How Christians Should Vote In 2016

By Jay Neuman

When Americans go to the voting booth on November 8, 2016, we are facing a choice like we have never seen before in our history. A dark shadow has come over American politics during this election. As people of faith in our country, it is the responsibility of Christians to be a light in that darkness. This eBook is meant to be an ABC guide to voting as a Christian in the United States. It presents fundamental biblical values behind some of the key policy issues debated today. It also presents the basic approaches to government and key policies behind our two-party system. Armed with that understanding, it will be up to each of us to make our own decisions when we enter the voting booth in November.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365433757

Book preview

How Christians Should Vote In 2016

Title

How Christians Should Vote In 2016

Copyright

Copyright  2016 Jay Neuman

All Rights Reserved

Chapter 1: America is Great Because America is Good

This eBook is meant to be an ABC guide to voting as a Christian in the United States.  It presents fundamental biblical values behind some of the key policy issues debated today.  It also presents the basic approaches to government and key policies behind our two-party system.  Armed with that understanding, it will be up to each of us to make our own decisions when we enter the voting booth on November 8th.

An American Romance

My parents have a classic American love story.  They met on an Army base in Germany in the 1950s.  My father was an Army officer.  My mother was a teacher at the elementary school on base.  My father is a child of immigrants.  His family were Jews from Eastern Europe.  My mother’s family were tobacco farmers in North Carolina.  She can trace her family heritage to Virginia before the Revolutionary War.  Theirs is the American story of two people from completely different backgrounds united by their common love for each other and their deep belief in American values.  They are still happily married today, after more than 50 years together.

My parents’ story in many ways is the story of America.  We are a nation of immigrants from every part of the globe, united by a common set of core values.  We are still together after over 200 years.  The marriage of new arrivals to more established American population groups is sometimes rocky.  But we always emerge stronger.  The best of both are united and bound together with the common cord of those core American values.  That has made us a light to the world in every generation.

While still on the ship bound for the New World, John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, preached a sermon to the future colonists.  It was called A Model of Christian Charity.  He shared his vision of the purpose for the new colony.  "We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us."  These are among the most famous words in American history.  They define who we believe we are as a people.   With these words, John Winthrop passed a baton to future generations.  As people of faith in our generation, it is our responsibility to pick up that baton.  The eyes of all the people of the world are still upon us.

America is Great Because America is Good

My father has a favorite story he likes to tell about his days at the Army base in Germany.  This was just a few years after WWII had ended.  Before he met my mother, he went on few dates with a German girl who worked on the base.  One evening, she invited him to have dinner with her family.  After a short time of conversation with her father, my father discovered that he was talking to an officer from Hitler’s SS.  My father tells how he fought to keep his composure.  But he especially likes the point in his story when he tells the ex-SS Officer that he is Jewish.  He says the man was quite cordial.  Still both of them knew just a few years earlier his life mission was to kill all of the Jews.  Because my father’s foreign religion was seen as the source of all his nation’s problems.

My uncle, my Dad’s only brother, has a very close friend who has a number tattooed on his arm.  He is a world-class physicist who invented a key part of the technology that makes a superconductor work.  I was invited to their home a few years ago.  When American soldiers entered Germany in 1945, they found the concentration camps.  That is where my uncle’s friend got his tattoo.  Those soldiers discovered that we were not only fighting to free the countries who had been conquered by Hitler.  We were also fighting to save a people.  When those soldiers returned home and sailed into New York Harbor, they passed a statue with words at its base that remind us who we are as a nation:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp! cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Those words at the base of the Statue of Liberty remind us that America’s strength gives hope to the world that nobody will ever have a number tattooed on their arm again.  They remind us that we must never again judge somebody by their religion, or the color of their skin, but by their potential to invent something that changes the world.

An anonymous quote, sometimes attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville, describes what all Americans believe in our heart and soul about our country. 

America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.

If we ever lose our goodness, then we have lost everything that truly matters. 

In 2016, we are standing on the precipice of losing the one thing that truly makes us great, our goodness.  We are at risk of forgetting who we are.

The United States in 2016

The United States in 2016 is the strongest nation on earth. 

We are still the one and only superpower.  Our economy is the largest on earth.  Nearly a quarter of the entire gross product of the world is American.  We are still sluggishly recovering from the Great Recession of 2008, but we are doing better than the rest of the world.  We have seen the longest period of steady job growth in our nation’s history.  Our military is stronger than the next 10 nations combined.   Crime is at near record lows.  The streets of our cities are safer than they have been since the early 1960s.  American businesses have set new records for corporate profits every year since 2010.  Racial divisions, although still very real, have been healed enough to give us the first Black president in our history.  We have every reason to celebrate what we have accomplished together as a nation.  We have some very real problems that still