Amy Bowers attends Milwaukee Mennonite Church. 

When we look to the Bible for guidance on how to view voting, we run into a problem: the scriptures are populated with people who have little or no say in how they are governed. Jesus and his disciples lived under Roman occupation. For the centuries proceeding, Israel had often been ruled by foreign powers, and before that, Israel was ruled by David and his descendants. To find an instance where people make a choice about how they would be governed, we need to look to the time of Samuel, when Israel asks for king.

Apart from some passing references to the possibility of Israel having a king, the law of Moses does not establish a monarchy or otherwise make provision for a system of government. The Law was set; there was no job for legislators. Leaders stepped up as the need arose. There were judges to settle disputes and generals to do the practical work of leading people into battle. Yet there was no head of state, commander-in-chief, or other human figure for the people to rally around.

The book of Judges presents Israel’s early days in the promised land as occasional periods of relative order within long stretches of increasing chaos. The author of Judges sums it up: “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” The scriptures present Israel’s last judge, Samuel, as a good leader that God had called. However, Samuel’s sons, his appointed successors, are greedy and corrupt. It is in this context that elders of Israel ask Samuel to appoint a king to for Israel.

Given the picture of anarchy in the era of Judges, it seem obvious that people would seek an alternative. Maybe a change, the strong hand of a worthy king, is exactly what Israel needed to establish them as a strong, orderly and prosperous nation. Since later history would portray David’s reign as a golden age, one might assume that requesting a king was a good move for Israel.

Yet at the Lord’s instruction, Samuel warns the people of the cost of living under a king’s rule. A king will take the best of all that they have—their fields, their crops, their cattle, their sons as soldiers, their daughters as servants.

But the people are determined: they want to be like other nations with a king that fights their battles for them. They willing to give over control to a monarch in whom they could place their trust, regardless of the cost.

You might say that Israel thought they were choosing the lesser evil. They were willing to offer their fealty, their property, even their children for the sense of security and certainty that they felt a king would provide them.

God’s case against having a king does not make any reference to what is working within the current system. There is no appeal to how good life was under Samuel and other judges who happened to be successful. God was not defending the rule of the judges but objecting to the people’s desire for a human ruler.

The plan had been that the Lord would be their king. The people would not need to be ruled by anyone; they would be free to follow God’s law, trust in God’s promises and enjoy the bounty of the land God gave them.

By asking for a king, people were saying that God’s promise to lead them and go before them was inadequate. They wanted a king they could see and could show off to other nations. They were sick of the uncertainty of having only the Lord as their king. They were ready to do what other nations did: give control of their lives to a king who would take care of them.

God sees this rejection of God’s kingship as another example of the people’s history of serving other gods. When the people persist in their request, undeterred by Samuel’s warnings, the Lord instructs Samuel to give the people the king that they are asking for.

Living in a monarchy worked out about as well as Samuel warned it would. Life in Israel was bound up in the character of the king. People followed where their king led them, and the nation experienced periods of peace and of injustice, of faithfulness and of idolatry. As the monarchy wanes, through occupations and exile, we hear the voice of the prophets call the people back to follow God’s law and again be God’s people and to turn their focus from their own comfort and prosperity to bringing justice to the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant.

As Christians, we seek to answer this call, affirming that God in Christ has become our king, the only one worthy of our allegiance and trust. The life of Christ in us compels us to follow God’s law, now written on our hearts.

If we are called to recognize no king but God, one might think that Christian citizens of democracies are at an advantage, free to govern ourselves rather than offering fealty to a monarch. In truth, we are subject to the same temptations that moved the Israelites to ask Samuel for a king.

I have watched this tendency on display this election season. We want to elect a president who will finally succeed in making things right. We want a leader who will fight our battles for us; we just disagree on whether our enemies are immigrants and terrorists or bankers and corporations. We want a leader who will make us like the nations we admire; we just differ on whether to look for our model in Scandinavia or in a glorious America from a past that never actually existed.

We seek to identify with parties and factions, seeing ourselves as the heroes and others as villains. We excuse the sins of some candidates while magnifying and mocking the failings of others.

In a season in which both major party presidential candidates are historically unpopular, I’ve seen variations on the discussion of choosing between evils: the difficulty in determining which is the lesser evil; the admonition that when you choose the lesser evil, you are still choosing evil. All of these discussions seem unhelpful to me.

Voting is not a choice between evil entities but between human beings: all confident in their own vision and intentions, and all capable of greed, dishonesty, and cowardice. Even the candidate that we find most honest and inspiring is unworthy of our unconditional trust.

Just as we are called to reject the narrative that our country deserves our unconditional allegiance, we must also give up on the dream of electing candidates that truly represent us and that we can fully support without reservation or criticism. This year especially, when so much rhetoric is focused on choosing the candidate who will fight for “people like us,” we must reject the narrative that voting is about choosing our champion, the one who will fight our battles for us and save us from whatever we believe is harming us. We can choose to look at voting as what it is—giving our opinion about the best person among the available candidates for a job.

I know that for some Anabaptists voting to elect a commander-and-chief is simply unacceptable , and our tradition has a strong history of disengaging from earthly powers and institutions and focusing our energy on serving one another in community. I can see how abstaining from voting can feel like a moral victory, a private protest against our system’s inherent violence or failure to offer candidates that we can truly stand behind. The problem, though, is that no matter how dissatisfied we are with our options, we are not a conquered people with no vote and no voice. We can’t stand on the outside, railing against our oppressors and calling out to God for liberation. It is frustrating to vote for candidates only because you find them slightly less objectionable than their opponents. But if we choose not to vote, we give silent consent to the choice made by the people who do exercise that right.

Placing our trust in Jesus as our king need not mean that we accept the nations of the world as they are, pretending there is nothing we can do. It can mean spending every ounce of agency we have to work toward a world where all people can live in peace and share the bounty of creation.

This includes what we do with our vote, how we hold our leaders accountable, and how we move through the world in the 1460 days between presidential elections. Rather than throwing up our hands and withdrawing from a world that we abhor for its violence, corruption, and inequity, we have the choice to follow Jesus in confronting the powers of this world face to face and witnessing to the peace, justice, and liberation of the kingdom of God.