The moral sugar high of the protest vote

We shouldn’t give politicians bloody noses over insurmountable single issues.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

A winning candidate at an election address the audience from a lectern while the loosing candidates look on

The victorious candidate at the Rochdale by-election.

A cat was elected as a Member of Parliament. A cat. George Galloway - former Labour party MP and Rula Lenska’s former cat - has been elected as Member of Parliament for Rochdale. The unique circumstances of the by-election make this a less surprising result than one might think. The Labour Party disowned their candidate, the Tory Party hardly contested the seat, and the sheer number of inappropriate independents meant that a split-vote victory for Galloway was entirely foreseeable. One must also note Galloway’s many skills: as a campaigner, an orator, and a dirty-tactic by-election gadfly.

So…Rula Lenska’s cat did the unimaginable and won a seat in Parliament. How did the cat do this? He convinced people that they could vote for him to protest the current Parliamentary position on the Israel-Gaza War. In his victory speech, Galloway gave an ominous warning: “Keir Starmer…this is for Gaza.” He went on to intimate that his victory was due to the high proportion of Muslim voters in Rochdale; their disgust at the Labour Party’s response to the Israeli invasion of Gaza morphing into a wish to give Keir Starmer (‘one cheek of the same backside’ - Rishi Sunak being the other cheek) a bloody-nose. He warned that Starmer “…will pay a high price for…enabling, encouraging, and covering for the catastrophe presently going on in occupied Palestine, in the Gaza strip.”

My fellow voters are intelligent enough to recognise that the single addition of George Galloway to the green benches will do almost nothing to affect change. They have voted so, the general consensus goes, simply to register their fury at the plight of ‘fellow Muslims’. I simply want to respond with a question. Is this moral?

People vote for all sorts of reasons. If we believe political scientists and pollsters, voters might care about many things, but will end up voting on the basis of one thing. Normally the economy. One’s own economic interest is a perfectly rational reason to vote for one party’s promises than another. There is a potential immediate impact on our lives and those of our family and friends. But Gaza?

Sociologists have spilt a tremendous amount of ink describing how human communities tend towards ‘tribal’ affection. We tend to feel more connected to those who are like us - in terms of geographic location, in terms of obvious racial characteristics, in terms of language and culture, of course religion. The notion that the Gazan War is a war on Muslims would be a natural driver for the Muslim community of Rochdale to vote ‘for’ their fellow Muslims.

On the other hand, in the world of modern ethics there has been a move to recognise that such tribal allegiance is ultimately meaningless - a call to see all human beings as equally worthy of our care and attention, especially irrespective of geography. Peter Singer famously presented the thought experiment of a drowning child - if we are willing to get our shoes wet and muddy to save a drowning child we walk by a shallow pond, why aren’t we willing to give up some of our wealth to alleviate the war-stricken poverty of a Gazan child many miles away?

The people of Rochdale must vote as their conscience requires. I simply worry that their conscience has taken on an impossible burden of care that they will struggle to sustain.

The words of Jesus seem to support such an ethic, which is always global in its vision. We are not only to love our neighbour as ourselves, we are to go out into all the world, evangelising the nations. From its beginning the Christian faith has preached that loving our neighbour means loving everyone. Everyone is a beloved child of God. Everyone is our neighbour. Surely a vote for Galloway, a vote of rage against the occupation of Gaza, is fundamentally moral - either on grounds of tribe, or rejection of tribe. Surely its Christian!

I’m not so sure.

I’m not so sure we fallen humans actually have the capacity to ‘care’ about the horrors that go on many, many miles away. Jesus tells us to love our neighbour as ourselves, but we barely have the emotional energy to love ourselves. We live in a society of such activity and distraction - with a seemingly concomitant rise in the incidence of hopelessness and depression - that I don’t think we can really give our moral and emotional energy to an event as distant and overwhelming as the plight of Gazan civilians. We can barely give it to our families. We can barely give it to ourselves. C S Lewis once wrote that the best way of eradicating suffering was people working away quietly at limited objectives: “I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.”

