Twenty years ago, John D. Roth thought members of his Anabaptist tradition should stop voting — if only for a season.
In an essay he distributed among clergy of the Anabaptist movement, which includes pacifist traditions such as the Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites, Roth called for a five-year break from voting to pray and reflect, rather than campaign for one candidate or the other. He argued that the differences between political aspirants were illusory and that in national elections Christians might better fulfill their role by questioning, challenging and discomfiting those holding power, rather than tacitly or explicitly supporting any particular party or person.
Roth believes his summons to a voting “sabbatical” is just as relevant today. “I wrote that essay 20 years ago, when the deep cultural divisions were just beginning to show up in our churches,” Roth told New Lines. “The idea was that we were in need of a deeper spiritual grounding in the face of the highly polarized political climate. Not surprisingly, that idea went nowhere.”
In a supercharged political landscape with MAGA evangelicals, “Hindus for Harris” and rising numbers of Muslims rallying behind Donald Trump, Jill Stein and Cornel West, it may come as a surprise that some people of faith in the U.S. abstain from voting entirely — or at least don’t take sides.
But understanding their reservations and motivations, experts say, might speak more to the current state of U.S. politics than any partisan zealotry coming from voters of faith this election cycle.
While MAGA evangelicals — and those who oppose them — get a lot of play in the headlines, there is a steady tradition of Christians abstaining from partisan politics completely, explained Michael Budde, a professor at DePaul University, a private Catholic university in Chicago, who teaches on religion and politics.
“Not all Christians have made their peace with secular powers,” Budde said. Whether it’s the early centuries of the Christian era and monastic dissenters in the desert, those who refused to take up the sword within the church after the Roman Emperor Constantine, or the Catholic Worker Movement and people like Daniel Berrigan, a Catholic Jesuit priest who vigorously opposed the Vietnam War, multiple Christian communities have resisted allowing empires and states to borrow their legitimacy from the church. In addition to these pacifist traditions, there are fundamentalist Christian groups that teach that Christians are not of this world and are not to become involved in its politics.
And this election cycle, a larger number of U.S. Christians seem set to sidestep the ballot box in accordance with their interpretation of the Bible and their evaluation of current politics. According to research from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, 104 million “people of faith” might abstain from voting this year — including up to 32 million churchgoing Christians. As political scientist Robert Postic wrote for the evangelical magazine Christianity Today, “given short-term political dynamics or the candidates available, declining to vote can be the best way to reflect our values and acknowledge the importance of an election.”
“Sometimes, the right choice,” Postic wrote, “may be not voting.”