Vote Like Your Soul Depends On It

Republican vs. Democrat is the same as God vs. Satan, good vs. evil, fought on a different plane.

Election Day falls within the Octave of All Saints, which runs from November 1 to November 8, inclusive. In fact, American national elections have always fallen within this Octave, being Constitutionally scheduled on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Coincidence? Perhaps. Or, maybe, the Holy Ghost influenced the authors so that we vote with our own mortality on our minds.

Voting Against Vampires

“For there is a terrible task before us, and once our feet are on the ploughshare we must not draw back.”

— Dr. Van Helsing in Dracula by Bram Stoker —

For years, I mistakenly compartmentalized divine revelation from politics. My sin was double because, at a young age, I read Truth in Religion by Mortimer Adler. I learned that “religions” that lock “faith” into logic-tight compartments are not religions at all. Religion demands a leap of faith. Or, as Bram Stoker wrote in Dracula: Faith is “that faculty which enables us to believe things we know to be untrue.”

Dracula, a very Catholic book, shows us what happens when who’ve compartmentalized religions away from logic respond when reality imposes upon them things they know to be untrue. The book’s main characters are men and women of reason, law, and science. Its champion, Dr. Abraham von Helsing, is both attorney and physician. But all the lawyers, doctors, and businessmen rise above their human knowledge when faced with unhuman evil in form of Count Dracula. They stop “following the science” and start following the cross.

I believe God gives man earthly problems to vote against because man is too stupid to vote for merely for good. Voting for good often requires voting against ones immediate interests and positions. Take student loan forgiveness as an example.

Every person with student loan debt has an interest in cancelling his debt. In a compartmentalized world, the choice is a no-brainer. If you have debt, vote the people most likely to cancel it. Some people who owe education loans oppose debt cancellation. They’ve put their position (debt cancel bad) before their interest (freedom from debt good).

Dracula’s characters put their moral position before their interest. Their interest would be to stay away from vampires, but their position is that evil must be confronted and defeated, and it’s up to us to do it.

Had Dr. van Helsing or Jonathan Harker gone to politicians, police, and media with their concerns that an ancient count has landed in London to feed off the blood of Englishmen in the dark of night, they would have been locked up in Bedlam. “Disinformation,” London’s mayor would have snarled. “Likely Russian propaganda,” says Scotland Yard. Even the clergy would have been skeptical. “Demons? We stopped believing in demons in the Middle Ages, son.”

Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all, and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

—Bram Stoker, Dracula

Vampires are, to science and law, untrue. Politics is a practical art that must eschew things that cannot be weighed and measured. Everybody knows this. God knows this.

But we are far, far from the narrow road, and God knows this, too. We have inflations, lockdowns, medical tyranny, sexual grooming of children, a collapsing economy, rampant crime, and the possibility of nuclear war to keep our minds focused. It’s as if God said, “you don't want to live the Bible, so I’ll give you some highlights. Let’s start with the ten plagues of Egypt.”

Voting For God

Next Tuesday, Americans will go to the polls and vote against plagues. Many will do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Their reasons for voting will be reasonable, logical, and legal. They will vote against the party whose platform endorses evil, for sure, but their reasons will be wholly practical: less crime, less inflation, affordable housing, economic prosperity, and peace. God will, no doubt, be pleased with the outcome but dissatisfied with our motivation.

For there is but one motivation that satisfies Our Lord in all that we thinks, say, and do: that His will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Fiat voluntas tua sicut in caelo et in terra.

For partisans with strong feelings about issues or parties or candidates, this is a tough sell. It requires us to vote according a well-formed conscience. It requires that we actually consider God’s will, not ours, in how we vote. Most men won’t reflect on God’s will, so God gives us a cheat: crime, inflation, war, and all that.