Jesus was the ultimate localist - God became incarnate as a unique individual, of a particular tribe, of a particular nation, in a particular time and place. Jesus taught an ethic of universal love and dignity and respect, but lived out in specific acts of service. He didn’t wash the feet of all Jerusalem - just his disciples. He didn’t heal all disease everywhere and forever - but he did restore sight to the few blind people he met. St Paul wrote individual letters to individual communities. Yes, he asked them to pray for him and each other, but otherwise told them to focus on their immediate needs and charity and holiness. The popularity of Jordan Peterson is largely based on the achievability of his slightly nebulous self-help worldview: make YOUR bed, keep YOUR back straight, look after YOUR family. Improve yourself first if you want to even begin improving the world. You’ll probably never manage to improve more than your village…maybe only your own household. That might be enough.

I don’t judge those who voted for Galloway as a Gaza-conflict protest. A new campaign, ‘The Muslim Vote’, has emerged to persuade Muslim voters to lend their support to candidates who commit to ‘Peace in Palestine’ – ceasefire, sanction Israel, and a state for the Palestinians. It is becoming clear that what appears to have happened in Rochdale may well happen in constituencies up and down the country. The idea of the ‘Muslim vote’, which Galloway was able to turn into electoral victory, is being given form and force. It is emotive and persuasive, and may well convince people who have no link to Gaza other than their Muslim faith. It is entirely possible that some of the voters have family and friends trapped in the siege. I empathise with their vote and weep for their sorrow.

I don’t judge those who voted for Galloway as a Gaza-conflict protest. I do, however, worry that many have taken upon themselves a fundamentally unwieldy ethic. Galloway is not a one-man parliamentary wrecking ball - whatever he says. The position of the Government will not be changed by his election. The resolve of the Israeli military is unlikely to be dinted by the UK Government, no matter what resolutions the House of Commons passes. The people of Rochdale must vote as their conscience requires. I simply worry that their conscience has taken on an impossible burden of care that they will struggle to sustain. Perhaps they would be more fulfilled and more effective if they cast their vote on the basis of what could be achieved for them in their community, in the immediate future.

We must pray for the people of Gaza, and we must not cease praying; but I would suggest that we must vote in the interests of the people of our own place, our own constituency. Giving the Labour Party a bloody nose over Gaza might be an immediate moral-sugar-high. Electing an MP who will actually work for the needs of the community in their particularity will certainly be less instantaneously thrilling - but maybe it is more moral.

Article

America

Conspiracy theory

Culture

Politics

10 April 2024

5 min read

Will America succumb to the undertow?

A returning expat asks if an exhausted majority is, in fact, asleep.

Jared Stacy

Jared holds a Theological Ethics PhD from the University of Aberdeen. His research focuses conspiracy theory, politics, and evangelicalism.

A sleeping voter sits and snoozes next to voting booth.

'Which One?'

Nick Jones/Norman Rockwell/Midjourney.ai.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously made a decision to return to Germany before the outbreak of the Second World War. The year was 1938, and he was visiting America for a second time. Instead of taking a theology teaching position in New York that would’ve kept him above the fray of a deteriorating social world in Germany, Bonhoeffer’s sense of spiritual responsibility drove him to solidarity with the German situation.

I’ve thought about Bonhoeffer a lot these last few months as our family is making a transition back to the States during an election year. Not because I’d ever directly compare our move with Bonhoeffer’s. But because I’m anticipating the “shock” of returning to a deteriorating social world. Unlike him, our decision to return is far more modest and expedient. Still, we’re often asked by our friends here in Scotland, “why go back?”

My immediate answer is straightforward and entirely different than Bonhoeffer: we did what we came here to do. Our visas are up; I’m defending my PhD this month. But behind these questions of expediency, I do feel the weight of an existential question, one directed towards myself as much as it is towards America.

