Thabiti Anyabwile has weighed in with yet another excellent, searching post on voting.
Here are some choice excerpts:
- “Never has there been a more studied effort at performance, appearance, suggestion, posturing, and styling while ‘pivoting,’ ‘spinning,’ ‘ducking,’ and ‘redirecting’ away from substance.”
- “Some others will vote in a couple weeks because they’ve heard and perhaps believe that not voting is not an option. It’s fine if people feel that way, too. If you feel a moral ought when it comes to voting, do what you believe to be right. Even write and speak to convince others that voting is right, morally good, even morally necessary. But I don’t hold that view. Nor do I believe that speaking against the system while not voting is less effective than speaking against the system then voting.”
- “ the right of free speech comes prior to and is fundamental to voting, which is simply another form of speaking. The most necessary thing is that we speak, not that we vote. The more effective thing in a democratic society that prizes the free exchange of ideas isn’t the private, quiet, sometimes symbolic act of voting. The more effective thing is shouting from the rooftops, banging the drums or pots, repeatedly delivering the message, enacting a little civil disobedience that challenges the powers of complacency and complicity. The most effective weapon in the campaign of ideals are words, not ballots. Ballots have their place but only if they reflect what people are speaking.”
- “it seems to me that if we really believe the system is broken but we vote anyway, we simply nullify our contention that the system is broken.”
- “ if you think the farce of national democratic elections has reached an almost irretrievable state of disrepair, corrupted by big money on both sides and fundamentally manipulative and insincere in its presentation of candidates, then to vote could only end in one outcome no matter who is elected–the further entrenchment of the brokenness we decry”
- “ So far, I don’t see evangelical Christians being very shrewd about the political world”
- “I don’t have a political home and I need to fight to create one. It won’t likely be in either of the two major parties. It won’t be created by checking so much of who I am at the polling curtain and ticking a few blanks out of a vague sense of duty or an even vaguer hope that ‘this might work’ “