Lakepointe Church senior pastor Josh Howerton delivered a sermon titled, “How to Vote Like Jesus.” In it, Howerton “repeated GOP rhetoric in a veiled attempt to convince his Dallas-Fort Worth congregation how to cast their votes in November’s election.”
Howerton recommended that Christians “should rid themselves of the idea that presidential candidates, including former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, must be perfect. Instead, he suggested people vote for the politician they believe best upholds their religious values.”
So, if you’re a Christian, how do you vote like Jesus”? Howerton’s implied answer to that is of course, “Vote for Donald Trump.” But does Trump uphold Christian values?
I’ve seen lists of “Christian values” that obviously try to tailor-fit Donald Trump’s conservative political stance, or at least what he says he believes in, presumably to please his evangelical supporters. But I won’t fall into the same temptation by hand-picking Christian values that may favor Kamala Harris, or by going the opposite direction and coming up with a list that traps and judges Donald Trump. So I asked the question, What might be a source for a list of Christian values that would be seen as politically neutral?
What can be more apolitical than than the values Christian parents teach their children? To find a list, preferably a short one (as I don’t have the time for a very long one), I searched online for books that might help parents teach their children Christian values.
I found one: 10 Christian Values Every Kid Should Know. By the way, we shouldn’t think there’s one set of values for kids and another for adults. And the book does not imply that at all.
I like the way the book is promoted: “Using the latest research, Donna Habenicht provides more than 1,000 strategies for teaching kids the basic Christian values of respect, responsibility, self-control, honesty, compassion, thankfulness, perseverance, humility, loyalty, and faith in God.”
We’re not going to use 1,000 strategies for teaching voting adults Christian values, but we’re going to use the same values that Habernicht has on the list.
RESPECT
Even if you’re the most loyal of all Donald Trump’s MAGA fans, you would not consider Trump a respectful man. And Jesus would certainly agree with you! Trump is known for the opposite. He disrespects anyone who opposes him. His disrespectful name-calling are too embarrassing to mention in detail here. So I won’t. But let me make an exception: Trump called Kamala Harris “dumb as a rock” and a “low-IQ individual.” By the way, that’s a very interesting insult from a very disrespectful presidential candidate who didn’t want to debate with his opponent again after she defeated him in the only one they had.
RESPONSIBILITY
Besides Richard Nixon’s irresponsible involvement in the Watergate scandal that resulted in Americans losing faith in the government, the January 6 insurrection is probably the most irresponsible event in recent memory that a presidential candidate was involved in and didn’t care about what might happen to people at the U.S. Capitol, including his own vice president, Mike Pence. “Donald Trump sat for hours watching the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol unfold on live TV, ignoring pleas by his children and other close advisers to urge his supporters to stop the violence.”
SELF-CONTROL
What is self-control? Meriam-Webster defines it as follows: “restraint exercised over one’s own impulses, emotions, or desires.” I think that anyone of us can sometimes lose self-control, but there’s one among us who always loses his cool. The most recent one, if you missed it, is a display of utter lack of self-control. His behavior and actions were, to say it mildly, not appropriate for general audience and definitely not befitting a person running for the most dignified office in the world: President of the United States. In a recent political rally in Milwaukee, Donald Trump lost his cool over the microphone that didn’t serve him well: “I get so angry. I’m up here seething. I’m seething, I’m working my ass off with this stupid mic. I’m blowing out my left arm, now I’m going to blow out my right arm and I’m blowing out my damn throat too because of these stupid people….” From a display of anger, he transitioned to an act of lewdness as he depicted a sexual act using the mic stand.
HONESTY
Honesty is an issue that those who pay close attention to and watch unedited videos of presidential candidates know who between the two do not have it in their heart to tell the truth. I have been reminded a number of times that none of us tell the truth every time. Well taken. But I’m also aware of the fact that one presidential candidate, Donald Trump, has been documented making false claims and lying to people all the time. “By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.” Only about 2% of people’s lies are cruel lies. But Trump’s cruel lies are a staggering 50% of his lies: “Instead of adding up to 1 or 2 percent, as in my previous research, (Trump’s cruel lies) accounted for 50 percent. When I first saw that number appear on my screen, I gasped. I knew, of course, that Trump likes to mock and denigrate other people (and countries and agencies), but I didn’t realize just how often he was doing that with his lies.” That clearly tells us what kind of a liar Trump is—the most cruel!
