Actually, most people are like me, very few are politically knowledgable enough to feel absolutely sure in their economically political beliefs. For example, a good friend of mine, a man who is a very morally conservative person, is currently a Bernie Sanders supporter. I struggled for a significant amount of time trying to figure out how someone who is clearly a Born Again Christian with conservative theology could support a self-proclaimed godless person like Bernie.
I now believe it is the result of having wrong priorities when evaluating candidates.
My good friend, while being conservative on moral issues, is fairly centerist/liberal on economic issues. He likes some of Bernie's ideas about income inequality and campaign finance reform. Now, I'm not going to discuss the merits or lack thereof of those types of policies in this post; I want to concern myself with whether or not they should even be a priority to the Christian voter. There's an old saying, "It's the economy, stupid!" But is that really true?
I want to present the idea that there are certain beliefs which, no matter how great a candidate is otherwise, disqualify him from our votes. For example, we can all agree that even if a candidate was absolutely perfect on every other issue, we could not support him if he thought we should bring back slavery, or something of that nature, right? There are some beliefs that are so basic that they are non-negotiable.
I want you to get this so I will say it again:
Some Ideas are So Important that We Cannot Support Candidates Who are Wrong About Them
I think the first thing we should do when evaluating the field is to look at which candidates are preemptively disqualified because of crazy/horrible/disgusting/evil positions on certain basic issues.
One of the issues that is non-negotiable is abortion. Any candidate that supports a woman's right to murder her child cannot receive support from Christian individuals. This is so basic.
Another one of these issues might be gay marriage. I'm not as certain that this is disqualifying but it is definitely important. I would struggle to support any candidate that defies God's command concerning marriage.
Now, many issues that most conservatives consider extremely important are actually secondary. For example, gun control. Conservatives get so fired up about something that is not a morally imperative issue. The Bible never commands governments to allow their citizens to bear arms, at least as far as I know. Now I'm not saying that gun control is not an important issue, but I am saying that many conservatives place it above what are actually, in God's eyes, the most important issues.
Other issues that are not immediately disqualifying are : social security, Medicare, Medicaid, obamacare, military funding, state's rights, and that's just off the top of my head. Now again, each of these issues is important, and I'm not saying we shouldn't take them into account when choosing who to support, but I am saying that we should have already gone through to see who we cannot support before we get to these issues.
This is the argument I will present to my friend. I will not try to convince him of the falsehood of Bernie's economic ideas because the issues at hand are too complicated for me to truly understand and it would be almost impossible to change someone's opinion about them anyway. But I will try to show him that even if the rest of Bernie's policies are good, it is untenable to support a candidate with a moral compass so directly supposed to the God of the Bible.
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