Our Heavenly Father has given citizens of the United States of America a special blessing. We have the right to vote for the political representatives that govern the United States. These elections take place every year with different political positions becoming available for election. Every four years the president is up for reelection, making the fourth year arguably the most important election. This year is one of those special fourth years, and the important steps to the presidential election are well under way.
Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints recognize that God expects us to participate in the political processes of our government. For those in the United States, this means voting in elections. This often requires faith, so I felt it would be an excellent subject to address today, particularly since so many people that I know don’t vote.
You may wonder how voting is an act of faith. Consider the people of the Nephites, whose account can be found in The Book of Mormon. King Mosiah transferred the government from a monarchy to a government of elected officials similar to the United States government. Several times after this, a portion of the population became wicked and desired to return to a monarchy with the wealthy wicked in command.
At one point in time the wicked wealthy, called kingsmen, became so numerous that the righteous feared these kingsmen would succeed in overthrowing the government in the next election. So, acting on faith, the righteous prayed for help from God. Then they went and voted. And the wicked did not succeed. Consider what would have happened had the righteous not had faith. They probably wouldn’t have voted. Then the wicked would have succeeded and taken over the government.
This can be very similar to the world in which we currently live. So many of us are concerned with the path the United States has taken. We see the government rejecting God by casting Him out of schools at the request of those who don’t believe. There are attempts to removing Him from Christmas. And even our current president has claimed we are no longer a nation under God. Wickedness runs rampant in our country. And most of us recognize that many of the elected officials are pursuing a course away from the Constitution upon which our nation was founded.
We still have the ability to vote, however, and remove those who seek to destroy our liberty from office. Yet so many of us choose not to vote. There are five reasons I’ve been given for why people don’t vote: they are too lazy, they don’t know enough about the candidates or the issues, they don’t care, their vote doesn’t count, or they don’t like the republican or democrat that is running. I want to address each of these arguments.
The easiest of these arguments to address is the claim not to know enough about the candidates or the issues. If this is your excuse, I’m going to be brutally blunt with you. This is an extremely lame excuse. Do you realize how easy it is to find the information you need? Candidates have their own websites. News sources are more than willing to tell you about each candidate and issue. There are debates and so many other ways to find out. So be honest. It’s not that you don’t know enough about the candidates or issues. It’s that you are too lazy to find out or you don’t care.
So let’s focus on being too lazy to find out. Let me ask, do you hope and pray that our nation’s freedom will be preserved? If not, where is your faith? If so, then don’t you think you had better get over being lazy and practice the action part of faith? That is, after all, what is required if you expect God to answer your prayers.
So what about those that just don’t care? To this I will again be brutally honest. Are you foolish? Consider the impact the political decisions of the last century have upon you. We have the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Social Security and Medicare impact your income and your health. We have the war on Terrorism. There is the North American Free Trade Agreement. And there are a host of other laws and acts that impact you. These impact your wages, your retirement, your ability to get jobs and just what kind of job you will be able to get, your civil rights, and every other aspect of your life.
Now consider what impact the political decisions of the next decade will have. Depending on your age, they may impact your grandparents. For many of us, these decisions will impact our parents. But it is definite they will impact us. Don’t you care about your income? Don’t you care about your retirement? Don’t you care about your health? If you answered yes to even one of these, then how can you not care about voting?
But, let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that you don’t care about yourself or your future. What about your children? The political decisions that take place today will have the largest impact on the youth of today’s world. Do you care about them? If you do, and I know you do, then you simply must care about politics because the future of our youth depends upon political decisions made today.
Perhaps your argument is that you don’t like the republican or the democrat. Guess what. There are others to vote for. You can vote for another candidate running. You can write in a name. It really doesn’t matter who you vote for just so long as you vote. This is what is expected by God. And if you actually demonstrate faith in Him, He will answer your prayers and look after the nation. So vote on someone.
But what if you believe your vote doesn’t count. Well you are wrong. It does. There have been many times that just a few votes have made the difference between who was elected and who was not, even in our presidential elections. So your vote could be the deciding factor. Furthermore, how many more people think like you do? How many others decide not to vote because they believe their vote doesn’t count? It adds up.
If this had happened to the people of the Nephites, they would have lost their liberty. Are you prepared for those consequences if you decide not to vote simply because you believe your vote doesn’t count? Are you prepared to lose your liberty? Furthermore, where is your faith? How can you trust and hope in God, believing He will defend your liberty, if you don’t have enough faith to believe your vote will count?
Remember that the politics of Babylon denied the Jews from practicing their religion, as discovered in the book of Daniel in The Old Testament. Political actions at the time of Esther almost resulted in the destruction of all the Jews, as found in the book of Esther in the Old Testament. Political actions at the time of Christ resulted in His crucifixion, as recorded in the books of the New Testament.
Political decisions of the leaders of the Jaredites resulted in the destruction of an entire nation, as read in the book of Ether in The Book of Mormon. The Nephites were nearly destroyed many times by politics, as found in The Book of Mormon. And so many other scriptural accounts record politics destroying nations and placing the righteous in bondage.
Your liberty and your freedom are important to your ability to worship God. Politics play a large role in that freedom and liberty. It’s time for you to realize that you simply have to care enough about your spiritual welfare, and that of your children and grandchildren, enough to practice faith in God and vote.
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