Election day ends at a set hour. The officials it chooses keep making decisions for years. This guide asks what a Christian owes those officials in the meantime, and it answers with a monthly habit. The habit measures every elected official, including the one you voted for, by one standard: whether people are treated with dignity and helped to flourish. You can work through it alone in about an hour, or with a group over one or two sessions. After that, the practice takes about twenty minutes a month.
The guide draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Justin Giboney, an attorney, political strategist and president of the AND Campaign. Early on, Fields names the habit this guide means to break. One thing people struggle with, she says, is that “when they vote someone in and they’re excited, they think that’s the end of it.”
Before anything else: look at your own record
Before deciding what you should do, look at what you already do. Draw a line down the middle of a sheet of paper. On the left, list the last few times you defended an elected official, publicly or privately. A comment, a dinner conversation or a shared post all count. On the right, list the last few times you criticized one. Write the official’s party next to each entry.
Don’t judge the columns yet. Look at them. Does one party fill one column? Can you remember criticizing someone you voted for, or praising someone you voted against? Keep this page, because you will come back to it.
In a group, nobody should be asked to read their columns aloud. A facilitator can ask whether anyone saw a pattern they didn’t expect, and let people answer in general terms or not at all.
Three texts, read slowly
None of these passages was written to tell modern citizens how to treat elected officials. Read each one first for what it meant to its first hearers. Then ask what it might shape in you.
A letter to exiles
Jeremiah wrote to Judeans carried off to Babylon, a city that wasn’t theirs, ruled by a king they hadn’t chosen. In Jeremiah 29:7 he tells them to seek the peace of the city where God has sent them as captives and to pray to the Lord for it, because their own peace is bound up with the city’s.
Observe: Whose city is it, and whose welfare are the exiles told to seek? The exiles owed Babylon’s rulers no loyalty. What they owed was care for the city’s peace. As an application, and not the passage’s original point, ask whether your civic attention follows the good of a place and its people or the fortunes of a person you prefer.
A command about neighbors
When a lawyer asked Jesus which commandment was greatest, Jesus gave the first and then added: “And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 22:39).
Observe: The measure in this verse is your own self. Whatever you would want protected and provided for yourself becomes the measure for the neighbor. Before reading Giboney’s application below, write one sentence of your own: if this verse governed how you judged an official’s work, what would you have to start paying attention to?
Prayer for those in authority
Paul told Timothy that “first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty” (1 Timothy 2:1-2).
Observe: These kings were not Christians, and many of them were hostile. Paul still asks for thanksgiving and intercession for them. The passage describes prayer. It does not describe political approval.
What Giboney adds: a hinge, a slide and a standard
Giboney gives the practice its structure in three moves.
The vote is a hinge, not a finish line. In his words, “your vote is the end of one process.” It also begins a second process, “which is the process of making sure that you’re holding people accountable.” His reason is plain: “If you just go vote and you leave your elected officials to their own devices, there’s no guarantee” that you will get what you voted for. A ballot fills an office. It decides nothing about what happens there afterward.
Loyalty slides. Giboney describes how supporters drift once their candidate wins: “we feel that our only job once they get in office is to protect them, is to make sure that they can’t be attacked, is to make sure that we justify everything they do.” Protecting someone from unfair attack is not the same as making them immune to every criticism. Neither is the same as justifying everything they do. Giboney applies this warning to his own party: “Look, I’ve been a Democrat my whole life, but we have to be a little more shrewd and sophisticated than that.” He adds that “there are things that the Democrats do too that can be hurtful.”
The standard reaches past your own group. This is the measure the practice will use. “Christian politics can’t be about Christian self-interest,” Giboney says. “It has to be about defending the human dignity of others and promoting human flourishing. It’s not just about us, it’s about other people.” He ties this to the great commandment and describes neighbor love as “being self-sacrificial because you’re caring for other people like you care for yourself.” His test is concrete: “I still have to watch and make sure that they’re doing things that are helping people, not just Christians, but helping people in general.”
Two more of his lines shape the practice. First, accountability runs in both directions: “When they do good things, we let them know they did it,” he says, “But we also have to push back.” Second, it involves direct communication, “that you let them know what you want and what you don’t want, and how they should proceed.”
Testing the idea before you practice it
A habit built on an untested idea won’t last, so test this one against three honest worries.
