How Should Christians in Rochester, NY Vote? (lol, Buckle Up)

A Rochester Election Blog From Jomo K. Johnson

With Election Day coming up this November here in Monroe County — governor, Congress, state legislature, and a stack of local races all on the ballot — I already know the question is coming. Somebody's going to corner me after service or slide into my DMs and ask, "Pastor Jomo, who should Christians vote for?"

Here's my honest answer: I have no idea which party Jesus would register with. And neither does anyone else, no matter how confidently they post about it on Facebook.

Let me show you why.

Christians Have Voted Every Which Way for Centuries

If you think there's one obvious "Christian" political position, church history is about to ruin your morning.

The early church didn't vote at all — they were a persecuted minority inside the Roman Empire, wrestling with how much loyalty they owed a government that occasionally fed them to lions. Paul told believers in Romans 13 to respect governing authority, while John's Revelation described that same empire as a beast. Even in the first century, Christians couldn't agree on how close to get to political power.

Once Rome went Christian, the faith got tangled up with empire for over a thousand years — kings ruled by "divine right," and dissenting from the king could get you burned as a heretic. Not exactly a shining chapter.

The Anabaptists of the 1500s — the spiritual ancestors of today's Mennonites and Amish — looked at that mess and said "no thanks" to political power entirely. They preached total separation of church and state, refused to fight in wars, and believed true faith couldn't be forced by a government or married to one.

American Christian abolitionists in the 1800s — many of them Quakers, many of them evangelical revivalists riding the wave of the Second Great Awakening — used Scripture to fight slavery, often putting them at odds with fellow Christians in the South who used the same Bible to defend it. Yes, both sides quoted verses. That should terrify anyone using "the Bible says" as a political trump card today.

The Black church, after Emancipation, largely aligned with the Republican Party — the party of Lincoln — for decades. That loyalty didn't shift toward the Democratic Party until the New Deal era of the 1930s and accelerated through the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and '60s, when Dr. King worked with, pushed against, and was disappointed by leaders in both parties.

The Social Gospel movement, around the turn of the 20th century, produced Christians who fought for labor rights, child labor laws, and public health — proto-progressive politics rooted in Matthew 25 ("whatever you did for the least of these"). Around the same era, Catholic social teaching was doing something similar, blending concern for workers with deep commitment to family and the sanctity of life — a combination that doesn't map neatly onto either modern party.

Liberation theology, born in Latin America in the 1960s and '70s, fused Christian faith with critiques of poverty and economic exploitation, aligning many Christians with socialist and left-leaning movements.

The Moral Majority, launched by Jerry Falwell in 1979, pulled white evangelicals firmly into the Republican coalition around abortion, school prayer, and "traditional family values" — a partnership that has largely defined American evangelical politics for the last 45 years.

And today, movements like the evangelical left continue to argue that Christian faith demands progressive policy on poverty, immigration, and the environment, while conservative evangelicals argue faith demands the opposite priorities.

The takeaway: Christians have been abolitionists and slaveholders, monarchists and revolutionaries, socialists and capitalists, Republicans and Democrats — often at the exact same moment in history, all quoting the same Bible. If your pastor tells you there's only one righteous party, they've skipped a few centuries of church history.

So Can You Vote Republican or Democrat and Still Be a Faithful Christian?

Yes. Full stop.

You can look at the same Scripture, weigh the same moral concerns — the unborn, the poor, immigrants, national security, religious liberty, criminal justice — and land as a thoughtful conservative or a thoughtful progressive. That's called prudential judgment, and Christians of good conscience have always disagreed on how biblical values translate into policy.

But MAGA Isn't Just "Conservative." That's a Theological Problem.

Here's where I have to get specific, because I think a lot of well-meaning believers have confused "voting Republican" with "endorsing MAGA," and those are not the same thing.

MAGA, as a political and cultural movement, isn't simply a policy platform — it operates as a fused identity of nationalism, personality-driven loyalty, and grievance politics wrapped in Christian language. And when I look at that combination through the lens of Scripture, I don't see a legitimate policy disagreement. I see a set of patterns the Bible directly warns against.

1. It flirts with idolatry. The first commandment isn't a suggestion: "You shall have no other gods before me" (Exodus 20:3). When a flag, a nation, or a political leader gets treated with the reverence that belongs to God alone — when rallies start looking and sounding like worship services — that's not patriotism. That's idolatry with a marching band.

2. It has a truth problem. "You shall not bear false witness" (Exodus 20:16). "Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord" (Proverbs 12:22). A movement substantially built on conspiracy theories, election denialism, and manufactured outrage cannot simultaneously claim the mantle of biblical truth-telling. You don't get to pick and choose which commandments are negotiable.

3. It struggles to love the stranger. Scripture doesn't whisper about this one — it shouts it: "The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself" (Leviticus 19:34). Jesus went even further, saying that how we treat "the least of these," including the stranger, is literally how we treat Him (Matthew 25:35–40). Rhetoric that dehumanizes immigrants as invaders or vermin isn't a prudential immigration policy disagreement — it's a direct contradiction of a command repeated dozens of times throughout the Old and New Testaments.

4. It runs on pride, not humility. "Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall" (Proverbs 16:18). Philippians 2:3 calls believers to "do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves." A movement built around the infallibility of one man, where loyalty to the leader supersedes loyalty to truth or conscience, is functioning less like Christian discipleship and more like a cult of personality.

5. It often sides against the poor and vulnerable. The Old Testament prophets reserved their harshest words for leaders who built comfort on the backs of the poor: "Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights" (Isaiah 10:1–2). James 5:1–6 pronounces judgment on the wealthy who withhold wages and live in luxury while others suffer. Policies that gut healthcare, food assistance, or protections for the vulnerable — while praised in explicitly Christian terms — deserve exactly the kind of prophetic pushback Amos and Isaiah were known for.

6. It replaces enemy-love with contempt. "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44). A political culture that thrives on mockery, dehumanization, and treating political opponents as enemies to be crushed rather than neighbors to be loved has drifted a long way from the Sermon on the Mount.

7. Its fruit doesn't match the Spirit's fruit. Galatians 5:22–23 lists the fruit of the Spirit as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Galatians 5:19–21, just before it, lists the works of the flesh: enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions. Jesus said we'd know a tree by its fruit (Matthew 7:16). I'd simply ask: which list does the loudest MAGA rhetoric actually produce?

A Fair Word to Those Who See It Differently

I'd be doing you a disservice if I pretended every thoughtful Christian agrees with me here. Plenty of sincere believers who support this movement would push back hard on this whole argument. They'd say they're not worshipping a man, they're defending religious liberty and the unborn against a culture they see as hostile to faith. They'd say concerns about national sovereignty and immigration enforcement are about the rule of law, not hatred of immigrants. They'd argue that calling out "MAGA theology" as unbiblical is itself a political move dressed up in spiritual language — and honestly, that's a fair challenge to sit with. I'm not writing this to tell you which candidate to circle on your ballot this November. I'm writing it because I think the fusion of nationalism and faith is worth examining regardless of which party benefits from it — and I'd say the same thing if a movement on the left started demanding that kind of allegiance.

So, How Should You Vote?

Prayerfully. Humbly. With your eyes open to the actual fruit a movement produces, not just the slogans it wraps itself in. Talk to people who disagree with you before Election Day, not just after. And whatever you do, don't let anyone — me included — tell you that a single political party has a monopoly on the Kingdom of God.

Vote your conscience this November, Rochester. Just make sure it's actually your conscience, and not a borrowed one.

— Jomo