Does your faith indluence who you for vote in a secular election?

[Tommy999]

Starts with the Bishops. As a whole they are focusing more on things like immigration and hospitality when i feel like intrinsic evil should be the priority(Abortion, etc). And it’s trickled down to the priests and deacons and this is what they are feeding the sheep.

And I’ve noticed the same things in African American Churches on the protestant side. A lot of times they break democratic as well. What are they being told in their pews there? No idea but not sure how true Christians of any shape or size can turn a blind eye to so much evil.:shrug:/QUOTE]

I hadn’t thought about it much previously but I think you’re right on that. Perhaps there is a cultural and historical aspect to this, as well.

I don’t know many African Americans personally, but the ones I know are generally opposed to abortion and same sex marriage but they tend to believe that the Democrats care more about their social and economic well-being as well as their civil rights. Perhaps that is the same way with a significant amount of Catholics in these polls, but I truly don’t know.

 

[Tommy999]

I am going to go by the five non-negotiables (pages 3 through 5 in the link below), since this is my first major election as a Catholic.

catholic.com/sites/default/files/voters_guide_for_serious_catholics.pdf

Thanks for sharing that, Graceful_Lamb. I didn’t realize there was such a guide.

 

[Tommy999]

Thanks to everyone who replied to this thread… and sorry for misspelling the word ‘Influence’ in the thread title. That’s what happens when you try to type too fast.

 

[Cheiron]

To me, faith matters as well. Generally speaking, I won’t vote for a believer, though I did make an exception for a very intelligent Catholic a few years ago.

It absolutely is relevant. In the Ontarian election, there was a woman running named Kathleen Wynne (she’s now our Premier, unfortunately). She’s open about the fact that she’s a homosexual. I don’t believe a person that’s openly homosexual is fit to lead Ontario or any other leadership position. For this reason, I didn’t vote for her. It would’ve been comparable to voting for an openly adulterous person or someone who openly confesses to stealing.

I wouldn’t vote for someone who is pro-choice, either. That’s not negotiable.

If you think that two consenting adults in a same-sex relationship is comparable to stealing, then I guess whether an action is harmful or not is irrelevant to what you consider to be moral. And this is one of the main problems I have with religious lawmakers: they tend to put into law whatever they think God decreed to be moral or immoral, regardless of its effect on society.

 

[Entwhistler]

To me, faith matters as well. Generally speaking, I won’t vote for a believer, though I did make an exception for a very intelligent Catholic a few years ago.

If you think that two consenting adults in a same-sex relationship is comparable to stealing, then I guess whether an action is harmful or not is irrelevant to what you consider to be moral. And this is one of the main problems I have with religious lawmakers: they tend to put into law whatever they think God decreed to be moral or immoral, regardless of its effect on society.

Actually, I agree with you. Not about Gay Marriage but about leaders legislating morality too much. There are some religious lawmakers who make laws regarding morality and do not look at their consequences. I believe that Aquinas (or was it Augustine?) who, in regards to prostitution, observed that laws against such a sin would do more harm than good. That does not negate its intrinsic evil. It is just taking reality into perspective.

 

[Horton]

Along with many others here my faith is a huge deciding factor in this election. I am very conservative in my views, political and otherwise.

I can not vote for a candidate whose position on social issues is so opposite of mine. I oppose abortion, and I especially oppose taxpayer funded abortion. I’m opposed to a so called Catholic who believes abortion is fine and taxpayers should pay for it.

As a Catholic my resolve to not vote for the Democratic candidate was increased by her choice of VP once I heard his positions on major issues. I’m not a one issue voter but there are many issues the Democrats position on is in opposition to mine. Abortion is a biggie but there is more than that. Their unwillingness to confront a major enemy of Christianity is another. Their position on law enforcement, or against law enforcement is another.

In the beginning I was not crazy about Trump. I prayed one of the other candidates would actually get the nomination. But…over time I’ve come to understand his approach better. Yes he can be bombastic and inappropriate at times. However, I will be voting for him this November.

 

[Cheiron]

Actually, I agree with you. Not about Gay Marriage but about leaders legislating morality too much. There are some religious lawmakers who make laws regarding morality and do not look at their consequences. I believe that Aquinas (or was it Augustine?) who, in regards to prostitution, observed that laws against such a sin would do more harm than good. That does not negate its intrinsic evil. It is just taking reality into perspective.

Thanks. There is also the matter of small government versus big government. I’d like the government to be out of my bedroom and out of the doctor’s office. For example, a ban on contraception is not just big government. It’s huge government. Gargantuan government!

 

[jlhargus]

Hello all,
Just curious to what extent your faith influences for whom you will vote in a secular election like the upcoming US presidential election or any other election, for that matter.

For instance, do you vote for a candidate of the same faith as yours (if there is one) as the main voting qualification criteria or does faith play no role whatsoever? Perhaps somewhere in between?

