Articles
Nine Election-Year Temptations
The following article was written by a respected Christian leader back in 1992. It remains a useful
perspective in the superheated political climate of our time. ~Dan Williams, Harding University
Nine Election-Year Temptations
1. To try to use God as an instrument for achieving our own ends rather than humbly serving
God as instruments for fulfilling His purposes.
2. To offer simplistic remedies for problems that are extremely complex and for issues that are
inescapably ambiguous.
3. To argue that only one position on a multifaceted matter is biblically mandated, when actually
there may be several viable approaches.
4. To equate personal piety with legislative and administrative competence, refusing to admit
that spirituality is not the same as statecraft.
5. To identify our insights and programs with the truth and will of God – absolutizing the
relative, dogmatically declaring, “Thus saith the Lord,” as if we knew exactly the divine
mind – and refusing to admit that the policies we advocate for healing society’s ills are at
best the fallible prescriptions of finite minds.
6. To refuse to compromise, even on matters that do not involve moral principles, forgetting that
politics, as the art of doing the possible, requires give and take.
7. To forget that our country is not a covenant nation standing in a unique relationship to God,
but a pluralistic, secular society where justice for all faiths must be maintained.
8. To fall back on sub-Christian means to achieve our ends: forsaking the claims of honesty,
fairness, and courtesy; scathingly caricaturing an opponent; failing to state a rival policy
position accurately and fully; stereotyping a person who disagrees with us; employing
questionable fundraising techniques.
9. To believe the siren of voices of demagogues and fanatics, not critically analyzing deceptive
rhetoric.
In the end, the issue is humility – not letting our religious fervor blind us to our own
fallibility, and not trying to wrest the helm of history from the hands of God. As Sir Herbert
Butterfield wrote, “It would be a good thing if men would recognize that, in the case of many of
the world’s conflicts, the struggle is not between right and wrong, but between one half-truth too
willful and another half-truth too proud.” ~Vernon Grounds, Denver, CO (edited for space)
