Why Election Day Won’t Save Us
The Pseudo-Theology Behind the Ballot
About the author: Dr. Ashish Varma is an Indian American theologian based in Chicago, IL. His dissertation work explored theological grounding for virtue ethics. In recent years, his research has sat at the intersection of theological engagement with race and ecology, writing and speaking on both. Additionally, he edited and contributed to A Praying People, a collection of essays on prayer (Wipf & Stock, 2023).
Election. What is the first thing that came to our minds upon invoking the word “election”? More to the point, what feeling did it conjure? Elation? Fear? Vindication? Despair? The odds are that you do not have a neutral feeling about the word, especially a mere handful of days removed from the U.S. Presidential election. Its ubiquitous significance has saturated our imaginations. Whether or not we are inclined to believe the heavy rhetoric—“this is the most important election in American history”; “democracy is at stake”; “the church is under attack in America, and this election is the only way to protect the rights of [fill in the blank]”—the 24/7 media coverage leading up to the election invariably shaped our perceptions of space and time.
The election season lasted a year and a half, far beyond the process in any other country. And from the beginning, the election was about superlatives—the greatest, the worst, the dire, the fearful. Whether through news media, comedians, or social media, we have spent the past year and a half in self-pity over all that is wrong and with fingers firmly pointed across the political aisle. All the woes we face could only be addressed through the election and, specifically, through the coming to power of the right candidate.
In the United States, this election was (or, perhaps, is) our hope.
Election. Our minds went to the great, cosmic battle of blue and red because, in the aftermath of November 5, we are barely removed from the sacramental event of U.S. liturgy. We have participated in the event in hope of receiving its grace with our preferred candidate, whom we either adore or tolerate for the sake of the ideals.
Yet Christian theologians also speak of another election. Why do our minds not begin there?
Sure, we tire of the debates. For instance, the textbook discussions relay older European political theologies embedded in the abstracted form of “I am of the tribe of Calvin” or “I am of the tribe of Arminius.” Below, I will describe this political theology as “whiteness.”1
But theological election predates those political theologies by well over a millennium. Theological election in Scripture actually arises in an entirely different political economy. As opposed to our struggles to make our political proclivities supreme, the apostle Paul addressed election to first-century Christians who sat doubly on the margins of political decision-making, for the early Christians sat on the outskirts of the Roman theo-political establishment and the majority rabbinic order. Paul presented election as a claim of hope beyond the political and social order.
At that, please allow me to quote at length from Karl Barth, who offers insight on what exactly theological election bears on possibilities beyond our current socio-political landscape:
There is a modern concept which during the last two centuries has shown itself with increasing clarity to be a kind of secular imitation of the concept of the election of Jesus Christ—the concept of the leader . . . The whole mystery of human existence in his sphere is his mystery. All freedom and all responsibility, all authority and power in this sphere, belong to him. He is the other, by whom is taken from the many beside him both their election and everything else with it—the mystery of their individuality and solitude, freedom and responsibility, all authority and power—and from whom they hold everything only in fee, to carry out his decisions. Emerging from the ranks of the many and elevated over them as the other who alone may be an individual, the leader is an absolute usurper in relation to other individuals. Election in the sense of the modern leader-concept has nothing whatever to do with the election of Jesus Christ except that it is its utter reversal and caricature. The individualism of the West obviously cannot evade responsibility for the formulation of this concept. All the brutality, all the murderous insolence of the usurper have been involved in it from the very outset. Mastered, as it were, by its own logic and reduced ad absurdum, it has brought down upon itself an inevitable and most terrible reaction. But this has simply disclosed the antithesis to the Christian concept of election in which it found itself even at its inception. The Christian concept of election does not involve this despoiling of the many for the sake of the one. On the contrary, when Jesus Christ is the elected One, the election and the accompanying mystery of the individuality and solitude, and with it the freedom and responsibility and the authority and the power of the many, are not abrogated, but definitively confirmed in this Other. He is not the object of the divine election of grace instead of them, but on their behalf. He does not retain for Himself or withhold what He is and possesses as the Elect of God. He does not deal with it as with spoil. But He is what He is, and has what He has, in His revelation and imparting of it to the many. His kingdom is neither a barracks nor a prison, but the home of those who in, with and by Him are free. He is the Master of all as the Servant of all. Secular individualism may have reached its goal and end in the contemporary leader-concept, but in the Christian concept of election its own barely understood desire has always been defended against it, and even in face of the catastrophe which has overtaken it, it will continue to be preserved.2
Recall that Barth’s theological life straddled the kind of pseudo-theological political upheaval that produced two massive, Western-centric wars, which we call “World Wars.” I cited his discourse on the theological structure of our Western Parliamentary-style election of leaders, of which the U.S. government is a type. He continues with a similar theological critique on the “social mass” model (Communism, socialism), and Fascism.3 That is to say, we should understand that Barth’s jabs are directed in all political directions.4
Let us focus on two things: first, notice how Barth takes up his contemporary political connotation of election as a pseudo-theology. By “pseudo-theology,” I mean something that bears theological weight but does not recognize itself as a theological construct. For Barth, the political notion of election is thoroughly political because it is a deformity—dare I say simulacrum?—of what he calls the legitimate theological basis of election, the election of Jesus Christ. The pseudo-theology takes its cue from the election of Jesus Christ, but the former warps the latter by destroying the very character of the election of Jesus Christ. The elected political leader does not occupy leadership on behalf of the many but rather in the stead of the many. The political structure is geared precisely to feign the creation of a sphere of representation only in actuality to create the sphere that it is to represent. That is to say, Barth’s concern is that political parties care less about people themselves (and their real problems) and more about manipulating people to care about what the party leaders want them to care about.5 Indeed, even the party leader(s) are merely earlier versions of people formed by the party ideals, created as emissaries who stand-in for the party’s ideas. More precisely, then, we are formed as a following community, disciples to a cause wherein hierarchies are made, and we are to uphold them in the name of freedom.