Background example:
Back in 1976 and 1980, my fellow evangelicals voted for Jimmy Carter in large numbers. At my evangelical university in 1980, I was looked down upon when I was asked for whom I was going to vote and I told them, "Ronald Reagan’. After all, Ronald Reagan was a divorced movie star whereas Jimmy Carter was a faithful Christian of one wife who wore his faith on his sleeves. At my Christian school, I was considered a disloyal rebel who was out of step with what was considered right by my peer group.

I told them at the time that if I was voting for next door neighbor, I would vote for Carter but that I thought Reagan would make the better overall leader based on other traits I saw in him.

In this year’s US presidential election, one of the candidates is of the same Christian faith tradition as me. However, I do not share that political party’s views on many important issues and so I do not intend to vote for that candidate, even though the opposing candidate is not much to write home about, either.

Scenario for Catholics:
One of the vice presidential candidates is a Catholic who by all accounts attends Mass regularly and even sings in the choir. However, he is part of a ticket that opposes Catholic teaching on abortion and same sex marriage, if I understand correctly.

The opposing VP candidate is an evangelical who shares the same views on abortion and “gay marriage” that Catholicism teaches, but he is not a practicing Catholic anymore.

As a Catholic, are you more apt to vote for the candidate who has a Catholic VP running mate or the one who holds similar views as the Catholic Church on matters such as abortion and gay marriage but is not Catholic? Or does none of this factor in at all?

In case someone is interested about my own personal beliefs on this subject, my Christian faith helps form my conscience and my world view, which in turns helps me decide who to vote for – but my faith alone (no pun intended) is not the overriding factor, as illustrated above in the 1980 example I shared.

Your thoughts and (name removed by moderator)ut are welcomed.

makr

 

[pianistclare]

Thanks to everyone for the replies. Most of your replies so far were what I would expect from committed Catholics who live out the values of their faith. I admire and share these beliefs regarding abortion and same sex marriage, by the way.

One of the reasons I asked the question in the first place was because I am puzzled by polls that show that Catholics as a whole slightly favor the party that promotes abortion under the guise of “women’s health” and promote same sex marriage as “marriage equality”, that clearly go against Catholic teaching. In the last election, I saw stats that showed that Catholics gave the edge to our current president who also held values contrary to Catholicism and I was scratching my head about why that occurred.

My best guess is because some may be “socialized Catholics” who may or may not attend Mass on a regular basis but who apparently put other issues ahead of Catholic teaching on abortion and same sex marriage.

As a Methodist, I am sad that the candidate of my faith tradition is not Pro-Life and is a supporter of same sex marriage. That, and many other things, are why I couldn’t ever vote for her.

Beware the Polls.
Media - speak for “this is what other people think, so you should too”.
Polls depend on who is conducting them, and where they take them.
Pretty much useless, No one has ever polled our parish, community or city, for example.

Political polls are meant for people who are undecided. To sway.
To be fair, there are plenty of cafeteria Catholics. CAF-ers are lifers. LOL

 

[Tarquin]

I am going to go by the five non-negotiables (pages 3 through 5 in the link below), since this is my first major election as a Catholic.

catholic.com/sites/default/files/voters_guide_for_serious_catholics.pdf

Thanks for the link, Graceful_Lamb. Four of those are crucial when I consider all the positions of competing candidates. Cloning I am less certain on, because a cloned person would be a person, with arguably the same father and mother as the person from whom the cloning cell was taken. That issue is of a different category from issues in which a person is given not life but death. Thanks again for the link.

 

[Tommy999]

Beware the Polls.
Media - speak for “this is what other people think, so you should too”.
Polls depend on who is conducting them, and where they take them.
Pretty much useless, No one has ever polled our parish, community or city, for example.

Political polls are meant for people who are undecided. To sway.
To be fair, there are plenty of cafeteria Catholics. CAF-ers are lifers. LOL

Point well taken, Clare. I don’t remember being polled on anything political, either, although I was asked by the Nielsen group once to be in their poll on TV shows a number of years ago. I guess my choices were too boring because after about a month or two they quit asking me to do it.

 

[Tommy999]

Along with many others here my faith is a huge deciding factor in this election. I am very conservative in my views, political and otherwise.

I can not vote for a candidate whose position on social issues is so opposite of mine. I oppose abortion, and I especially oppose taxpayer funded abortion. I’m opposed to a so called Catholic who believes abortion is fine and taxpayers should pay for it.

As a Catholic my resolve to not vote for the Democratic candidate was increased by her choice of VP once I heard his positions on major issues. I’m not a one issue voter but there are many issues the Democrats position on is in opposition to mine. Abortion is a biggie but there is more than that. Their unwillingness to confront a major enemy of Christianity is another. Their position on law enforcement, or against law enforcement is another.

