Forty-eight million. That’s the number of evangelical Christian adults who did not exercise their right to vote in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. With over 80 million professing Christians in our country, according to the United States Census Bureau, that means less than half of all Christians made their voices heard in the voting booth.

At Multiply Life, a division of Human Coalition, Inc., we believe exercising your right to vote is an essential part of being a pro-life Christian. Yet, as the above statistics illustrate, millions of Christians have abdicated their role of upholding Judeo-Christian values through the ballot box. In fact, one could go so far as to say that in America today there is an apathy and political laziness in the Christian Church.

Based on my travels around the country, speaking at Christian conferences, churches, and educational institutions, I submit that voter apathy in the Church — particularly among those who claim to be pro-life — stems from two misunderstandings:

  1. Church leaders believe that they and their congregants should not engage in political issues.
  2. Christians have bought into the liberal fallacy of the “separation of church and state.”

Let’s start by unpacking the first issue.

1. Church Leaders Should Not Talk About Abortion

This is the position of many evangelical Christian churches in America: Don’t talk about abortion, don’t preach about it, and you certainly shouldn’t address it in any official capacity.

But what if more Christians knew that God not only encourages activism in the political process, but He actually mandates it.

First, let’s look at Psalm 24:1, “The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.”

To the Christian, there should never be such a thing as secular. Psalm 24 tells us that it’s all sacred. It’s all sacred because it all belongs to the Lord. That means everything — from science to art to education to politics — is God’s gift to man. And all creation — all of the kingdom, all of earth — is under God’s sovereignty.

So maybe you’re thinking, But Brian, aren’t politics nasty, worldly, and crooked? Why should Christians engage in something that’s so corrupt? My response would be to point you to the words the apostle Paul penned in Colossians 1:13-20 (NIV),

For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Seven times in just eight verses Paul expounds the truth of Psalm 24:1, reminding us that all things fall under God’s domain. But Paul goes a step further by asserting that Christ’s death on the cross not only reconciled man to God, but also reconciled man to creation. In other words, through Christ’s atoning work on the cross, He makes all things new, and He invites Christians to participate in His process of reconciliation.

Look back at Colossians 1:13. God has moved us from a domain of darkness and has placed us in a new reality where the kingdom of His Son is at hand. Part of being a citizen of that kingdom is reclaiming our fallen world for Christ — even the dirty world of politics.

Christ Himself spoke of the kingdom of God. In the first Gospel account, Matthew records the term kingdom of heaven (an equivalent reference to the kingdom of God) 32 times. Furthermore, the phrase the kingdom of heaven is cited at some of the most consequential moments in His ministry:

• In Matthew 3:2, John the Baptist announces Jesus’ presence with the words, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
• In Matthew 4:17, Jesus launches His earthly ministry with the words, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”
• The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–8) is full of parabolic descriptions of the kingdom of heaven.
• When Jesus sent out the 12 disciples (Matthew 10:7), He gave them these instructions, “As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’”

We can see from the Gospel of Matthew that Christ’s finishing work on the cross goes beyond the salvation of our souls. When speaking of the kingdom of heaven, Matthew is referring to an “already, but not yet” reality. In other words, as believers we have experienced the full atoning power of Christ, but we are still waiting for creation to be restored.

And because of God’s great mercy to us, He has invited us to be His earthly agents, playing a role in the redemption of the world. From music to science to politics, we are commanded to be Christ’s hands and feet. In which case, as Christians called to be salt and light in this world, we have a biblical obligation to influence our government for Christ. Voting is perhaps the easiest and most powerful means of doing this.

2. Separation of Church and State

The second reason why many Christians stop short of engaging in politics and why many church leaders cower from addressing the issue of the sacredness of LIFE from the pulpit is because they’ve believed the erroneous argument about the separation of church and state. In truth, no such statement, nor reference to such statement, is asserted in any of America’s founding documents.

This much-touted phrase gained misguided significance in a 1947 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Everson v. Board of Education. The Court ruled that “The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.” Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing, et al., 330 U.S. 1, 18 (1947).

As David Barton of WallBuilders explains, “The ‘separation of church and state’ phrase which [the justices] invoked, and which has today become so familiar, was taken from an exchange of letters between President Thomas Jefferson and the Baptist Association of Danbury, Connecticut, shortly after Jefferson became President.” In other words, the activist justices had to bypass the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers and sift through a private letter from Jefferson to a small church in Connecticut in order to find an ambiguous phrase to support their ruling.

As further explained by Barton, “Thomas Jefferson had no intention of allowing the government to limit, restrict, regulate, or interfere with public religious practices. He believed, along with the other Founders, that the First Amendment had been enacted only to prevent the federal establishment of a national denomination.”

For those Christians who invoke the “separation of church and state” philosophy as a reason to refrain from engaging in politics, let’s make its context clear. It was written in a private, personal letter to a small group of individuals.

Now that we’ve established that Christians are biblically mandated to participate in the political process and that the separation of church and state is a judicial fallacy, only one question remains: Does God instruct His Church to ignore politics and protect His creation? Does the Church have an obligation to be intimately and passionately engaged in protecting not only the lives of unborn children, but also mothers, fathers, and communities from taking innocent lives? Does God want His Church to be healing helpers to men and women who are suffering from past abortions? Undoubtedly, yes.

Abortion is the willful killing of an innocent human life. It is not about choices, reproductive rights, or Republicans versus Democrats. It is not about labels, marketing campaigns, or votes. Abortion is about a mother, a father, and a child. The child loses his or her life, and afterward the parents suffer emotionally and spiritually and often physically. There are no winners in abortion.

If Christians do not vote to protect the sacredness of life, if we allow abortion to remain solely in the political realm and refuse to get involved, then we remove the humanity from the holocaust.

Proverbs 24:10–12 states it better than I can:

If you are slack in the day of distress,
Your strength is limited.
Deliver those who are being taken away to death,
And those who are staggering to slaughter, Oh hold them back.
If you say, “See, we did not know this,”
Does He not consider it who weighs the hearts?
And does He not know it who keeps your soul? (NASB)

The unborn are being taken away to death in America, resulting in approximately 3,500 deaths every day — that’s one abortion every 26 seconds.
While we may not all agree on every single issue, there are some nonnegotiable issues that as Christians we are called to support — the sacredness of human life being preeminent. Remember, for the Christian there should be no “sacred issues” and “secular issues.”  There are only sacred issues. God is in charge of our government, and He has commissioned you and me to be stewards over it.

There are many ways to get involved in the fight to help rescue babies from abortion — from volunteering at life-affirming pregnancy medical clinics, to sidewalk counseling, to financially supporting life-affirming organizations such as Human Coalition. But one of the easiest and most accessible ways for all individuals to fight abortion takes place inside the voting booth.

Christians have the power to change the landscape of our nation. Encourage your congregants to get involved in the fight to end abortion in America in our generation — encourage them to vote for LIFE.

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