A ballot fills an office. It does not decide what happens inside that office. Justin Giboney, an attorney, political strategist and president of the AND Campaign, builds his account of Christian civic responsibility on that gap. Pulled together from what he says across one conversation, accountability comes to this: judge officials by a standard you held before they won, tell them plainly when they meet it and when they fail it, and never let your support for them become a duty to defend them. Voting is where that work starts.
The definition is the easy part. The difficulty is a premise most voters carry without examining it. That premise quietly turns a ballot into a blank check, and it works the same way whichever party benefits.
What Does Accountability Actually Require?
Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, names the problem directly. One thing people struggle with, she says, “is when they vote someone in and they’re excited, they think that’s the end of it.” Giboney’s reply sorts civic life into two processes. The election, with its primaries and campaigns, ends when you vote. Then a second one begins, “which is the process of making sure that you’re holding people accountable.”
He gives his reason for treating the second process as necessary: “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. Every decision after the election is still open: which bill gets priority, which provision gets cut, which pressure gets resisted. A voter who goes silent after election day has given up any say in those decisions.
Assembled from his remarks, accountability has three working parts.
A standard set in advance. You judge the official by commitments and values you held before they won. You do not adjust those commitments to match whatever they do once in office.
Communication. In Giboney’s words, you “let them know what you want and what you don’t want, and how they should proceed.”
Feedback in both directions. Giboney says that “when they do good things, we let them know they did it,” and that voters should encourage that work. “But we also have to push back.” An official who hears only complaint learns nothing about what to keep doing, so praise belongs inside accountability rather than outside it.
Which Premise Turns a Vote Into a Blank Check?
Giboney describes the mistake with some precision. Because we get so excited about the candidates we supported, he says, “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.”
The three clauses climb. Protecting someone from unfair attack is one thing. Making sure they can’t be attacked at all is another. Justifying everything they do completes the surrender. Under all three sits one unstated assumption: my vote made their record my record. If that is true, then criticizing them means criticizing myself, and defending them means defending my own judgment.
Look at what a vote actually is, and the assumption falls apart. A vote is a comparative judgment, made at one moment, between the options on one ballot. One thing follows from it: you preferred this candidate to the others available. Their later decisions do not inherit your approval. If someone you hired breaks a promise, your decision to hire them does not oblige you to call the broken promise acceptable. Your earlier choice and your present judgment are two separate acts.
Giboney’s example is the way many white evangelicals treated Donald Trump. He says they did not “hold him to the standards that they had set.” The wording carries the point. The standards belonged to those voters. Nobody imposed them from outside. Defending the candidate meant giving up their own convictions, which is a higher price than losing an argument with opponents.
He was not making a partisan jab. He made the point to Black Christians just as a new administration took office, one many of them had worked to elect, and he told them, “We shouldn’t make the same mistake.” He also says of himself, “I’ve been a Democrat my whole life, but we have to be a little more shrewd and sophisticated than that.” Someone criticizing only the other side cannot say that sentence. It works as a credential because it puts his own party under the same rule.
Scripture gives a narrative counterexample to the idea that a chosen leader is beyond rebuke. When King David took Bathsheba and arranged the death of Uriah, the prophet Nathan confronted him with a parable and then the verdict: “And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man” (2 Samuel 12:7). The passage is narrative. It describes what happened in Israel’s monarchy and gives no instruction to modern voters about their representatives. What it does show is narrower and still useful. Being chosen did not exempt a ruler from being named a wrongdoer to his face.
What Standard Should Christians Measure Them By?
Accountability needs a measure. Giboney insists that the measure cannot be the interests of one group:
“Christian politics can’t be about Christian self-interest. 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.”
— Justin Giboney
He ties this to the great commandment. Jesus, answering a question about the law, gave as the second commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 22:39). Giboney reads that as a call to self-sacrificial care, doing for others what you would want done for yourself. Applying it to civic life is his application rather than the passage’s original setting, but the step is a short one. If love of neighbor governs a Christian’s public life, then the test for any official reaches past whether Christians are being protected.
That widens what you have to watch. Giboney’s example is the Equality Act, which he believed would harm faith-based schools, hospitals and churches. His concern reached past Christians to Muslim and Jewish communities as well. Supporters of that bill read its provisions very differently, and this article does not settle that policy dispute. The method he draws from it applies however you land: “You never judge a bill by its name.” Holding someone accountable means reading what they actually do, not the label on it. He sums up the posture this way: “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.”