In the beginning I was not crazy about Trump. I prayed one of the other candidates would actually get the nomination. But…over time I’ve come to understand his approach better. Yes he can be bombastic and inappropriate at times. However, I will be voting for him this November.

I very much agree with you on this, Horton. I don’t care for Trump’s lack of humility and his belittling of all competition to the point where very few of them could even endorse him after the primary. But in the end, he is better than the alternative, in my opinion.

 

[badnewsbarrett]

Hello all,
Just curious to what extent your faith influences for whom you will vote in a secular election like the upcoming US presidential election or any other election, for that matter.

For instance, do you vote for a candidate of the same faith as yours (if there is one) as the main voting qualification criteria or does faith play no role whatsoever? Perhaps somewhere in between?

I’m going to say somewhere in between. I do have a preference to vote for someone with my religious beliefs, perhaps you could call it a bias, but then there’s a bunch of other things I consider and then I come back to it and see where it winds up.

In this particular election, I think that we would all be doing ourselves a favor if we start seeing it as the election of the third party, and possibly the end of a strictly two-party system. I believe both Hillary and Donald should be cast adrift at sea, and I’ll be voting for Gary Johnson. I reason it thusly.

Hillary is definitely going to increase government spending on a wide variety of different things, and the extraordinary presidential wartime powers (oops now it’s just anytime powers) will continue to expand under her watch. There’s a reason why she’s polling in the low teens among active US military, they don’t trust her hand to be on the button, so to speak. These are issues that have gotten progressively worse in the last 16 years under both W and Obama, and she will continue that progression. She’s been fairly open about that.

Trump is not really a conservative, and he’s also incredibly offensive. He pretends to be a conservative for five minutes and now I’m supposed to vote for him? Forget you, Donald Trump. And disclose your tax returns already, you spaghetti-squash-wearing coward. Oh no, you’re under an audit. Who discloses this kind of thing while under an audit? I’ll tell you who, Richard Nixon. Yeah, that’s right, Donald Trump is officially shadier than Richard Nixon when it comes to this. The comparisons don’t stop there- when it came to the US military, Richard Nixon- this is a true story- claimed that he had a very secret plan that would fix Vietnam, he would withdraw everyone quickly and leave it in great shape, but he couldn’t disclose what that plan was because he didn’t want the enemy to know. Then he got elected and guess what, his secret plan was to escalate Vietnam without any particular exit strategy. Trump has done half of that so far, and I strongly suspect he will do the other half but with more in the way of offensive rhetoric and scaremongering. Additionally, Nixon was known to appoint people to positions of power and then have them do his dirty work for him, including his attorney general. Trump has already implied that the owner of a media conglomerate who criticized him really ought to be audited extra hard, he implied some sort of wrongdoing and suggested that someone should rattle his cage. If Trump appoints Chris Christie as his attorney general- which is his most likely move- there is no telling what kind of shady business the two of them could concoct.

And then there’s Gary Johnson. I want him to be elected, and then I want him to have the ability to use the line item veto. If he is able to do this, he will line item Washington lobbyists out of a job description. He says he will draw down our military entanglements and he actually will, his plan is to reduce the defense portion of the budget by about 30% and he actually will. Among those actively serving in the US military, he is the leader in their polls, and it’s been an eternity since any third party candidate has been the leader in any meaningful category. I don’t agree with all of his socially liberal views, but I do believe he will fight corruption more than any of the other candidates and I know he has more experience with handling budgets than either of the other nominees (though in fairness the VPs do). As far as his religion goes, he has some form of vague spirituality but doesn’t have ideas about God that conform to organized religion and he says the god he prays to doesn’t need to be found in a church. If memory serves, I believe he was married and now divorced, he’s been seeing someone but they aren’t really planning on getting married at this time. None of that is particularly ideal, and if all other things were pretty much equal I might care about that a little more. But all other things are not equal,

To summarize, Hillary Clinton is corrupt, ambitious, self-serving, and a congenital liar who despises traditional notions of decency. Donald Trump’s only previous experience in the political arena is in the capacity of being a crony, and aside from that, he is arrogant, areligious, anti-constitutional, ignorant, big-government, an ad hoc panderer, and he gave Hillary money. There are extremely good reasons why these two candidates rank 1 and 2 with their negatives in the all time history of American politics, and we are fortunate to have a third party candidate that will be on the ballot in all 50 states. I would vote for almost anyone in order to avoid these two, and Gary Johnson actually seems fairly competent and somewhat likable.

In a normal election where the glaring negatives do not stand in such stark contrast with one another, I probably would have more of a reason to pay attention to religious practice and affiliation. This election is anything but normal though.

Side note. A vote for Gary Johnson is not “a vote for Hillary” or “a vote for Trump.” A vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Gary Johnson. He can actually win some electoral votes, and that means he can win this election.

