Election fever is soon to hit us in Australia again. Who should you vote for? The traditional Christian approach seems to be to vote for the party which most reflects Christian moral positions on such issues as abortion. But is this the right approach?
A problem with politics is that when you vote you’re not just voting for one issue. You’re voting for a political party which has particular stances on a large range of different issues. You have to look at them all if you’re going to make a sensible decision. It’s almost an impossible task, because how do you weigh up completely different factors and trade them off against each other?
You can take the football team approach. You can pick one party and decide that it’s your team, and you can vote for it and stay loyal to it regardless of policies, competence, performance, or trustworthiness. In some countries this results in institutionalised bad government. People keep voting for Policitian X, because he happens to belong to their tribe. They refuse to consider the obvious facts that Politician X is corrupt, selfish, and incompetent.