Question: How might Jesus go about evaluating political candidates? What qualities or policies would most align with His teachings and priorities? I’m not asking which political party He would support—that feels like hearsay at best (and frankly, kind of icky). I’m more curious how someone striving to follow Jesus should think about political leadership. Beyond looking for a candidate who simply claims faith, what kinds of character traits, decision-making habits, or values would matter most to Him?
This question comes from a Facebook post I started, where I welcomed people to ask me their political questions.
Israel’s Rise with Godly Kingship
From a biblical perspective, politics have always been a mess. After God saved Israel from oppressive slavery in Egypt, they practiced a political ideology in which God alone was King. In that world, the priesthood tried to maintain law and order to the best of their understanding. In their view, politics and religion were one and the same, as was the case with pretty much all ancient political systems.
As you can imagine, this ancient justice system could be messy. We read a lot of ancient laws, and we’re baffled as to how they thought some of their laws were “just.” Sometimes we misunderstand the way ancient people thought. Sometimes we’re missing context to make sense of why they thought their laws were just. And sometimes, their ancient ways of understanding right and wrong were misguided or flawed (like how plenty of modern-day laws need to be changed for a better understanding of justice).
But even in the midst of ancient justice, you could get a feel of the kind of ideologies God had in mind for government. For example, God programmed a reset button meant to be pushed every 50 years in the form of a celebration called “The Year of Jubilee.” When that time came, everything that had gone wrong in people’s lives was to be restored. Those who lost their properties were to receive them back. Those who had debts to pay were to be forgiven. Sadly, we don’t have any records to prove that Israel was ever radical enough to practice this idea, but it was a part of the expectation.
Israel’s Decline into Human Kingship
The Bible shows that even when God is king, politics have a way of going sideways, because people don’t always listen to God. Israel falls short on this front over and over again throughout the Bible. After a time, they started to fight for a new political system. They wanted a human king like all the other nations. God warned them that if they did this, they would suffer deeply, since Kings tend to let power go to their heads and treat people as objects. They ignored God’s warning and said they wanted a human king anyway, so he allowed them to have it. The first king failed. The second and third kings, David and Solomon, are the best remembered kings, but they had massive moral failures. Some of the other kings didn’t care about God at all. Eventually, Israel had become so oppressive to other nations under the leadership of their kings that God decided to turn them over to the consequence of exile. They were supposed to represent what God is like, and they were instead showing the world the exact opposite.
Jesus, the True King
Let’s fast forward to Jesus, who enters the scene as the one true king while Israel is in exile. Unlike the other kings, Jesus never partnered with Satan, and he never sinned. Unlike the other kings, he never gave in to the temptations of power or muddled with darkness to get what he wanted. Instead, he did everything backwards from what we expected. He taught us that real power is found in humbling yourself to the lowest places and serving those around you. He reserved his harshest words for the religious types who used God’s name and religion to gain power and oppress the poor. He showed us new ways of practicing resistance that were grounded in enemy-love and gave us pacifistic ideas we never thought of to overcome the powerful. He preached his most famous sermon, called the Sermon on the Mount, in which he undid much of what people thought they knew about politics, religion, and the law. He then pieced it all back together again, cementing all of his teaching in a basic principle: Love God and love people. If our attempt to do religion or politics operates outside of this simple concept, then it is missing the foundation of what law, religion, and politics have always meant to enforce under God’s understanding.
All of this being said, earthly politics always falls short of the full Christian mindset, for there is no other earthly King like Jesus, no other earthly Kingdom like Heaven, and no other earthly law like Jesus’ law. Christians can only ever center themselves on Christ for the real thing. As we focus on him, all the kinds of things that Jesus cares about—like the love of God, neighbor, and caring for the poor—should come pouring out of us in the way that we engage earthly politics. (Of course, one of the greatest failures of the American church today is that we have been endorsing the exact opposite of these principles and have instead set our sights on all the kinds of power and corruption that Jesus himself denied in attempts to get our way.)
Why Jesus Doesn’t Fit in a Political Party
Like you said, it’s icky to imagine Jesus endorsing one of our political parties. Both sides are severely broken and neither can ever look like Jesus in full—nor could we make a new party that could ever look like Jesus in full. It’s just not possible. Though democracy gives us a chance to vote, God didn’t create it and it’s flawed—even if it feels like a better system than what’s been offered in past centuries. The best we can do while living in a democracy is vote for the kinds of political efforts that we feel Jesus would have prioritized, while recognizing that we’ll never get the full hopes of what we want.
Character Still Matters
The Bible has plenty to say about character and how it impacts leadership. While no leader is perfect, there is enough in the Bible to recognize bad leaders based on how they talk and carry themselves. For example, the Bible has a lot of warnings against leaders like Trump, and it pictures his particular form of leadership and many of his political desires as beastly and vicious. It also warns us that some Christians will somehow confuse such beastly actions with Jesus and they’ll get sucked into this messed-up political system. It tells us that if we’re really going to follow Jesus, we have to pull out of the mess and resist what’s happening, even if it comes with a cost.
Politics Are Spiritual
All humans are made in the good image of God, and therefore all humans have the ability to image goodness to the world. Politics are charged because there’s a lot of broken spiritual energy raging through it. Any politician who enters into that field needs to work hard to keep their eyes on Jesus if they’re a Christian, or at least keep their eyes on goodness if they’re not. Kings exist in the first place because God desires the kind of order and justice that chooses to love all people—friend, frenemy, and enemy alike. While we’ll never have a perfect earthly kingdom, love will draw us closer to the kinds of ways God designed the world to operate, and there is natural blessing in the ways of love and caring for the poor.
Jamin Bradley 
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