The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler spoke at the Family Research Council’s Pray, Vote, Stand Summit in Atlanta on Thursday where he offered some thoughts on voting. Basically, good Christians need to do it and they need to do it the right way or they’re not good Christians after all. Oh, and we do mean the Right way.
Listen:
Mohler says it’s “absolutely necessary” that Christians vote in the upcoming midterms and “insofar as [Christians] do not vote or they vote wrongly, they are unfaithful.”
Hmmm, well. What does wrongly mean exactly? There was a lot of immediate speculation online that for Mohler, voting “wrongly” means voting Democrat. Mohler made a very public about face in 2020 after declaring that he would “never” support former President Donald Trump, instead throwing his support behind Trump.
Mohler took to Twitter to confirm that, yes, he believes faithful Christians will vote Republican. “If you are offended that I encourage Christians to vote FOR candidates who defend the unborn and support the integrity of marriage and to vote AGAINST candidates who support abortion and subvert marriage, that has been my message my entire adult life,” he tweeted.
It’s all there on the record in written form for you to read. Better make a strong cup of coffee, there are a few million words. I direct you to https://t.co/Frg6grY0D6. It’s not like the argument is in secret code. I am confident the vast majority of Southern Baptists agree. 2/2
— Albert Mohler (@albertmohler) September 15, 2022
Fair enough, but that tweet represented a step back on Mohler’s part. Encouraging Christians to vote for candidates is one thing. We all encourage our friends to vote for the candidates we think will make the country a better place. But in his speech, Mohler went much further, saying anyone who doesn’t vote like him is being “unfaithful.”
Voters will have to accept that there is no perfect political party for the Christian worldview. Your personal convictions and priorities may be better represented by one party or another, but it is very unlikely that either is an exact match and if it is, you probably need to rethink just who is steering your worldview. Christians of good conscience might disagree over which party earns their vote more than the other, but setting up one side as the political party of faithful Christians while the other is the party of the wayward is a recipe for disaster.