Worry one: criticizing my own side only helps the other side. Giboney answers from how politics works. “Politics is chess,” he says. “We have to make sure that we’re pushing, because if you’re not pushing somebody else is.” When an official’s own supporters go quiet, the pressure doesn’t disappear. Other people apply it instead. He ends the conversation by saying that refusing to hold officials accountable means “we’re not hurting the other side. We’re hurting ourselves.” Ask whether that fully answers the worry. Decisions about when to raise a criticism, and how loudly, still take judgment, and this practice won’t make those decisions for you.
Worry two: some officials deserve far more than an even-handed monthly check. That may be true. Using the same method does not mean reaching the same verdict. Apply the same four questions honestly to two officials and you may find one serving people well and the other doing real harm. The symmetry is in the questions, not in the results. The practice doesn’t ask you to pretend two records are equal. It asks you to use one ruler, so that you aren’t using a softer one for the official you favor.
Worry three: accountability will make me cynical or cruel. Giboney gives two guards against this. The first is patience with real limits: “we don’t have a king. We have a president,” who has to work within checks and balances. The fair questions, then, are “do you have a plan? And how are you going about that plan?” The second guard concerns how we see people who are badly wrong. Reflecting on the attack on the Capitol, he insists that those responsible face consequences. He also says, “So people can be wrong and they can be suffering.” Accountability can name a failure without turning the person into a cartoon.
None of this tells you which policies to favor. Giboney says plainly that “Christians don’t have to agree on everything when it comes to politics.” He doesn’t treat party membership as the enemy either: “partisanship has practical value, but it can’t be the master of your social action.”
The practice: one ruler, two officials
The core of this discipline is symmetry: the same questions asked about two people in the same month.
Set it up once. Choose two officials whose work affects your community, such as a mayor, a legislator, a member of Congress or a school board member. One should be someone you voted for, or would have. The other should be someone you voted against, or would have. Write both names down. Pick a fixed day each month, perhaps one you already use for paying a bill, and put a twenty-minute appointment on your calendar.
Each month, ask the same four questions about both officials.
- What did they actually do? Find one vote, decision, statement or appointment from the past month. Read what it does, not just what it is called. Giboney’s rule applies: “You never judge a bill by its name.”
- Who is helped, and who bears the cost? Name at least one affected group of people who are not like you. Ask whether their dignity and flourishing were served. Let Matthew 22:39 be the measure.
- Is this a failure or a limit? If something promised hasn’t happened, ask whether there is a plan and whether it is being carried out.
- What is one honest word of encouragement, and one honest push? Write both down for each official, even if one of them is small.
Then do two things before the month ends. First, send at least one of your notes to an official’s office by phone, email or letter, and say plainly what you want. Over time, aim to send as many messages to the official you supported as to the one you opposed. Second, pray for both officials by name, as 1 Timothy 2:1-2 asks. Give thanks where you honestly can, and ask God to give them wisdom where they need it.
Watch for the slide. When you catch yourself answering the questions more gently for one official, write down why. Giboney observes that many Christians “don’t have the self-confidence to stand up to their own tribe to say, we agree here, but I don’t agree there.” That confidence grows through small, repeated honesty, and this practice gives you a regular place to practice it.
For groups using this guide
Agree at the start that nobody will try to win anyone over to a party. Before anyone responds to another person’s assessment of an official, they should restate it fairly and confirm they understood it. Groups that meet monthly can take a few minutes for members to say whether they completed both halves of the practice. Nobody needs to name officials or share conclusions. Giboney hopes Christians bring to political conversation a posture “not always in a posture of self-defense, but really in a posture of self-examination.” Let that set the tone for the group.
Questions for discussion or reflection
- Where does fair defense of an official end and the slide toward justifying everything begin? Describe the line in your own words.
- What makes it harder to criticize someone you voted for than someone you didn’t? Is the difficulty about them, about your own judgment, or about the people around you?
- What is one area where applying a standard of dignity and flourishing for people in general might lead you somewhere your political side would not expect?
- If the four questions keep producing very different verdicts for your two officials, how would you know whether you were seeing clearly or seeing what you hoped to see?
- Where could this practice become unhealthy, through cynicism, self-righteousness or an endless intake of news? What limit would keep it in proportion for you?
Coming back to the two columns
Take out the page you started with and read it alongside Giboney’s closing counsel: “Don’t follow a politician too closely or think you always have to defend them. Hold them accountable.” Then set a date three months from now. On that day, draw the two columns again, using only what you did during those months. If both officials appear in both columns, the practice is taking hold. If they don’t, the page will show you where to begin next month.