For Barth, one of the grand ironies is that we are led to believe that following the leader will guarantee our freedom because the leader will advocate for those freedoms. The reality, though, is that we find ourselves enslaved to the leader who encloses party members around himself, where the leader, too, is beholden to the invisible ideals that shape him and guarantee our allegiance. In electing the leader, we and the leader are beholden to the ideals that enclose creation around them. This enclosing, this pseudo-theology, is a pseudo-gospel that cannot do what it guarantees. Our being enclosed is our loss of true freedom. The second irony is that the loss of freedom is inevitable, for the true character of the Christ who is imitated and displaced is to be the “Master”—in Barth’s wording—by being the greatest Servant of all: “He does not retain for Himself.” He secures our individuality by joining it to his own divine freedom-in-being-for. That is, Jesus Christ, the Elect One, bringing freedom by destroying mastery.
Second, by implication, I want to extend Barth. I do not believe he goes far enough. He does not seem to get the depths of the sinister character of the bondage of the elected leader made as a false image to replace Christ. Not only does the elected leader form us to serve him, but the enclosing—my language—into a system of ideals begs another question: what are those ideals? More specifically, what are the aesthetics of the ideals? Is it merely the case that we are enclosed into a generic structure of ideals, or do those ideals have their own character?
The leader is, of course, typically male. There is a gendered character to the ideas of the modern leader: the self-sufficient male with a quite specific designation of the image of his self-sufficient masculinity in terms of mastery. The mastery often takes specific forms while denying that the prescribed forms of masculinity are precisely local and relative.6 For example, I have heard colleagues describe the ideal professor as one who exercises “control over the room,” where the context was clearly the need for professors whose booming voice out-muscles any potential distraction, lending power to what the professor has to say. The same former colleagues applied the same rubric to the hiring of a potential female colleague, expressing concern that she might not be able to “control the room.” The assumption, of course, is that students will not learn “truth” without the booming voice that casts out “heresies.” Not surprisingly, my soft-spoken, conversational approach to the classroom became a prime example of how “lies” infiltrate theological education.
The elected leader is the exaggeration of the highly specific norms of self-sufficiency, thus justifying his standing above the rest and at the expense of the rest. Individuality is ultimately for the elect one, who is ironically the tool of an idea that promises freedom and perfection to those who follow the ideal elected leader. To live into this enclosing, one must sacrifice oneself to possibilities constrained by the uniform imagination. That is, the act that is praised as the act that guarantees freedom to all is, in reality, actually an act that constrains freedom and individuality by sacrificing them for the elevation of the chosen one as the Master, who himself conforms to an invisible ideal.
Additionally, the character of the ideals is “white.” The idea of “whiteness” troubles some, so please allow me to quote at length again, this time from theologian Willie James Jennings:
White self-sufficient masculinity is not first a person or a people; it is a way of organizing life with ideas and forming a persona that distorts identity and strangles the possibilities of dense life together. In this regard, my use of the term “whiteness” does not refer to people of European descent but to a way of being in the world and seeing the world that forms cognitive and affective structures able to seduce people into its habitation and its meaning making.7
“Whiteness,” here, is not a simple designation of skin color. It preys upon visual optics—especially pigmentation—making judgments about maturity, ability, and status. Formed in the colonial theater of the European “Age of Discovery,” it made peoples and places in its images, determining maturity on the basis of how closely peoples and their cultures approximated the thoughts and lives of the “explorers.” The newly forming racial judgments extended to peoples across the world the institutions of mastery that it had already extended to its own people, where only a few were able to lead on the basis of their own self-sufficiency. Yet even these few, according to Barth’s critique, were not truly free, for they were merely the ones who most conformed to the false image of personal maturity. They benefited by excluding those who did not adequately fit the form, yet they also lost themselves to the false image of maturity and freedom. The pseudo-political-theology of election was violent toward everyone, including the “chosen ones.”
