Hypocrisy. . .

Hypocrisy.  The media has point out the hypocrisy of the Black Church that will not uniformly adopt the ordination of women or the acceptance of the full GLBTQ agenda.  The occasion is the election of Chicago's first black, woman, openly lesbian, married to a white woman, mayor.  But is it hypocrisy?  Is it hypocrisy to vote for someone to lead the government whom you would not like to see as your pastor or sit next to in the pew?  I wish that I could say that Christians, particularly orthodox and conservative Christians, have the luxury of finding credible candidates whose political views and whose theological stance are both laudable and consistent with their moral compass and their creeds.  It has been a long time when even the presumption of such a thing might exist -- much less the reality.  The truth is that many, dare I say most, Christians hold their nose in the voting booth because the choices before them are not the choices they would have.  Is this hypocrisy or voting for the lesser evil?  Is this hypocrisy or acting as good citizens as best one may within the choices afforded them?  I have no idea who Mayor Elect Lightfoot is or what she stands for but to suggest that the Black Churches of Chicago are practicing hypocrisy is a laugh given the history of the machine politics that have long dominated the Windy City.

Honestly, I would love to suggest that the Christian could act with the kind of integrity that would allow them the freedom to vote only for those whose political and theological stands are consistent with their own.  That would essentially disenfranchise Christians from the political process and create the larger issue of an absence of people of faith in the choosing of the leaders whom the process has set before us as the choices on election day.  Perhaps in primaries it might be easier to be consistent but in the general election, when the choices have been set, we do not always have the liberty to select people whose character and faith are consistent with our own.  This is hardly hypocrisy.  It is reality.

Sadly, we live in such fractured political times that the good people we would love to elect have largely chosen not to run, not to subject themselves or their families to the scrutiny and feeding frenzy of media -- not for a short time but for as long as two years (witness the numbers of Democrats already turning us away from today and onto November 2020).  The tragic fact is that we have structured such a system and such an environment when wise men and women who have made some mistake in their past and learned from it are automatically ineligible to run, when every slip of the tongue ends up causing blood in the water of social media, when parties no longer mean that much and the cult of personality reigns, when special interests dominate, when it is presumed that anyone can only represent his or her own demographic, and when the great issues before us (protection of life is one great example) are buried under a mountain of tweets and sound bytes.  If Christians wait for the right candidate who has moral credibility and theological integrity that appeals to them, they will be sitting out the election process for a long time.

There is hypocrisy, to be sure, but it is less the creedal and moral norms that Christians bring with them to the ballot box than progressivism and liberalism parading as open and positive when their ideas are marketed within a politics of division and their conversations open only to those who agree with them. Long ago Christians of all colors have learned that the choices before them may not appeal to their faith or to their morality but they are the lesser evil or have the most chance of protecting the Christians' rights to believe, speak, and practice their faith.