Tag / Voting

by Michael

Questioning The Candidates

I emailed the following questions to the mayoral candidates for my city’s upcoming top job and, in Mr. Emanuel’s case, sent the questions through his webpage.  I could not find a way to submit them to Ms. Watkins.  If you have an email address, give it to me, and I’ll email her office.  What questions would you ask? 

  1. What is your vision for the city?
  2. Finances, crime, and education are three popular issues to have been mentioned thus far in the race, and necessarily so.  What related or unrelated matters do you want voters to be aware of as the election approaches?
  3. Why do you want to be mayor?
  4. How will you address concerns from communities in the West and South sides?
  5. How will you resist the inherent pressures to pay attention to people and places who are politically connected, and what will you do to invite new people into the democratic and political process?
  6. Much has been said about the city’s financial position, but hardly any discussion has been given to the specific issue of finances relative to poor people.  How will you lead this city in paying attention to addressing poverty, and empowering poor citizens and their families?
  7. How do you grow and sustain yourself personally, spiritually, and professionally?
  8. Who are some of the people who have helped you become a servant to the public?
  9. If you are elected, how will you work to build relationships across neighborhoods, with people who didn’t support you, and in communities that are often underrepresented in our city’s leadership and power structures?
  10. I imagine you get asked all kinds of questions you don’t want to be asked.  I may be wrong.  But what questions (along with your corresponding answers) do you wish to be asked during this campaign season?

When these folks answer, if they answer, I commit to gladly posting their responses on my blog.  Who knows whether I’ll get some response.

Again, what would you add?

by Michael

Faith, Doing Good, and Voting pt 2

Voting is an act of faith.  That’s  my point.  I started writing about this a few posts ago, and you can see that it the Previous Addresses to the right.  Whatever your faith–and I’m thinking in terms of some kind of real, religious, spiritual, or otherwise related-to-those-words kind of faith–you exercise it, express it, and practice it when you vote.  Not that the gesture of voting proves that you have faith or doesn’t.  But that voting, when you do it, is an act of faith. 

Faith comes from the unseen, though it is tutored by what is seen.  To vote is similar.  You choose or select and give your support to a person based upon something that can’t be seen.  So it’s an act of faith.

Lately, I’m thinking of voting as a chance for believing people, if you will, to think and to act upon their best thoughts.  As a leader, I see a part of my role in people’s lives as enabling people to make the best choices.  As a Christian leader, I don’t separate those choices from faith in Christ.  Christ is foundational, in my view and life and work, when it comes to good choices. 

Leaders sometimes tell people what to do or what not to do.  Leaders also present people with their options and make connections between those options and what those folks value.  I think helping people see voting as “an expression of your best options” is a good thing.  Why wouldn’t I push people to do good at every possible time, at any available chance?  It’s not at all that voting is the only chance to live into your faith, to make visible your belief, but it is one such chance.  Making faith real and tangible requires using every option, including voting.

That’s what makes voting, the small and non-ultimate act that it is, a critical one.  It adds itself on top of the rest of what a person does when doing good.  Voting becomes a part of that person’s life as he or she lives toward the good.  I have no delusions that voting is indispensable to a healthy life.  To think that would suggest blindness of several levels.  But I do think that the expression of the civic gesture is one more way to make tangible the desire to do good.

What about you, any thoughts?

by Michael

Lotteries, Sacraments, and Voting pt 1

Today is the day that the Chicago Board of Elections will conduct its lottery to decide whose name appears first, along with the order of every other name, on the ballot in February’s election.  Today is also my first of four or five posts on something I can think of no better subtitle for than voting as an act of faith. 

I mentioned the underpinnings to this series in a reactionary post on election day when my two coworkers told me they weren’t voting.  You can find that scattered rambling and the great comments in reply to it by looking into the Previous Addresses to the right.  To clarify for this post, and the other posts which will come between now and the election, I do not think that voting is a gesture that makes a person faithful–so that if one doesn’t vote, one is not faithful–or that voting is an act of particular significance.  I do think that voting, however, is a sacramental act of general significance, and I’ll spend this post explaining what I mean.

Richard Foster, author of several books and editor of one paraphrase of the bible, writes about six major Christian traditions in Streams of Living Water, one of which is the Sacramental tradition.  Foster says that the Sacramental tradition is about bringing the invisible into the visible realm.  He also pulls together a timeline of characters from history who live their lives inside this particular stream, people like Johann Bach, Susanna Wesley, and Dag Hammarskjold. 