Recall the language of enclosing. “Election day” is an exercise of reinforcing the enclosing, picking the fruit borne of a saturated imagination where we are periodically asked to believe that this is the most pivotal election.
Please do not mishear me. I voted. I believe there were important issues. However, to place my hope in the structure of a system of replicating leaders who are ultimately servants of ideals borne of whiteness—in order to replicate a society meant to enclose peoples into its organization of creation—is nothing short of theological tragedy. And it is not the theological tragedy of the cross, although the simulacrum of white self-sufficient leadership tries to replace it. It is a Babel. To place my hopes in such a structure would be to succumb to the enclosing reality of a pseudo-theology of an election that disciples people into a form of maturity with an invisible aesthetic.
Yes, to be clear, I voted. I voted because I thought people at large could be served by the placing of certain individuals in positions of leadership over others. But let us not kid ourselves. Last Tuesday was not election day. The efforts that led to Election Tuesday may have been efforts to set certain people free, and that does matter. However, the political efforts to liberate peoples are but attempts to construct places; at best, these efforts are a mirror to the freedom that comes only in the Elect One, Jesus. A key difference here is between constructing false replicas (Babel) and pointing or witnessing to someone and something else (Jesus).
We look forward to the new reality made possible by the Election Day that did not enclose. Rather, the election of Jesus made possible the election of humanity and creation, the setting free of creation and us in it to live into an encircling around Jesus.
In short, if the church really wants to place so much stock on Election day, it ought to put stock in its identity as the elect Gentile community living in the eschatological reality promised by the encircling of creation around the Elect One of Israel. The church is validated in its election by the Elect One, not the “leader” who is “elected” in the voting booths. The latter can be a local mechanism for pointing, but it is not a replacement for the Elect One, and it better not succeed in enclosing the church within its imagination of creation under the ideas of self-sufficiency—ideas that, in the final analysis, actually make no one self-sufficient.
Lord, may we, the church, have expanded imaginations to live in this place, laboring creatively to affect real communities of anticipation. Amen.
The notion of “whiteness” is a contentious one that itself divides us along political lines. Often, we view “whiteness” in overly simple terms that can too easily entrench our racial divisions. My hope is to move beyond “whiteness,” not by ignoring it, but rather by exposing it as an aesthetic and a political theology that a theology of election should critique. Criticism of the epoch of “whiteness” is not the rejection of those who have come to see their skin as “white.” It is criticism of the movement that made skin seem “white” or “not-white,” with gradations in between. The goal is not some simple political-theological inversion, where “not-white” takes over our political and theological realm and subordinates “white.” The goal is to name our structural racial problem and to destroy its power over our imagination and moral vision.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/2: The Doctrine of God, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance, trans. G. W. Bromiley et al. (T&T Clark, 1957), 311–12.
Barth, CD II/2, 312.
For present purposes, I will set aside Barth’s seemingly overly-optimistic view on “the Christian concept of election” historically over and against the “catastrophe which has overtaken it” more recently in his tumultuous century.
Arguably, Bernie Sanders leveled a similar critique at Democratic leaders in the aftermath of Trump’s victory over Harris on November 5.
Of course, more recently, through hyper-reaction to idealist distortion, there is the over-atomization of particularity, which often seeks to overcome the idolatry of whiteness with a bunch of smaller idolatries that, unfortunately, receive their own character from their opposition to whiteness. That is, the hyper-atomization only ends up reifying whiteness.
Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020), 8–9. He continues, “Whiteness was formed in the colonial theater with a convening power unprecedented in the world not only in its scale but also in its utter disregard for the convening abilities of other peoples. In the hands of the Europeans, the good of convening joined the bad of imperialism, and from it came a vision of the universal controlled by Europeans. Only they could gather the world, and only they understood the gathering of the world. Europeans not only exploited the differences among peoples but they also created boundary identities between peoples—geographic, physical, cultic, sexual, and theological—that Europeans believed spoke the truth of peoples more accurately than peoples’ own accounts of themselves. Religions, races, and nations were created in this operation of whiteness, and we are yet caught in its protocols, protocols that drive forward its imperialist habits of mind” (19).