5 Qualities We Should Look for in Our Political Leaders

If your passage pertains to what we are to do when voting, the passages that I have presented most certainly do so at least as much as the one that you have presented. If you disagree, feel free to show from Scripture itself why your passage applies but mine do not.

But the verses you provided did not show that God would be pleased with our voting for either of the wicked people. They just showed that some people are more or less wicked than others. Why do you think that God would be pleased with our voting for people as wicked as Jeroham or Ahab in spite of God's perspective on wickedness presented in Psalm 5:4?

I think some may have lost track of the central argument. The original article’s thesis was basically that character matters and we should be actively seeking it in the various ways we participate in government.

One counterargument often made is that there are no perfect rulers until Christ establishes His kingdom. The application often made is that they’re all the same, so look at policy not character.

A counter-counter I noted is that although Scripture shows us all rulers are flawed, it doesn’t encourage us to view them as all equivalent. Some are characterized in far worse terms than others. And even without a biblical evaluation spelled out, we see that some rulers are obviously far worse if we’re being reasonable at all in how we evaluate them.

The connection with voting isn’t spelled out anywhere in Scripture, no. The principle is more general: character matters and we should seek leaders of good character and reject those of the worst character. Voting happens to be the primary means we have to do that—for most of us, the only means.

So it boils down to “does character matter or not?” If it does, our voting must reflect that. If it doesn’t, then we can vote for hairdos or whatever, I suppose. We could say “only policy matters,” but the difference between policy and character in executives shrinks to near meaninglessness when you start asking the flipside question:

• Does character matter? Why?/Why not?
• Does policy matter? Why/Why not?

Most of the things (maybe all) that make policy matter also make character matter, when we’re talking about high office.