The Vernon Grounds Institute

The Vernon Grounds Institute was officially launched this week with two great lecturers. Ron Sider attempted to build a normative framework of biblical truth in order to engage meaniningfully and thoughtfully in politics. Darrell Bock seeked to answer how best to engage individuals in meaningful Christian dialogue, especially about social issues. Both lectures will be linked to here once they are available.

When the Sider audio gets posted, I challenge you to listen to the approximately 40 minute lecture. He provided a great foundation for Christian engagement. Essentially, he called for an expansive, holistic Christian worldview to engage social issues. Christians should care about global aids, global poverty, the unborn, a lack of health care, be for both justice and righteousness, the environment, homelessness, etc. Essentially, he argued that Christian witness and political engagement have been incomplete and fractured for too long. In this he is right.

But I was left a little unsatisfied by Sider's lecture. With the limited Q & A time we had, I wanted to ask the first question to which I don't really feel like he answered. I essentially asked him, "But if we care about justice, does that mean we have to vote as a Democrat?" Here's what I mean. I believe abortion is murder. Many issues are gray; this one is not. But I also care about eliminating poverty and aiding the homeless, but that doesn't necessarily mean I think the government is the best solver of the problem. Yet, many fall into this trap.

Just because we can care about holistic justice and the unborn, it does not leave us with the option of voting for the Democratic side of an issue or the Republican side. As a matter of fact, since I believe politics can affect more change at the local level, I've seen conservative political ideology better address the issue of poverty more than liberal ideology (at the local level, the city council and mayor incentivized small business, big business, faith-based institutions to affect local poverty). "Being against poverty" is not inherently a liberal position. Sider didn't really address the fundamental core of my question, which at its root recognizes that the voters are usually left with 2 very imperfect choices and not much else, practically speaking. It is this major reason that I lean the way I do politically (if you cannot tell by now). The unborn is a slam dunk, but justice and poverty can be worked out in other ways.