COMPASSION
“Compassion is a feeling of sympathy or pity for someone who is suffering, and a desire to help them. It’s a social feeling that can motivate people to help others relieve their physical, mental, or emotional pain.” There’s an image that comes to mind and one that graphically shows a lack of compassion. In 2015, Donald Trump, appeared to mock a reporter, Serge Kovaleski, when he contorted his arms apparently imitating Kovaleski, who suffers from arthrogryposis. In Trump’s defense, others have denied Trump mocked Kovaleski, but you can just watch it to see for yourself.
THANKFULNESS
There are so many things we can be thankful for but there’s one thing that I believe many of us are grateful for: the privilege of living in this imperfect and yet still the greatest country in the world. A young person has expressed why we should be thankful for living in the United States: “We live in a country that has so much freedom that we often take that freedom for granted. In other countries freedoms like political diversity, education, and religion is illegal, sometimes the outcome is even harmful. We need to realize just how lucky we are.”
Despite that realization, however, a presidential candidate, instead of expressing gratitude, trashes America: Former President Donald Trump has called the United States a “third world nation.” The reason for him degenerating America is because of his allegation that the 2020 election was stolen from him despite the fact that he has no evidence to back his claim. Today he still continues to trash America when he ought to be thankful that he could freely do even the crazy things he does.
PERSEVERANCE
Perhaps this is a trait that Donald Trump possesses. He lost the last election, denies he lost, and is now running again as candidate for president. He perseveres! But why? It seems obvious to me that he’s running again not really because he cares about people and the country. He cares about himself, how he can use his power to avoid punishment for the crimes he has been convicted of, and he wants to wield enormous power against his enemies. Unfortunately, that’s not the kind of thing good leaders patiently suffer through to achieve their dreams that are often not just for themselves but also for the country and the world. If Trump is known for anything, it is for short cuts. What can be a faster way of making more money than giving tax cuts to billionaires like himself (if he is still considering his debts).
The American economy has been built on the back of regular American workers and they are the ones who need the tax cut. But didn’t Trump claim he cut taxes for the middle class? Yes he did. But it was just a claim. “The tax legislation that President Donald Trump signed in December 2017 significantly reduced federal revenues, with the largest tax cuts going to the richest Americans. Following the enactment of these tax cuts, federal revenues fell dramatically—as the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) and Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected would occur at the time the law passed1—and they remain below projections of federal revenues made prior to their enactment.”
HUMILITY
Do we even need to talk about this? OK, I don’t want to deprive you of a good laugh. So here, and you may laugh out loud too: https://youtu.be/ANvWtIwoOb8?si=HpOF__IvL6UVyIiV
LOYALTY
Loyalty happens to be a big word to Donald Trump. But loyalty is always towards him. Anyone who is not loyal to him was and will be fired! The list of the people he fired is long and you can google that yourself. Trump is not known for loyalty. He is not loyal to his own country—he degenerates the United and criticizes how it is governed by leaders a lot smarter and better than himself, and praises despots like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un. His only loyalty is to himself.
FAITH IN GOD
Donald Trump talks about his faith. Yes. Rarely, but he does, especially when he is speaking to his evangelical base. He praises people like Franklin Graham who, in times of natural disasters, go out there and help people (see for example). Caring and helping others can be a sign of faith. James 2:14-17 (English Standard Version) reads,
What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.
But is Trump really interested in helping people because his faith makes him such a caring person? Those who know Trump know him very well:
Donald Trump deliberately withheld disaster aid to states he deemed politically hostile to him as US president and will do so again unimpeded if he returns to the White House, several former Trump administration officials have warned.
As Hurricane Helene and then Hurricane Milton have ravaged much of the south-eastern US in the past two weeks, Trump has sought to pin blame upon Joe Biden’s administration for a ponderous response to the disasters, even suggesting that this was deliberate due to the number of Republican voters affected by the storms.
Harris accuses Trump of ‘playing politics’ with hurricane disaster relief.
So back to the question: “How to vote like Jesus?”
Yes, a presidential candidate does not have to perfect. And I agree with Pastor Howerton that we “should rid ourselves of the idea that presidential candidates, including former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, must be perfect. “Instead…people (should) vote for the politician they believe best upholds their religious values.”
So if we are to teach people the Christian values listed above and choose one of the candidates who better embodies and upholds those values, though imperfectly, who might that be?
You know who my choice is. And I think Jesus would approve of my choice. Who is yours?
PENnED 
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