It was once that watching two 80-year-old men argue about what to do within the Middle East might occur by chance at McDonald’s at seven on a Saturday morning. Now, the entire world is watching because certainly one of those two men will get the nuclear codes.
The presidential debates this 12 months can have all kinds of implications for the country, but Christians should especially listen to what these events don’t do. The most vital aspects in selecting a frontrunner aren’t those being debated.
The problem shouldn’t be simply that presidential debates—and, increasingly, debates for lower offices—are entertainment driven, in ways in which Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman warned us about. The moments most individuals search for in a debate are more like pro wrestling than rational discussion of qualifications and issues.
Plenty of individuals—from all around the political spectrum—are nervous about this 12 months’s debates, but they’re not nervous that their candidate won’t have the suitable policy response. They are nervous that one candidate or the opposite might walk to the microphone and order the worth meal with extra fries or fall down the steps of the platform. But there’s a deeper reason why debates—even in one of the best of situations—don’t help us as much as we predict.
Debates tend to strengthen a fundamental problem with what we predict we’re doing when we decide leaders. The problem shouldn’t be that the debates aren’t focused enough on issues; it’s that we’re selecting a frontrunner to cope with issues that may’t possibly be asked about in a debate. That’s because probably the most critical questions facing any leader often aren’t all that foreseeable.
Debate moderators asked John F. Kennedy concerning the “missile gap” with the Soviet Union and about Cuba, but they couldn’t peer into how he would cope with a crisis about offensive weapons in Cuba that may spark a nuclear war. Richard Nixon didn’t debate anyone in 1968 when running for president, but when he had, no one would’ve thought to ask him if he would try to make use of the CIA to pressure the FBI to drop an investigation.
A debate stage couldn’t show how George W. Bush or Al Gore would reply to an attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Even if pandemic preparedness policy had been an issue within the debates between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, it might have been an abstract hypothetical, nothing like how decisions are really made about infected Americans on cruise ships or spurring on a quick development of a vaccine.
Many things in debates are more evident in hindsight than on the time. Ronald Reagan’s “There you go again” line with Jimmy Carter in 1980 was a preplanned talking point, but it surely really did show a basic leadership approach that characterised his presidency—an approach that his critics would dismiss as reading from cue cards but that almost all Americans would come to see as a genial steadiness. Donald Trump’s message from the talk stage to the white nationalist militia the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” was stunning on the time, but it surely takes on a completely different vibe watching it after January 6, 2021.
In any given election, you aren’t voting for a set of abstract issues. From a Christian perspective, the role of the state is, ultimately, to “bear the sword” of maintaining justice and order (Rom. 13:4). In a democratic republic, the persons are entrusting that sword to someone to wield it on their behalf.
That means electing leaders who aren’t just bundles of issues but quite those with the sort of character and temperament to be entrusted with nuclear codes, with the steadiness to make prudent decisions about sudden matters we will’t even predict straight away.
Since that’s the case, sometimes it’s more essential to see how candidates arrive at positions than what boxes they check off on a listing of policy options. Sometimes it’s as essential to see how candidates articulate positions than to know what those positions actually are.
Even those that disagreed strongly with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal could see that his articulation of his vision—“The only thing we have now to fear is fear itself”—was a profit to the country when something happened that nobody was asking about in 1932: how a commander in chief would rally a nation to answer an attack by imperial Japan.
This has implications beyond the presidency, to the overall query of how and on what basis we decide our leaders.
Despite the caricatures, we who imagine character matters for, say, the presidency don’t mistake a president for a pastor. The qualifications for any church office are different than those of a civic office—starting with the need of a living faith in Christ and a capability to show doctrine and discipleship to others.
What’s held in common, though, is that any position of leadership—whether church ministry director or county supervisor—rests on greater than just the power to parrot the “right positions” on whatever issues are being argued about in the meanwhile. In instructing the church methods to select leaders, the Holy Spirit devotes much more time to the needed character of a frontrunner than to the things for which we fallen human beings typically look.
We are to look to the past and to the current of the potential leader’s life: Is this person quarrelsome? Does this person have a superb repute with outsiders? Does this person lead well in his own household? Is it someone demonstrated to be sober-minded and self-controlled, capable of teach, gentle, not violent or argumentative or given to drunkenness or love of cash? (1 Tim. 3:1–13). These things aren’t boxes to envision off.
The requirements of secular leadership are different spiritually from those of a pastor, but that doesn’t mean that only issues matter and character or temperament don’t. Centurions and tax collectors couldn’t excuse extortion or fraud because their work was “secular” (Luke 3:12–14). The biblical civil law doesn’t apply to those outside the covenant of Old Testament Israel, however the Proverbs apply to everyone. What one can tell by private characteristics in addition to how an individual talks can reveal much about whether one is sensible or a idiot (Prov. 6:12–15).
Sometimes, within the ecclesial or civil realm, we’re deceived. Someone seems to have the vital integrity but fools us. That’s an awful situation, but it surely’s not nearly as awful as not even asking the essential questions—much less not caring about them.
Presidential debates are of some value, but the true query is a for much longer game, extending to the past—to the honesty, integrity, and gravity shown in candidates’ lives—and to the long run—to how we’d best predict the character traits, intuitions, and wisdom of this person in coping with matters we will’t even imagine now.
Debates and forums can show us just a little little bit of that sometimes, but they’ll’t get at a very powerful things. Those things can’t be scripted out in a rehearsal or shared on TikTok. The most vital matters just aren’t up for debate.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
