Struggle: Personal and Political

Just last year we re-elected Presisent Bush. During the heat of opposing campaign adds, right before election day, I struggled. Of course I would vote Republican. I'm all for a conservative president who "upholds the Christian ideals". But I struggled with the "why" of my choice and the relevance of my vote. Does it even make a difference who I vote for?Why did I want Bush to become president? As I looked around me, I noticed that many of my peers and even my family and fellow church-goers chose Bush because of the simple fact that he's conservative. They blindly backed up everything he said, truly believing that the country would go to ruin if Kerry was elected. Their view was that the only way to save America was to have a "Christian" president. I realized that electing a Christian president won't change the world, it's love and compassion that will save the world. It's living out our Christianity is what will change America. I was slightly tempted to vote Democrat as a statement of that very belief. I recently read an interview with author Philip Yancey in Relevant Magazine. I like the way he talks about the tension between politics and faith:

Martin Luther King Jr. used to say that you can pass laws to keep whites from lynching black people, or require them to open up their restaurants, but you can't pass a law requiring one race to love another. That pretty well defines the tension. It took laws and Supreme Court decisions and federal marshals to overturn legalized racism in the South. But have we achieved King's dream of a "beloved community"? I'm afraid we have a long way to go.
We can pass laws against abortion--but will we be willing to step forward with compassion toward the woman who delivers her child? We can define marriage as between a man and a woman, as many states have, but no law can address the spirit of judgment and exclusion that so many churches project toward gay people.
A fine example of this is the twenty-five million people who are already suffering from AIDS in Africa: "innocent" women, promiscuous individuals, orphans, children infected from birth. Laws that dispense funding for treatment will certainly help, but the church needs to step up with an outpouring of human compassion. I've been in some of those clinics, with volunteer "mothers" who come in from churches every day and hold babies. That's not a legal issue, that's pure compassion. If the church responds consistently with compassion toward the marginalized and disenfranchised, then we'll simply be following in the steps of Jesus. And, I might add, that's not the reputation of the modern church.