On the "Lesser of Two Evils"

What's a Christian to do?

(This is an excerpt from my book Christ’s Co-Rulers, available to paying subscribers or on Amazon or Focus Press. Paperback coming soon!)

Ahead of the 2024 election, pollster George Barna shared that 32 million self-identified Christians who regularly attend church wouldn’t vote at all.

The reasons why probably vary–some out of disinterest, some because they have bought into the rhetoric about Christians not entangling with worldly affairs, and some who found the candidates distasteful. In any case, that is a group large enough to change the trajectory of the country, yet they have decided to abstain from using the tool given them. 

Some will run ahead and ask “is it a sin not to vote?” or its cousin question, “Can we Scripturally bind a command to vote?” As always, I despise such questions, because they are an attempt to shut off our brains. Everything is a binary yes/no rather than a mature discernment of good/better/best. 

As Paul took the right given to him by the law to invoke an appeal to Caesar (Acts 25:9-12), so Christians can use the rights given to us, such as votes and petitions. And just because it is not the ultimate good of soul-saving evangelism, it does not mean it is not a good. Pulling a child out of oncoming traffic isn’t evangelism, either, but it’s a good thing to do. 

Voting on the “big” issues (abortion, LGBT matters, immigration, war) often correlates with the more day-to-day matters like cost of living, education, and crime. To pretend these things aren’t any different from administration to administration or municipality to municipality is to deny reality.

But what if you feel like our options are so poor that you aren’t sure you want to get involved?

The reality of the matter is, especially when it comes to Presidential elections, our options are rarely going to be upstanding people who uphold all of our values. Can we, then, support a “lesser of two evils” option?

The trolley problem

What we have here is a trolley problem, a thought experiment in which someone has to choose between letting the trolley roll down the left side and kill five people tied to the tracks, or flip a switch to reroute the trolley to the right, which will kill another person.

It’s a question of agency: do you allow five people to die but keep clean hands, or do you save the five by flipping the switch, thereby killing one who would not have died? Taking agency in a way that results in one death feels a lot dirtier than not getting involved. But as good as it feels to keep our hands clean, that does not absolve the responsibility of the four excess deaths.

Making matters worse, in this particular trolley problem of our election, the person on the right tracks dies no matter what you do. The worst things about the red tracks, like their weakness on abortion and LGBT matters, are echoed and amplified by the blue tracks.

Under the current circumstances of national politics, there is no switch that can be pulled or not pulled that will avoid those unfortunate realities. That being the case, inactivity or siding with the greater of two evils is even worse, since there is an option to at least do some good by flipping the switch to the right tracks.

What about the worst case scenario? Does the logic hold up?

What if the options were, say, Hitler and Stalin? Would we still choose the lesser of two evils?

It’s a fair thought experiment, because it takes the lesser of two evils thinking out to its extreme. Assuming you actually had a say, why wouldn’t you do your research and figure out which of two abhorrent options would be less bad, even if only mildly so? Then, having made that choice, your role would change from choosing them to opposing any evil they tried to enact. 

We do not live in a world in which our options are ribeye or lobster. Nor do we live in a world in which, when presented with rotten fish or burnt kale, we can say “I’ll take a ribeye, please!” In the real world, less than ideal choices have to be made every day.

And whether we make this particular choice or not, we’re still getting a plate of food placed in front of us. Seeing as the burnt kale, as distasteful as it may be, makes it more likely that we’ll live to fight another day, choose that one. This does not mean we love the choice, but that we’re doing the best we can with the options available to us.

The cost of clean hands

To cite Dr. Barna once again, his survey also found that “simply encouraging people to vote in order to fulfill their biblical responsibility would not only be seen as doing their job while helping the community, but an estimated five million regular churchgoers would be likely to vote as a result of that simple exhortation.” 

It is impossible to calculate the many downstream effects of five million churchgoers being persuaded to participate, but it would almost certainly be enough to swing major elections.

It might be the difference between a packed Supreme Court re-establishing Roe or a rightward-moving Supreme Court someday overturning Obergefell. It could be the difference between wars in Ukraine and Gaza ending or continuing, with impacts on future conflicts as well. It could be the difference between gas and groceries being affordable, or being so budget-straining that churches, missionaries, and ministry organizations are shut down due to a lack of funds.

That’s what’s at stake every time one of these guys gets up and obliviously reassures their congregation that “No matter what happens, Jesus is still on His throne,” thereby encouraging their faction of the pivotal five million voters to stay home and not care.

Politics are about tough decisions and difficult tradeoffs. But when somebody feels warm and fuzzy about keeping their hands clean by staying above those difficult tradeoffs, point them to the blood on the tracks spilled by the trolley they could have stopped, but wouldn’t.

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Notes

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