How should Christians vote?
by Ian Paul, Psephizo:
A friend posted online a short story which highlighted a key issue for Christians in voting on June 8th.
Recently, while I was weeding my front garden, my neighbours stopped to chat as they returned home from walking their dog. During our friendly conversation I asked their little girl what she wanted to be when she grew up. She said she wanted to be Prime Minister someday.
Both of her parents, Labour Party members, were standing there, so I asked her, “If you were Prime Minister what would be the first thing you would do?”She replied, “I’d give food and houses to all the homeless people”.
Her parents beamed with pride.
“Wow, what a worthy goal”, I said. “But you don’t have to wait until you’re Prime Minister to do that”, I told her.
“What do you mean?” she asked, so I told her. “You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull out the weeds, and trim my hedge, and I’ll pay you £50. Then you can go over to the shop, where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the £50 to use toward food and a new house.”
She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, “Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the £50?”
I said, “Welcome to the Conservative Party.”
Her parents aren’t speaking to me anymore.
It is, of course, fictional, and some would read it as rather flippant. But it does open up a key issue often left unexcavated in Christian discussion of politics: if we are truly seeking the welfare of our neighbour, does that primarily involve providing aid in the form of social security, or does that primarily involved enabling all to participate in the dignity of work? Or, put it another way, should we tackle poverty or the root causes of poverty? When Paul Bayes, Bishop of Liverpool, tweeted:
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