(Christianity Today) — Here we are, right at the end, and the election is a coin toss.” A friend said that to me just a few minutes ago, referring to the razor-thin polling margins between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. A few thousand votes one way or the other in as few as three swing states could produce radically different alternatives for the future of the country.
I wonder, though, whether as American Christians we ought to think of Election Day as a coin toss in a different way as well. Even in a more secularized society, the words “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17, ESV throughout) are still recognizable to most people. The account—from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke—recounts Jesus’ response to the question of whether to pay taxes to the Roman emperor’s regime.
Like many other Scriptures, those words have been grossly misused. They’re quoted to justify churches engaging directly in political activism (often paired with a misreading of Abraham Kuyper’s famous declaration that there is not one square inch of the universe that Jesus does not claim as “Mine”). They are also quoted to make the case for a separation of Christian conscience from public justice (often with a similarly downgraded version of Martin Luther’s idea of two kingdoms).
Jesus’ words here actually speak sharply to what it means to be his follower in a time of pronounced divisions and high stakes. But to hear them rightly, we must pay attention to how Jesus discerned what was real and what was false. In many ways, his political situation—though radically different, set in an ancient empire rather than a modern democracy—was similar to the one facing us right now.
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Russell Moore is Editor in Chief of Christianity Today and is the author of the book Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call for Evangelical America (Penguin Random House). He also hosts the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show and is co-host of Christianity Today’s weekly news and analysis podcast, The Bulletin. An ordained Baptist minister, Moore served previously as President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and, before that, as the chief academic officer and dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he also taught theology and ethics. Moore was a Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics and currently serves on the board of the Becket Law and as a Senior Fellow with the Trinity Forum in Washington, D.C.
