Helping Kids Think Biblically About Elections

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In this episode of the Foundation Worldview Podcast, we explore how to help children think biblically during election season. Host Elizabeth Urbanowicz delves into what the Bible says about government and offers practical ways to apply these principles to guide your kids through any election. Whether you're navigating the current presidential election or preparing for future ones, this episode provides timeless insights to equip your children with a strong biblical perspective.

Transcript

Note: The following is an auto-transcript of the podcast recording.

Hello friends. Today's question says, how can I help my children think biblically this election season? Wow, what an important question for us to think through. So that's what we're going to dive down deep into today on the Foundation Worldview Podcast, where we seek to answer your questions so that you can equip the children that God has placed in your care to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter and understand the truth of the biblical worldview. I'm your host, Elizabeth Urbanowicz, and I'm thrilled that you've joined me for this episode today.

Now just, sorry, just as a little bit of a caveat before we get started, I am recording this podcast in 2024 before the presidential election in the us. However, what we're going to cover today are several big principles that I think can apply to any election season. So no matter when you're watching or listening to this podcast, it's my prayer and hope as I record this, that what I share can apply to any election season.

And so as we think through how can we help our children think biblically about an election, I think that there are two big topics that we need to cover. And the first topic is what the Bible says about government. And then the second one is how to apply that to think and act biblically in this particular election season. So first we'll look at what does the Bible say about government? And I think there are a few important things to talk through with our children about what Scripture says about government.

The first principle that I think we should cover is that God is the one who ultimately appoints and overthrows leaders. And to show this principle, we can take our children right to Romans 13 and Romans 13 verse one says, "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God." Now, this does not mean that every leader is going to be the best possible leader that there is. This first means that even terrible leaders such as Adolf Hitler were there because God in his sovereignty allowed that leader to be appointed. And so that's what we want to help our children understand. That whoever is the leader of our country or our nation is someone that God has allowed to be there, that he's ultimately the one who appoints leaders and then overthrows them, takes them out of power.

Another principle that I think we should cover with our children is that we as Christians are called to respect and obey our leaders. And the next verse in Romans chapter 13 makes this clear. Romans chapter 13, verse two says, "Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment." And then in first Peter, chapter two verses 13 and 14, Peter writes, "Be subject for the Lord's sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good." Now, I'm sure as I'm reading these scriptures out loud that a bunch of questions are floating around in listener's mind thinking we're not just supposed to blindly obey everything our leaders say. Well, that is true. There is the one biblical exception. The one biblical exception to being subject to the governing authorities is when the leaders over us require us to disobey God, that God is the highest ruler of all. He's the supreme ruler, creator and sustainer of the universe. So we are called to obey him. Now, he has told us to obey our leaders. So long as our leaders don't call us to do something that goes against God's rule, we are to be subject to them. But we do have some clear examples in Scripture like in the first few chapters of the Book of Exodus, when the Hebrew midwives are ordered by Pharaoh to kill all of the baby boys that are born to the Hebrews, the midwives disobey. They do not kill the baby boys and God blesses them because of that disobedience, because murdering the innocent clearly goes against the law of God.

Okay, so the first two things we talk through is that God is the one who ultimately appoints and overthrows leaders, and we are to respect and obey our leaders. Then the third thing that I think it's important for us to cover is that the Bible does not prescribe a certain form of government. That even throughout the biblical narrative, there were many different forms of government that God's people were subjected to throughout the course of history. So we want to make clear for our kids that God's word does not prescribe one certain form of government for any nation. However, when we look at the biblical worldview as a whole, we want our children to see that we here in the United States are blessed in that our form of government aligns well with what the Bible has revealed about human nature. That all throughout Scripture, it's clear that we are fallen, we have inherited the sin of Adam and that we choose to sin every day. And so with the form of government that we have in the United States where we have three separate branches of government, and each of those branches has checks and balances, that's a really good thing knowing that all of our leaders are fallen humans. So we know that Congress cannot make a law without a check from the President of the United States, and similar, the President cannot make a law without a check from Congress or from the Supreme Court, and we know that the President is the one who appoints the Supreme Court justices, and the Supreme Court justices then can check the Congress and the President. And so this is a really beneficial system from what we know of the biblical worldview about human nature, that it's not a great idea to just have one person in power because that one person is going to be fallen. So we want our kids to understand. The Bible doesn't tell us what form of government we should have. However, with knowing what Scripture has revealed about humans, we're really blessed to live in a nation where our highest leaders have checks and balances on their power. So that's the first thing to cover with our kids what the Bible says about government.