 

[badnewsbarrett]

Faith plays some role for sure but I am not voting for a spiritual director. This is politics and government. I usually go for the “least-worst” since most often there is no “best” sorry to say. I try and think of who will do the least amount of damage when it comes to matters of important issues, sometimes it’s a tough call.

It’s not such a tough call this time around. Trump and Hillary both stand to do a tremendous amount of damage, and it clearly makes the most amount of sense to vote for a third party candidate.

 

[badnewsbarrett]

Abortion is the deal breaker for me. Call me a 1 issue voter all you want but if our government can sanction the innocent killing of the unborn, what else can the do?

Too bad for you none of the candidates in this election are pro-life (excluding the VP choices). I mean, one of them is lying about it, but all of them are pro-choice.

 

[Tarquin]

In this particular election, I think that we would all be doing ourselves a favor if we start seeing it as the election of the third party, and possibly the end of a strictly two-party system. I believe both Hillary and Donald should be cast adrift at sea, and I’ll be voting for Gary Johnson. I reason it thusly.
…
Trump is not really a conservative, and he’s also incredibly offensive. … And disclose your tax returns already, you spaghetti-squash-wearing coward. … Trump has already implied that the owner of a media conglomerate who criticized him really ought to be audited extra hard, he implied some sort of wrongdoing and suggested that someone should rattle his cage. …
To summarize, Hillary Clinton is corrupt, ambitious, self-serving, and a congenital liar who despises traditional notions of decency. Donald Trump’s only previous experience in the political arena is in the capacity of being a crony, and aside from that, he is arrogant, areligious, anti-constitutional, ignorant, big-government, an ad hoc panderer, and he gave Hillary money. There are extremely good reasons why these two candidates rank 1 and 2 with their negatives in the all time history of American politics, and we are fortunate to have a third party candidate that will be on the ballot in all 50 states. I would vote for almost anyone in order to avoid these two, and Gary Johnson actually seems fairly competent and somewhat likable.

…

Side note. A vote for Gary Johnson is not “a vote for Hillary” or “a vote for Trump.” A vote for Gary Johnson is a vote for Gary Johnson. He can actually win some electoral votes, and that means he can win this election.

I, too, believe the U.S. is at yet another crossroads where the rise of a new party could well happen. In fact, two new parties. A more clearly if not perfectly socialist party, and a libertarian sort of party. The more towards socialist issues Clinton goes, the greater the possibility becomes of Socialism replacing Democratism. The less conservative Trump goes, the greater the possibility of Libertarianism replacing Republicanism.

Trump is no more “offensive” than Hillary. He called one woman a “fat slob” and got caned for it. Hillary called a number of women “bitches” and “sluts,” and a number of men “Jew bastards,” and everyone looks the other way. I don’t know why Trump hasn’t disclosed his tax returns, whether his reason is legal, personal, or something else. I don’t know why Obama hasn’t released his school records either, nor why Clinton didn’t release her emails (by virtue of having them destroyed), although there is growing evidence of why not, nor why I have not been able to find a detailed breakdown of where Obama’s “Stimulus Package” a.k.a. slush fund went, nor what Hillary said to Wall Street bankers and investors. Presidents and Presidents’ Men do attack the Presidents’ opponents and critics and often make life hard for them. Hillary illegally obtained FBI files on every member of Congress, lied about it, and had a maid “find” them in a White House hallway. Obama turned the IRS into a political purge machine for his own advantage. Hillary used the Travel Office as a scape-goat, Obama and Bill Clinton used the Justice Department as a private buffer to protect them and their friends from the consequences of their illegal actions. It’s not just Trump who acts Presidential; it’s all of them.

I, too, have a somewhat favorable view of Gary Johnson.

 

[Tarquin]

… I don’t care for Trump’s lack of humility and his belittling of all competition to the point where very few of them could even endorse him after the primary. But in the end, he is better than the alternative, in my opinion.

Which candidate does not lack of humility - none. Which candidate has not belittled and is not belittling of at least some of their competition - none. This mud slinging began at the beginning of the 19th century and has never let up.

 

[Padres1969]

I’d say my faith loosely influences who I choose to vote for, but I always pick my candidate of choice based on the totality of who they are (based on their stated views, history that backs that, etc…) and the context they’re running in. That said they don’t have to share my beliefs fully for me to vote for them if on the balance I agree with their views and I feel they’re qualified.

 

[Tommy999]

Thanks again to all who replied to this thread. Your (name removed by moderator)ut is much appreciated. :tiphat:

Please pray for those in authority over us. May they turn to the Lord for wisdom and guidance.

 

[Graceful_Lamb]

Too bad for you none of the candidates in this election are pro-life (excluding the VP choices). I mean, one of them is lying about it, but all of them are pro-choice.

From what I understand, Trump is pro-life.