Isn’t Criticizing Your Own Side Just Helping the Other Side?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a fair statement. Elections are close and largely binary. The alternative candidate may truly be worse on matters you care about. Public criticism of your own officials hands ammunition to opponents and may depress your own side’s turnout. So, the argument goes, loyalty is the responsible strategy, and complaints can wait.
Giboney says this is roughly how the evangelicals he criticizes reasoned: “They felt like they needed to protect him because the progressives were so bad.” The objection is not foolish. It has a logical gap, though. The premise that the other side is worse justifies a choice at the ballot box, where the options really are two candidates. Between elections, the question in front of you is whether your official should do a particular thing. The comparison that justified your vote has nothing to say about whether this bill, this appointment or this statement is right.
Giboney adds a practical argument. “Politics is chess,” he says, and then: “We have to make sure that we’re pushing, because if you’re not pushing somebody else is.” Officials respond to pressure. If the voters who elected them stay quiet out of loyalty, the only pressure left comes from other quarters. Near the end of the conversation he says that refusing to hold officials accountable means “we’re not hurting the other side. We’re hurting ourselves.”
The argument has a limit. Whether a particular public criticism will cost a particular election is an empirical question, and the answer is only ever probable. Giboney’s reasoning does not settle tactics: when to speak, whether to contact an office privately first, how loudly. What it does settle is the default. Loyal silence cannot be the standing policy of a Christian voter, because it hands the standard over to whoever pushes hardest.
Where Does Accountability Stop?
A concept is clearer once you can see its edges. Giboney marks three.
It allows for the pace of the system. Asked how much patience voters owe a new administration, he answers that if officials show urgency and have thorough plans, voters should give those plans a chance to be carried out. They should “understand that we don’t have a king. We have a president, and we have a series of checks and balances that he has to go through to get things done.” He adds that he said the same about the previous president. Blaming an official for delays the constitutional process itself imposes puts the fault in the wrong place. The useful questions are the ones he names: “Do you have a plan? And how are you going about that plan?” They separate failure from constraint.
It names wrongdoing without contempt. Reflecting on the attack on the Capitol, Giboney holds two judgments at once. He wanted the truth told, “the truth that this was completely outside the bounds of anything that’s Christian,” and he says the people involved should be prosecuted. He also warns against seeing only buffoons: “So people can be wrong and they can be suffering.” The same discipline applies to officials. Blanket cynicism ends evaluation as surely as blanket loyalty does, because both decide the verdict before the evidence arrives.
It looks inward first. Giboney describes the posture Christians should bring into political conversation: “not always in a posture of self-defense, but really in a posture of self-examination.” His reason: “Because neither side, when it comes to Christianity is advocating for everything that it could be, and we all could do a lot better.”
What This Does Not Settle
None of this tells a Christian which policies to support. Giboney says plainly that Christians do not have to agree on everything in politics, because Scripture does not prescribe exactly what to do in every situation or exactly how love should take shape in every policy. Two believers can share this account of accountability and still disagree about minimum wage, immigration or how to balance religious liberty with civil rights. The account governs how you relate to officials. The policy questions remain yours to work out.
Nor does it ask Christians to abandon parties. Giboney’s view, from the AND Campaign’s book Compassion (&) Conviction, is that “partisanship has practical value, but it can’t be the master of your social action.” A party is a tool, and it becomes a problem when it starts setting the standard instead of serving it. The ordering behind that claim is also the stated position of the Jude 3 Project: ultimate allegiance belongs to Christ and his kingdom, not to any party or politician. If that ordering holds, a voter can join a party, campaign for its candidates and still owe it no exemption from judgment, because the party was never the source of the standard.
The hardest open question is personal. Applying this standard takes a kind of nerve Giboney says he too often finds missing. He describes Christians who talk about justice “but don’t have the self-confidence to stand up to their own tribe to say, we agree here, but I don’t agree there.” No argument can supply that confidence. An argument can only show that it is required.
That points to the most useful test this account provides. Ask whether your accountability has ever cost you anything with your own side. If every criticism you have made landed on people you already opposed, you have practiced opposition, and opposition asks nothing of your loyalties. Accountability shows up as the willingness to tell the person you voted for that they got it wrong, and to say it to them by name. Giboney’s own short version:
“Don’t follow a politician too closely or think you always have to defend them. Hold them accountable.”
— Justin Giboney
