtue of our vote for them.
This means that while voting is important to everyone, it is especially so for people who are religious. Religion shapes a person’s values. Those values influence how a person votes. How a person votes in turn reveals the values she or he holds.
I am writing about this because it occurred to me after last week’s election that people of faith probably don’t think much about the inseparability of faith and politics, and what that relationship says about them.
But there is one caveat to consider. There are times when voters, religious and non-religious, support candidates even when they don’t agree with everything they stand for or promise they will do. What then?
In these instances I suggest it comes down to priorities. We have to decide as religious people which issues outweigh others. We may not agree with everything a candidate says she will do if elected, but we can make a judgement about the issues we think are important.
For me the common good is one way I make that determination.
That is the reason I believe so much in Obamacare. It is helping people who have never had health insurance before to get it. Before Obamacare for-profit insurance companies determined who got insurance and who didn’t, and we know the damage that did. So in the mid-terms keeping Obamacare and making it better was a priority issue for me.
The same was true regarding the economy. Because as a person of faith I am deeply troubled by the egregious economic inequality that exists between the rich and the non-rich in our nation, I weighed what candidates said they would do about the economy based on whether or not they would use their office to address economic inequality, ignore it, or make it worse.
Sometimes priority issues makes it easy to determine who to support and who not to. But at the end of the day it comes down to whether or not I want the values I say I hold as a religious person to be known by the politicians I vote for.
That, of course, is what voting means for religious people. We are saying publicly that the people we vote for represent what we believe and believe in. Understanding this fact is how we connect the dots between what we say we believe and how we vote.
Making that connection is the adult thing to do. It can also be quite sobering to examine the message American religious voters have been sending via that connection in the last several election cycles.
What that message has been, and whether it not it is consistent with the true message of the major religions of the world, especially Christianity, will be the focus of my coming Blogs starting Wednesday.
linnposts.com 
Religious? I think not. Spiritual, yes. There’s a WORLD of difference. They cannot be used interchangeably.
Personally I find the word “spiritual” too amorphous to have much meaning. But I use the word “religious” to be inclusive of people who claim their participation in an established religious tradition and take its beliefs and practices seriously. How what I say applies to being “spiritual” is something you will have to determine for yourself since the meaning of “spiritual” seems to me always to be in the eyes of the beholder, Not something I want to get into in this series.