Who should you vote for in November’s election, if you’re in the U.S.? There were times in this magazine’s history when it featured information about various candidates prior to major elections. Even then, the Witness and RPCNA emphasized that there are deeper issues to ponder than for whom to vote.

If you judge major media reports and comments in social media, professing Christians are a total mess when it comes to politics. We have nothing close to a unified witness. Many say we should vote for the lesser of two evils. That is a frightening principle. As one fictional character says in atheist Penn Jillette’s book Sock: “Keep voting for the lesser of two evils and things will just keep getting more evil.” And they certainly have.

This is the Witness’s election issue, in a way. In this issue we are declaring that, while our governors do influence the governed, our chief problems will not be resolved in the voting booth. We get much closer to the problems when we look at the worldview of the governors and the governed. Even Christians have unsound worldviews that are unreliable in helping them choose candidates and also in making life decisions. If Christians have a poor foundation, what can we expect of everyone else?

Our forebears pointed out that a country not founded on God’s Word and the truth of God’s reign would tend to drift from the Christian moorings it did have, even when Christians were at the helm. They were proved right. So we have a lot of work to do—that of understanding and teaching a God-honoring worldview, of applying it to each day’s decisions and showing an example in everyday relationships.

The pressure is on. Four years from now, the least of our problems might be who gets elected. Even now a handful of churches in the U.S. are fighting for the right to speak the truth of God’s Word from the pulpit, much less the public square. Christian businesses, institutions, and individuals have already been branded by some as hateful and thus lawbreakers. It is time for Christians to become uncomfortable with the current state, because we will be made to be uncomfortable if we stand for truth.

“Jesus took His message to the public square. But Uncle Sam has cut a deal with us, and here’s the deal: They’ll give you and I a tax exemption whereby we can deduct from our income taxes our tithes and offerings that we give to the church. But on one condition: that we not speak out on the political issues in our day. Ladies and gentlemen, that’s a compromise that the church can never afford to make” (R. C. Sproul, 2012). We must speak out and vote every day, both in the public square and in our quiet neighborhoods—not with hate and vitriol, but with truth and love and personal sacrifice.