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Today's Washington Post has what one of the CT editors calls an "almost sympathetic" account of Redeem the Vote, the Christian tour that combines CCM and voter registration.

"It's a fledgling effort and the rocker element still has a slightly forced feel, as when Democrats on the campaign trail appear with soldiers in uniform," writes political reporter Hanna Rosin, who was on the religion beat during the past presidential election. "Nobody mentions Bush or Kerry, and these get-out-the-vote efforts insist they are nonpartisan," but, she says, one is hard-pressed to find a Kerry supporter. "What counts as debate here is Justine Record and William Rassman, two friends from nearby Marion, in a heated discussion about whether God directly determined Bush's election and the Iraq war (he says) or whether human free will had some small hand in it (she says)."

The Redeem the Vote campaign is partly evidence, writes Rosin, that "evangelicals have long passed the point where they expect their kids to sing in the gospel choir and ignore the rest of the world."

But might there be a backlash?

In some ways, it seems the tables are turning. In his Breakpoint commentary last Wednesday, Charles Colson criticized Wheaton College historian Mark Noll's Christian Century article on why he's not voting—and hasn't in the last several presidential elections. For those of you who missed Noll's column, here's the main point:

Seven issues seem to me to be paramount at the national level: race, the value of life, taxes, trade, medicine, religious freedom and the international rule of law. In my mind, each of these issues has a strong moral dimension. My position on each is related to how I understand the traditional Christian faith that grounds my existence. Yet neither of the major parties is making a serious effort to consider this particular combination of concerns or even anything remotely resembling it.

Noll's response to political imperfection sounds an awful lot like the "touch not the unclean thing" mantra of the old-time fundamentalists, says Colson.

That position is dead wrong and damaging to democracy. It's the utopian notion which assumes divine perfection in fallen humans. His assumption that we can support only candidates who have perfect scores according to our reading of the Bible makes me wonder how he votes at all. And if that's the standard, all of us should stop voting.

But that's exactly what the fundamentalist movement did in the early part of the 20th century, the movement Mark Noll so correctly criticizes. Their error was allowing perfectionism to get in the way of their responsibility to act for the common good.

Ouch! Interesting question, though: Has Noll undermined his call for increased cultural and intellectual engagement among evangelicals? This conversation may well continue.

And it's certainly not limited to Noll and Colson. Another highly respected Christian intellectual, Notre Dame philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, is also calling for Christians not to vote. "When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither," he writes on the website of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture.

The only vote worth casting in November is a vote that no one will be able to cast, a vote against a system that presents one with a choice between Bush's conservatism and Kerry's liberalism, those two partners in ideological debate, both of whom need the other as a target. … Try to promote the pro-life case that we have described within the Democratic Party and you will at best go unheard and at worst be shouted down. Try to advance the case for economic justice as we have described it within the Republican Party and you will be laughed out of court. … In this situation a vote cast is not only a vote for a particular candidate, it is also a vote case for a system that presents us only with unacceptable alternatives. The way to vote against the system is not to vote.

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October (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48