Then we want to think through, okay, how do we apply this so that we as Christians, as a Christian family think and act biblically this election season? And one thing that I think we want to cover with our children is that voting is a privilege. That getting to cast our vote to say, this is who I think the best leader in this part of government will be. That's a privilege. So unless our conscience dictates otherwise, it's wise for us to exercise this privilege that we have. And even though in the New Testament, or even in the Old Testament too, we don't really see a democratic republic like we have here in the United States and people voting. We do see the Apostle Paul model for us being wise with the rights and privileges that he had in the Roman Empire. In Acts 22, when Paul is taken prisoner and is about to be beaten, he doesn't just sit there and say, oh, well, it's the Lord's will for me to be beaten. He looks up at the guard who's about to beat him and says, is it lawful to flog a Roman citizen? Because as a citizen of Rome, it was not lawful for them to flog him without a trial, without there being a certain accusation and him being found guilty. And so then, okay, Paul is not flogged, and they take him to the ruler so that he can explain that he is a Roman citizen. And so Paul was exercising his right as a Roman citizen. So again, unless our conscience dictates otherwise, it's wise for us to exercise this privilege to vote, and we can show our children that this is a privilege by actually taking them with us when we vote and explaining what we're doing and talking with them about how it's such a privilege that we get to cast our vote for the candidates we feel are best.

Now, I've heard a lot of Christians talking over the past decade saying that they feel like when they're voting, they're voting in the lesser of two evils. And to some degree I get that because all of our candidates are flawed and they're sinful like we are. And I think we could greatly desire and hope that our leaders would demonstrate a desire to honor God, that they would demonstrate humility, which so often our leaders don't. But I think voting for the lesser of two evils is the wrong attitude, and it's not what we want to impart to our children that there's a much better phrase that I've heard John Stonestreet say multiple times on the Colson Center podcast. That when we are casting a vote, a helpful biblical rule of thumb is which candidate is most likely to lessen the evil in our society? And so that's something we can talk through with our children. None of these candidates that I can vote for are perfect. They're all sinners just like you and me. But when I choose a candidate to vote for, I'm thinking which candidate is most likely to lessen the evil in our society?

Now, Christians may not all agree on which candidate will lessen the evil, but I do believe that Scripture offers helpful guidelines as we're thinking through which of these two individuals would help lessen the evil to a greater degree in our society. And now, sometimes as Christians, I've heard this so often in Bible studies and churches where people just say, well, sin and all sins are equal. Now, the first part of that I do agree with is that all sin, sin meaning all sin is a grievous offense against the holy God and is deserving of punishment. That anytime we sin, whether it's just rolling our eyes at someone in authority over us, or laughing at a dirty joke or committing some heinous crime against humanity, all of those sins are sins and they're egregious offenses against the holy God. However, not all sins are equal. So I do not believe that that is biblical. When people say, oh, well sin, sin, all sin is equal. I think that this is made clear through the example that we have in the Mosaic law, that when God gave his law to the nation of Israel, God told them how to live so that they would honor him so that his people would honor him. But he gave different degrees of punishment for different sins. For example, in Exodus chapter 22, verse one, Moses writes, "If a man steals an ox or a sheep, and kills it or sells it, he shall repay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep." So here we see, what is the punishment for stealing someone's ox or sheep? You have to repay it fivefold. So this is a terrible offense against God. It's a sin against the holy God. It's a crime deserving of punishment. What is the punishment? The person has to repay it fivefold. Then in Leviticus chapter 20, verse two, again, Moses writes, "Any one of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech shall surely be put to death. The people of the land shall stone him with stones." So what was the punishment here for someone who offers their child in a sacrifice? That person should be put to death. So we see here degrees of punishment according to degrees of the crime. So as we're thinking through, okay, who am I going to vote for? There probably is not any candidate, or it might be very likely that there's not any candidate that we agree with on everything or who we like both their policies and the way that they live their lives or their attitudes or their personal choices. But what we have to think through is what are the issues at stake in our culture, and then which of these issues are greater evils than other issues? In a perfect world, we would be able to choose a candidate who would lessen all of the evil in our society that every single evil that's committed, that this candidate would go after them, but we're probably never going to have a candidate who's going to do that. So we want to think through which candidate is most likely to lessen the evil in our society.

