Whitfield: Voting isn’t sacred but it’s essential

Returning to Rome, high in the sky, Pope Francis gave another inflight press conference last week. Again, his words made headlines all over the world, debated and divined either as oracle or heresy.
How one explains the pope these days depends mostly on what one already thinks of him. Not quite the ultramontanism of old, we still pay close attention to his every utterance. Only now we are less interested in truth; now papal words are more just grist to our numerous ideological mills. I wish we Catholics thought more about that: how the game is played, how words are played, how we are played. But that’s another topic.
Anyway, what caught Americans’ attention was what Pope Francis said about our upcoming presidential election. Criticizing Kamala Harris’ position on abortion and Donald Trump’s position on immigration, he said the election was a choice between the “lesser of two evils.” Not really a precise comment, it pleased few.
Partisans scrambled either to praise or hate what Pope Francis said only to say exactly what they said the day before. Which, as I said, is the game. Only the growing number of Catholics joining the American Solidarity Party were left scratching their heads.
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Yet Pope Francis nonetheless insisted that it’s our moral obligation to vote. “Not voting is ugly. It is not good. You must vote.” This is the Catholic position. However, I must admit this has long been difficult for me to abide. Tinged a bit still by Anabaptist thought, I do wonder if we shouldn’t respect abstention more; that too is a form of political engagement, I think.
At least it’s better than being pious about it. I’d rather think my vote a moral obligation than a prayer. In his speech at the Democratic National Convention last month, Sen. Raphael Warnock likened voting to praying. Granted it was a simile, it was still nonsense. It’s precisely that sentimentality, sacralizing the political, thinking your vote a holy thing, that we must abandon.
Of course, I am not here denigrating the sacrifices of those whose blood was given, just saying that to think our vote a sacred act has today become ridiculous, merely a rhetorical means of sanctifying political hatreds.
Yet voting should be revered. But it won’t be insofar as we no longer revere citizenship. This is an ancient truth. Since at least the Greeks, damos has predicated kratos — the root words for democracy. The quality of governance depends upon the quality of the people, upon the consent of the governed, presumably reasonable. That’s why Aristotle ended his Politics talking about education, for “a city is excellent through its citizens’ being excellent.” But that would take work, moral formation and the return of civics.
Václav Havel wrote once that “a nation gets the politicians it deserves.” If true, that’s a sobering thing to consider in 2024. But it also suggests what is our deeper problem.
Yes, to vote is a moral obligation; the stakes are certainly high. Exactly 60 years ago Malcom X talked about “the ballot or the bullet.” That’s prophecy I fear afresh.
Yet cheaply sanctifying our votes, blessing them by means of celebrity endorsements, will not heal our nation. Rather, only by becoming better people will we do that.
Which is why things like families matter, also neighborhoods, churches, synagogues and schools. Because those are the places where we learn the virtues of civic friendship, virtues that, at least this year, I dare say matter more than voting.
Part of our opinion series The American Middle, this essay warns against partisans who claim divine sanction for their party’s support.
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