The main idea in this stream is that God uses “matter to make present and visible the invisible realm of the spirit.”  The physical and material forms help the “soul apprehend spiritual reality.”  This language helps me better see the world as integrated rather than split.  The material matters as does the immaterial because how we live physically–what we do with our bodies–says something about what can’t be seen with those bodies.

I bring up Foster and the Sacramental tradition because the tradition anchors how I think about voting.  I think that voting is one of the many ways that people of faith live out their belief, making the invisible (which is faith) visible through a gesture or an act.  Praying is similar, as is congregational worship and fasting.  That is not to say that voting and praying are of the same essence, but it is to say that voting and praying are of the same form.  Each action has general significance.  Both provide a person behaviors and avenues to put into practice–making visible–his or her faith. 

So, the little lottery to choose placements on the ballot matters.  Voting matters.  Taking seriously the act of selecting and supporting an alderman matters.  These don’t matter in an ultimate sense, but they help bring the ultimate closer by exposing our belief a bit better.

If you’re interested in learning about the other “Streams” or traditions, they include the Social-Justice, Charismatic, Incarnational, Evangelical, Holiness traditions.  I commend the book.

by Michael

Am I Wrong For Being Upset With Coworkers Who Don’t Vote?

I came into the office and one of my coworkers asked if I voted.  I had.  So I repeated her question to her.  She said no, she hadn’t voted.  I started into a rant, a small one.  Then a second person came in while I was questioning the merits of the first coworker’s failure to vote.  The second person didn’t vote either.  I couldn’t take it.

I told them about a friend who wouldn’t let people she supervised come to work til they voted.  I started to say things about absentee ballots and early voting and the effectiveness of sitting out as opposed to actually doing the thing.  It’s sad to me that it’s too late for one of these ladies to vote.  She’s not driving to her home state to do it.  The other flat out said what she wasn’t going to do.  Both had their reasons, all of which I disagree with.

I told them I was going to my office to write a blog post.  I told them that I didn’t want to answer any of their questions.  Am I wrong to be upset?  Am I judging them when they’re able to say to me that if we had this conversation two months ago, maybe they would have voted? 

To vote is to exercise faith.  If Christians and people of other faiths do not vote, we miss one opportunity to live into what we believe.  I get that not all people of all faiths would agree that voting is a matter of faith, but go with me for a moment.  Faith is realized when we live it out.  Faith isn’t altogether interior but it pushes us out and makes us aware of the world around us.  A spiritual life that is Christian (and I’m talking specifically from my place in life) is concerned with the interal life and the external life.  And that external life is what we we see in our cities and counties, how budgets are passed or stalled, how legislators conduct themselves or fail to.  The spiritual life must be just as concerned in the political process because that’s a part of the world we live in and that’s one place people of faith can impact. 

When you vote, you say in the public sphere that you have beliefs about policy and how a city pursues peace and justice and well being.  When you vote, you say that you are choosing to support and elect a particular person for a specific role.  What you are doing is exercising your trust in that candidate, that jurist, or that politician, expressing your confidence in that person’s ability to execute the office or role to which they might be elected. 

It matters and it doesn’t matter whether they actually proceed in the way they said.  It matters and it doesn’t.  That’s why we vote: to hold people accountable, to change course, to remove leaders, to keep leaders.  We vote because we are discouraged or underwhelmed by the last two years or four years or eight years.  We don’t sit out.  We get up and go out to vote.

As a pastor, I think one of the best things I can do during election season is encourage people to vote.  Yes, to be informed about their voting and their values behind those votes, but to vote regardless.  If you believe that certain policies and certain legislative agendas can advance or get closer to what you believe the city, county, state, or country should be, wouldn’t restraining from a vote be contrary to your faith?  If you believe that your faith in meaningful for life now, wouldn’t it be fruitful for you to embody that faith in acts like praying for politicians, asking critical questions of judges, registering to vote, and following through during each election cycle by voting?  If you determine that a person’s values and commitments are similar to yours, particularly as a person of faith, or that a candidate’s spoken words accord with your own, wouldn’t it be a small failure of faith to not vote?  I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.

I haven’t even started on the whole thing about the actual historical and contemporary significance of voting.  I’ll save that for the early conversations I’ll start with my coworkers in advance of Chicago’s February elections.  So expect a few posts in late December and early January to anticipate the deadlines for voter registration and early voting.

So, am I wrong for having an attitude?  Perhaps I’ll get to staff meeting and find out that more people didn’t vote.  If I do, I won’t write another post, I promise.