How Should Christians Vote?

Christians of various political stripes aspire to use the “levers of power,” i.e., the state’s police powers, to enforce their conceptions of divine justice, i.e., how God wants people to behave.

With this is in view, I ask: what’s the difference between these two patterns of inference?


(1) God wants people to do x.

(2) The powers of the state can be used to force people to do x.

Therefore, God wants the powers of the state used to force people to do x.


(1) God wants people to do x.

(2*) Water boarding can be used to force people to do x.

Therefore, God wants water boarding used to force people to do x.

I advocate not for water boarding--the second bit of reasoning is ridiculous and horrifying--but against the unreflective assumption that God wants us to force people to do things, even by means of the relatively 'genteel' coercive mechanisms of the democratic state.