Photograph by Michael O’Sullivan via Unsplash

Picture this for a moment: You’ve muted the Facebook friends who cause your anxiety to ratchet up, you’ve told your friends, colleagues, and family that you can no longer bear the weight of speaking of the impending few weeks, and you’ve avoided news outlets like they are contagious with a virus. If this sounds anything like your response to the 2024 general election, you are not alone.

As I have traveled the country over the past month helping congregations develop a vocabulary by which they might speak about the election, I have found this is how a majority of the churchgoing Americans I have encountered are feeling about whatever is about to happen. For many, there is a pit in their stomach as we barrel toward one of the most consequential elections of our lifetimes. We just don’t know exactly to put these feelings and anxieties into words. Dangerously, this may become debilitating for some as they bury their head in the sand and wait for the day after Election Day on November 5.

With that in mind, I have gently reminded countless faithful Christians of the following reality that is as real as the anxiety they are feeling: Regardless of who wins the election on November 5, the Church that is dispersed throughout this country will have work to do on November 6. The Church will have to give voice to all that was felt on the Sunday after the election on November 10. The work continues regardless of who takes the White House and other elected offices.

I say this not to discount the weight of the decision at hand. In the case of the presidential election, the candidate that wins will signal a seismic choice being made by the electorate. Yet I am growing even more confident that while elections matter, the work we do to engender and enflesh the promise of what God offers us is the pressing nature of the Church. While we must not cede the work of political theology to the worst Christian actors on the scene, we must also remember that Philippians reminds us our citizenship is not of this world. Christians must live in this tension. The work and identity of being a Christian is fraught with tension. At times that tension is so thick you could cut it with a knife, as it is now. But in those moments, we are reminded of the communion of the saints who went before us to lead us and give us an example of how we might stare down the coming weeks and months to come.

I find it incredibly appropriate that the Sunday before the general election is All Saints’ Sunday. All Saints’[i] is an ancient Christian liturgical holy day that remembers the vast tapestry of those faithful witnesses who have gone before us and are seen to us only in memory and in history. Those saints, both sung and unsung heroes of the faith, are cheering us on and reminding us of the potential we have to overcome division and see the potential that laying our swords and shields down has in a moment like this. Equally, as writer and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams writes, “The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.”[ii] It appears that in this moment, all eyes rest on this moment in our history. It’s my hope that we are both worthy of that weight and can show the rest of the country that we can hold all this in tension for the sake of something better.

God, whose very own we are, will not leave us stranded in our anguish. I am confident that God who began a good work in all of us will bring it to completion, as Paul writes in Philippians 1:6, so through our activism and our engagement in the political arena with our votes, may we exude grace and courage. Because how we carry ourselves in this moment matters. All eyes rest on how we act and engage during this time. Let’s show the world what we’re made of.