When your political allegiance decides not only your vote but who your friends are, when it makes you cut off those who have a different politics, when it makes you willing to tolerate a moral bankrupt as your candidate and to vote for him or her, when your politics begins to substitute for your theology, when it decides your moral values then is it right to call yourself a Christian?
Well, for these reasons I avoid adopting partisan positions, to avoid scandalizing any of the faithful. I privately support some politicians and privately oppose others, but the only issues I care about with regards to the vote are those which are relevant to Christianity - will this person persecute the church and traditional Christian morality and promote immoral behavior such as abortion, euthanasia, sexual promiscuity, genital mutilation (whether non-consensual as in the case of FGM or consensual as in the case of those suffering from gender dysphoria, which should be in my view regarded as a serious mental illness rather than as a basis to effectively sterilize people by catastrophically reconfiguring their sexual anatomy in such a way so that most such individuals are unable to reproduce after “gender-affirming surgery”, which cannot actually change their sex but which is purely cosmetic (there is also the risk of life with any such procedure); lately indeed this has become one of the more pressing issues, more pressing even than homosexual marraige, due to, in the US, widespread attempts by some state governments to indoctrinate young children in a pro-trans ideology, with things such as “Drag Queen Story Hour” and other abhorrent behaviors, and with some school districts persuading minors their issues are due to gender dysphoria, frankly I find it a bit dystopian. Also anyone who supports prolonging military conflicts in which Christians are being killed, or failing to act to stop the persecution of Christians, or anyone who would be opposed to the first amendment protections we enjoy in the US on freedom of worship, for these are existential threats to the Church and to Christian peoples.
Outside of those ecclesiastically sensitive issues, the only other issues which I care about politically are uncontroversial ones which pertain to infrastructure, for instance, my enthusiastic support for nuclear power, large scale flood control and drought prevention measures including a network of trans-continental aqueducts in the US and Canada, and improvements in transportation infrastructure and business - specifically, i should like to see more passenger rail service, more competition in the manufacture of passenger rail equipment, with a breakup of the Alsthom/Siemens duopoly and other efforts to increase competition and reduce costs, and also discourage the needless replacement of equipment which is still in viable servicable condition such as the Amfleet coaches in the US, the XPT carriages (and perhaps the power cars, but on that point I’m not sure, that’s another issue) in Australia, and the UIC-Z, Corail and ICRm carriages in Europe, particularly with electrical multiple units which, due to their motorization, tend to have a shorter lifespan than hauled carriages. I should like to see more urban transport. I should like to see a breakup of the Airbus / Boeing / Embraer triopoly, and a breakup of certain large airlines which are anti-competitive (this is particularly a problem in North America, where Mexico and Canada now have only one large international airline each, and the US only has three international airlines that operate at scale; as recently as 2007 there were six such airlines in the US, two in Mexico and two in Canada. Likewise, a reduction of consolidation among passenger car manufacturers, so as to ensure enhanced consumer choice, would be highly desirable, as well as efforts to rebuild and restore conventional retail left devastated by the Covid pandemic and related issues, such as the proliferation of e-commerce, which lately has deteriorated greatly in quality (Amazon has caused a number of problems of late, tolerating the sale of products such as refurbished computers that come with actual viruses preloaded) which has recently claimed even the venerable Hudsons Bay Company in Canada.
These issues aside, which pertain to infrastructure and are not really politically sensitive, and ecclesiastical issues, I refrain from anything else, in particular endorsing specific candidates publically.
I also seek to avoid under any circumstances losing a friend due to a difference in political opinion. I can’t think of a worse reason to sacrifice a friendship. It requires presupposing that their views being different from yours are the result of actual malice on their end as opposed to a difference of opinion but not of positive intent.
