The Two-Party Trap

Didn’t your mother teach you that when you cross the street, you need to look both ways? I made the mistake in India once: I looked to the right and got hit from the left. (Fortunately, the motorcyclist saw my misstep soon enough to decelerate and knock me over in slow motion!)

Turns out that’s just as true for ideologies and politics: you can look to the left and get hit from the right. Or is it the other way around? The truth is that our allegiance as Seventh-day Adventist Christians belongs to neither the left nor the right.

Because if we look to the left (here in the United States), we face an advocacy of moral compromise that tears down the divine wall protecting human purity from sexual excesses. How can we support aborting the imago Dei of an unborn child as a method of birth control?

But if we look to the right, we face an advocacy of constitutional compromise that tears down the wall separating church and state. How can we support an impotent religion courting government to “make America Christian again” when the church has failed to make Americans Christian at all?

The Bible actually cautions us to turn to neither direction for help: “For promotion cometh neither from the east [right], nor from the west [left], . . . but God is the judge: he putteth down one, and setteth up another” (Ps. 75:6, 7, KJV). The only “promotion” we are safe to seek comes from above: “[Our] help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth” (Ps. 121:2, KJV). In fact, the numerically middle verse of Holy Scripture declares the truth: “It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man” (Ps. 118:8). The point of Scripture is that we cannot look to the east or the west, to the right or the left, for deliverance. Both political parties represent basic ideologies and worldviews we must oppose.

It is the two-party trap.

But we have to vote for somebody, some party, don’t we? Yes and no. Yes, we must, as Jesus expressed it, “render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matt. 22:21, NIV). But we must be clear in our own minds that our act of voting does not declare party allegiance, but simply personal conviction. 

As N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird have observed:

“We [Christians] must have the courage to pursue our own consciences and convictions, not glibly attach ourselves to the visions of either the neoconservative right or the radical left. We are to live faithfully within the symbols, story, and message of King Jesus that bid us to clasp our hands in prayer as much as to put them to the trowel of earthly labor in his name.”[1]

The point of Scripture is that we cannot look to the east or the west, to the right or the left, for deliverance.

Ellen White herself forcefully called for such nonpartisanship:

“There is danger, decided danger, for all who shall link themselves up with the political parties of the world. There is fraud on both sides. God has not laid upon any of our people the burden of linking up with either party. We are under Christ’s banner, and everyone who names the name of Christ is to depart from all iniquity. . . . We know not what political crisis will come next.”[2]

The threat of a future political crisis led her to caution:

“The Lord would have His people bury political questions. On these themes silence is eloquence. . . . We cannot with safety vote [straight ticket] for political parties; for we do not know whom we are voting for. . . . Those who are Christians indeed will be branches of the true vine, and will bear the same fruit as the vine. They will act in harmony, in Christian fellowship. They will not wear political badges, but the badge of Christ.”[3]

And it is that “badge of Christ” that we must unabashedly wear in this nation of political chaos and impending crisis. Now more than ever our apocalyptic community must point our country—both its citizens and its politicians—to the truth as it is in Jesus. For the truth is—only Jesus can save America.

[1] N. T. Wright and Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Powers: Christian Political Witness in an Age of Totalitarian Terror and Dysfunctional Democracies (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Reflective, 2024), p. 78.

[2] Ellen G. White, in General Conference Daily Bulletin, Feb. 17, 1897.

[3] Ellen G. White, Gospel Workers (Washington, D.C.: Review and Herald Pub. Assn., 1915), pp. 391, 392. (Emphasis supplied.)