This is crucial election of our lifetime.” I’ve heard this said every presidential election in my lifetime, but, this time, the stakes are being raised even higher. The 2024 election just isn’t just crucial—the results of it are existential.
At a fundraiser in February, President Joe Biden called Donald Trump the “one existential threat,” and he has also written on X to constituents: “In this election, your freedom, your democracy, and America itself is at stake.” Vice President Harris said at an event this month, “This is the one. The most existential, consequential, and necessary election of our lifetime.”
Former president Trump has used this line of argument as well: At the Faith and Freedom Coalition last month, he said that “this can be crucial election within the history of our country” and “our one probability to save lots of America.” Back in March, he responded to the claim that he was a “threat to democracy” with, “I’m not a threat. I’m the one which’s ending the threat to democracy.”
These talking points is likely to be effective campaigning, but they make for a toxic political culture.
In college, I competed in policy debate tournaments—a type of debate that focuses more on detailed (and fast-paced) presentation of evidence than rhetoric or performance. We created elaborate argumentative chains, showing how one policy change (subsidies for offshore wind turbines or the legalization of online gambling) could cause a cascading chain of events that just about at all times led to global nuclear war. It was a way of beating the opposite team: Sure, your proposal might lower inflation or decrease violent crime, but that’s nothing in comparison with global nuclear war.
Often, we spent more time debating which global extinction scenario was immediately catastrophic than we did debating the merits of the assorted policies that were purported to be the subject of the debates. It sounds silly, but, this 12 months, the identical thing appears to be happening in our national politics.
We raised the stakes so high that we frequently sidestep substantive conversations about policy in favor of weighing apocalyptic scenarios. These existential narratives are sometimes more about scaring people into turning out to the polls than they’re about fostering dialogue about necessary issues.
This is where Christian theology offers a present to our politics: an end to existential threats.
For Christians, nothing is really a threat to our survival or existence. We are a individuals who imagine Jesus Christ when he promised to return to his fallen creation, to wipe every tear from every eye and to make all things latest. We imagine that this story we live doesn’t end in violence, chaos, and strife—it ends with perfect righteousness, justice, and peace.
The promise of Christ’s return doesn’t demand quietism or political escapism; reasonably, it should prompt faithful political work that may resist the impulse toward violence and injustice. If Christ is returning to make the whole lot latest, prejudiced or brutal political options grow to be less rational, less mandatory. If this election poses an existential threat, then we are able to more easily justify doing anything—including harming our neighbors, lying, stealing, or cheating—to avoid it. But if ultimate justice is promised by God, we have now the liberty to hunt provisional justice here on earth as faithfully as we are able to, without fearing that if we fail all is lost.
This is the theology that motivated a few of the biggest movements for justice in our country’s history. The abolitionist Maria W. Stewart was in a position to hold together a fierce condemnation of slavery with a deep commitment to nonviolence because the top of the story was assured: “Stand still, and know that the Lord he’s God. Vengeance is his, and he’ll repay.”
Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps this country’s most famous advocate of nonviolent resistance, was clear that this approach was not merely pragmatic but theological: “The movement [of nonviolence] was based on hope … regardless that the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice.”
There has been quite a lot of talk these days about lowering the warmth of our political rhetoric, a recognition that when the problems seem so paramount, we risk reacting with violence. But this clever counsel needs a stronger theological backing.
The threats, in any case, usually are not imagined or entirely exaggerated. The consequences of this election can be serious, and certain in ways we don’t yet know. Lowering the stakes within the face of those threats might diminish the true significance of elections: They shape people’s lives, especially probably the most vulnerable. It risks communicating to folks that politics doesn’t really matter that much, that the human lives that can be affected by the consequence usually are not worthy of our attention.
But lowering the stakes because we imagine that the top of the Christian story is true is one other thing altogether. Lowering the stakes because ultimate justice just isn’t in danger on this election opens up greater opportunities for meaningful change here and now.
To many in our nation, it appears like the choices are between living in a continuing state of existential threat and testing of politics entirely. I’ve heard many bemoan on social media, “Can’t we just live in precedented times?” or “How many historical events do I actually have to pass though?” We consistently hear that the fate of our country is at stake on this election, but raising the stakes hasn’t appeared to encourage more political involvement.
The comment I hear most regularly from people in churches and schools across the country is that the fear and anger have exhausted them, tempting them toward total political apathy. We are bombarded with information in regards to the great injustices and evils on this planet, alarmed by the conditions of our own political culture, and we feel helpless to do anything about it.
Either we consistently scroll social media for updates on the most recent sign of impending political doom, join for each political group on the town, and take every opportunity to persuade our friends and members of the family about these existential threats—or we throw up our hands, declare the entire political system unfixable, and live in blissful ignorance of the parents who can be more directly affected by the policies we are able to’t be bothered to research. However, there may be an alternative choice to these options.
All of those claims—of existential threat, of “living in historic times,” of democracy teetering on the sting of disaster—are claims about where we sit in history, and what agency that position allows us. If that is the defining moment of history, we must always act in another way than we might under normal conditions. If democracy is on the ballot, nothing else really matters. If this candidate or party will end our very existence, political options to steer or negotiate are off the table. All that’s left is to destroy or be destroyed.
But the Christian story says that we usually are not awaiting the approaching turning point of history from goodness to chaos. The Christian story says that the defining point of history has already happened: the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In light of that victory over the powers and principalities, and in hopeful anticipation of his return to bring that victory to consummation, we have now opportunities to effect change in our fallen world. The resurrection of Christ is the horizon of our agency, the event that defines the chances for creative and faithful work.
One of probably the most frequent biblical themes is that it just isn’t the powerful and necessary whose actions most matter however the lowly, forgotten, and small. In a political culture that feels hopeless, in a system we feel powerless to vary, Scripture offers us stories of peculiar agency: of three men who survive a hearth once they stand down an idolatrous king, of midwives who save the lives of infants, of a person on a cross who dies a gruesome death but then rises from the grave.
In the face of an onslaught of existential threats, Christians can proclaim to the world that our options usually are not between apathy or political violence (Rom. 12:18–20).
Freed from the constraints of existential politics and motivated for change, latest possibilities appear. We can fight for justice, advocate for the oppressed, and seek flourishing in our own neighborhoods without worrying that if our candidate loses or our advocacy fails it implies that our very existence is threatened. And we’d just discover that politics has every kind of places for fruitful work that we previously ignored in our rush to stave off the largest existential threat.
Christian political motion will be bringing a casserole to a neighbor, showing as much as a city council meeting, organising an apartment for a refugee family, writing a letter to an elected official. Within the frame of God’s redemptive story, these small acts of justice and peace tackle greater significance than the desperate attempts to bring peace to earth at any cost.
Kaitlyn Schiess is the writer of The Ballot and the Bible: How Scripture Has Been Used and Abused in American Politics and Where We Go from Here.
