Election Day Article: Voting and Eucharist
Voting and Eucharist
By Allen Calhoun
One of my theological mentors, Stanley Hauerwas, is skeptical that Christians should vote. In his less scholarly moments (of which there are many), he is fond of saying, “Don’t vote! It just encourages them.” On more filtered occasions, he is inclined to say, “Sometimes I do vote, but without much hope that it will do any good.”
Hauerwas is wrong to be so pessimistic. We do have hope when we vote, although maybe not quite in the way we would think. That hope flows from the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.
As a threshold matter, the Eucharist is a political practice. In it we unite with Christians across space and time as fellow citizens (William Cavanaugh). The sacrament is the great leveler, in which the rich and poor and mighty and powerless are equally needy before God (Abraham Kuyper). Partaking of the Lord’s Supper is a formative practice, and as it shapes our characters how can it not shape the way we think and act in all areas of our lives?
But there is no use in denying the tension that the Eucharist highlights: we are citizens of two different kingdoms, and those kingdoms operate according to different laws. One kingdom’s laws may tell us to view immigration or abortion or any of countless other issues in one way while the other’s laws contradict those views. The commitments we hold in the heavenly kingdom often seem unrealistic in the earthly kingdom. This mismatch is what has led many Christians to adopt a rigid “two kingdoms” theology of the kind that underlies Hauerwas’ pessimism. We must live as divided people, they say, compartmentalizing our two citizenships. But this “two kingdoms” tension exists precisely because the Lord’s Supper is also the point of contact, carrying the mismatch within itself. Perhaps the greatest tension in our lives as Christians comes when we eat and drink basic, earthy elements and by doing so feast and commune with our Lord at his table in his kingdom (Alexander Schmemann). We are pulled apart, in two different directions, experiencing in our own bodies and souls time past and time to come—the mismatch that lies at the heart of what Christians have variously called the two kingdoms, the two swords, the two cities (Craig Keen).
The second point is this: because the Eucharist holds within itself the tension between the two kingdoms, it offers us a way to live as citizens of the earthly kingdom and the heavenly kingdom at the same time. The nations of this earth are “secular parables” of the kingdom of God (Karl Barth), and voting is a secular parable of participating in the Lord’s Supper. That means that voting in a federal, state, or local election can do nothing to bring about the kingdom of God, but it can be “powerful in bearing witness, capable of concentrating attention upon the ‘Beyond’” (Barth). Voting is a civic rite of exercising the privilege of citizenship in our corner of the earthly kingdom; the Eucharist is the ceremony in which we claim the benefits of our citizenship in the heavenly kingdom.
Thirdly, the tie between voting and the Eucharist runs the other way too. For two related reasons, partaking of the Lord’s Supper is the wellspring of all civic action that a believer undertakes. For one thing, the sacrament is the event in our lives that most starkly emphasizes the “happy exchange” in which Christ takes on our emptiness and we receive as our own all the benefits he has won (Martin Luther). One of the benefits we receive is the privilege of joyfully distributing the same benefits we receive to others. It is a joy because of the sheer abundance we receive when we take the elements and feed on the High Priest in our hearts by faith. And, secondly, the sacrament is the paradigmatic moment in which God transgresses the boundary between the physical and the spiritual, between temporal and eternal—which is why Luther bemoaned the loss of the early church’s practice of distributing food and other material goods to the poor as part of the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.
And so the Eucharist places us…
(not just symbolically but with actual effect)
- where we can claim our citizenship in two kingdoms at once
- where we can experience our common citizenship with believers across space and time
- and where we can pass on our joy.
It is eucharistic joy that we bring to bear in the voting booth. The joy of having received the great abundance of all things from Christ our Lord, and the desire to share that abundance with others as a parable and proclamation of his coming kingdom, which we have the privilege of expressing by our vote and in every square inch of our participation in this world.