Another thing that I think we're wise to teach our children as we're talking through the election and different candidates and what their positions are, is that we want to train our children to be careful of being tricked by the language that political candidates use. That it's really easy for a candidate to use some language that sounds good. And we think of one thing in our minds when we hear that language, but the candidate actually means something else. Now, this is something that can happen all of the time in most aspects of life. However, today we're specifically talking about the 2024 election season in the US and how we can help our kids think biblically through that. So in the context of politics, we want to help our kids be careful not to be tricked by the language that a political candidate uses. For example, almost a decade ago, I remember it was another presidential election, and one of my roommates at the time was we were talking about the election, and she actually passed along to me an article of why she believed that a candidate who was actually pro-choice was a more biblical candidate than a candidate that was pro-life. And in this article, it was saying that the pro-choice candidate was actually more pro-life than the other candidate because of all of the things that this candidate did to help the poor, to help the disabled, to help those who were sojourners. And now the things that were pointed out in this article, helping the poor, helping the disabled, helping the sojourners, those were all things that could be argued aligned with the biblical worldview. I think as Christians, we can agree that God has called us to help the poor, to help the weak, to help the disabled, to help those who are sojourners in our land, that those are biblical things to do. But the language being used in this article was very deceptive because pro-life in this article meant having kindness and compassion towards the downtrodden. Now, biblically is having kindness and compassion towards the downtrodden an important thing. Absolutely. It's what God has called us to, but that's one definition of pro-life used in this article, having kindness and compassion towards the downtrodden. Where with the other candidate that this article was speaking out against what pro-life meant for this other candidate was not murdering innocent human beings in the womb. Now, there's a vast difference between these two things, helping those who are down trodden and not murdering. I'm not saying any of these things that being pro-life in the sense of not murdering or being pro-life in the sense of helping the downtrodden or bad things. Both of them are good things. They're just different. This candidate that was helping the poor and helping the weak, helping the downtrodden was also agreeing to aggressively promote the murder of innocent children.

And so we want to help our children think through carefully how is language being used? And if you're sitting there thinking, oh my goodness, Elizabeth, I've heard that argument before, but I've never thought of it that way. Highly recommend you check out our Careful Thinking curriculum here at Foundation Worldview, because in that curriculum, it's 30 lessons that systematically go through. How do we think well? How do we think clearly? How do we think biblically? And we have an entire unit on mistakes in careful thinking. How when somebody uses the same word to mean two different things, how we have to look at, okay, what are the two different meanings of this word? So highly recommend you check out our Careful Thinking curriculum.

Then the final thing that I think we need to go through with our children is actually something that I covered at the beginning, but I think it's really important for us to just wrap everything up this way, is to remind our children that God is sovereign over our leaders. God is sovereign over the outcome of an election, and he has called us to respect our leaders. So we may cast a vote for a candidate, and that candidate may be elected into office, and we can be really grateful for that. Or we may cast a vote for a candidate, and the candidate may lose the election and we can be disappointed. It's okay to be disappointed, but we are still called to respect our leaders so long as they're - sorry. We're always called to respect them, but we're called to respect and obey them so long as they're not commanding that we do something that goes against God's moral law. And we can rest in God's sovereignty that the outcome of this election, the outcome of any election, is not a surprise to God. That God is ultimately the one that appoints and overthrows leaders.

Well, that's a wrap for this episode of the Foundation Worldview podcast. If you have a question that you would like for me to answer on a future podcast, you can submit that by going to FoundationWorldview.com/podcast. Also ask that you would invest a few seconds that it takes to rate and review this content just so that we can push it out to more people, so even more people can be equipped to get the kids in their care to carefully evaluate every idea they encounter. As we leave our time together. My prayer for you, it's the same as always, that no matter the situation in which you and the children, God is placed in your care, find yourselves that you would trust that God is working all things together for your good. By using all things to conform you more into the image of His Son. I'll see you next time.