And that question is “who is going back?” Because after three years, America has changed to us as we’ve changed ourselves.

The persecution confronting white Christians in America is the soft persecution of opulence diffused in the ordinary.

With that change comes new choices and new questions that didn’t confront us years ago. Returning to America has us asking questions like, how do you talk to your school-aged kids about active shooter drills in their new school? How will we navigate the racialized social scripts that pervade not just American communities, but also American churches? How will we re-enter a job market that ties production to basic health care?

We’re bracing for the shock of going back to America. It will be more difficult than leaving ever was. Not just because we’ve changed, but also that the American situation has grown more extreme while paradoxically denying that change.

We’ve discovered that if American Christians are persecuted at all, it’s not from President Biden’s “corrupt regime” seeking to jail Trump or secure power through another “rigged election.” No, the persecution confronting white Christians in America is the soft persecution of opulence diffused in the ordinary.

As an expat returning to America, I wonder if this exhausted majority is, in fact, asleep.

Perspective changes everything. The outsider’s view of America careening towards a crisis of democracy and a social fabric rent at the seams isn’t felt as much by those who live within its social world, whose experience of the mundane obscures the poly-crisis pressing our social fabric at the seams. How did we get here?

Researchers discovered an interesting demographic cohort in American life, you might have heard of it. It’s called the “exhausted majority.” It refers to an ideological diverse cohort at the center of American life that has all but disengaged politically. Researchers began to talk about this “exhausted majority” in 2018, before the pandemic, before a less-than-peaceful transfer of democratic power. The hope was, then, that this “exhausted majority” might be mobilized to fend off polarization and extremism. As an expat returning to America, I wonder if this exhausted majority is, in fact, asleep.

What has become of this exhausted majority? In the wake of 2020, America underwent significant backlash and retrenchment. This affected churches, too. Friends who are pastors tell me churches in their communities have “re-sorted” along partisan lines. One pastor suggested the election might not divide churches this time, as much as partisan-determined churches might contribute to social division. Polarization has worked its way from the outer edges of American life to the very center. It does this work silently, mediated by our reliance on algorithms, a life conformed to and captured by digital architecture.

There’s an element of surprise here, at least for us as we return. Because what we experienced as the collapse of our social world in white evangelicalism—a world that we no longer are at home in— I’ve found is still very much active, very much automated—like survival reflexes—still providing an artificial coherence and plausible deniability amidst a deteriorating social situation.

This retrenchment and backlash creates a dangerous condition: an undertow. For so many, life goes on as normal on the surface, while democratic institutions are pulled apart beneath. America is caught in a rip current, but asleep on the surface. This undertow partly explains, at least to me, why all the talk of “the crisis of democracy” doesn’t register with many Americans.

A recent survey found that more than half of Americans haven’t heard the term “Christian Nationalism”—in spite of a flurry of academic and popular discourses on the term, often at the center of “crisis of democracy” rhetoric.

The fact is, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t fall in a day, either. The Senate handing over power to Caesar one day didn’t do much to alter the mundane early morning routine of bread makers in Rome the next day. Tyranny dawns, but the ordinary continues. The routine of the mundane and ordinary, of bread and circuses, makes talk of a democratic collapse seem just another political game, a distraction from all the amusement that Neil Postman observed might be our death.

As we return to America, reflecting on who we’ve become and the responsibility of faith, I’ve found myself considering the difference between being fated and being holy.

Fate confronts us as necessity. The holy confronts us as something other. And this “other”—at least for Bonhoeffer—was the freedom of God. And I can think of no better prayer for the church in America in the coming years to maintain in ourselves the crucial distinction between fatedness and holiness. To not confuse the expediency of partisan games with the responsibility made visible in the light of the central claim of Christian faith in the body of Jesus Christ. The Crucified One, not the fate of Western Civilization, determines what it is to be the ekklesia, the “called out” community, both free and responsible, never fated.