Should Christians vote? What the Bible says about elections, and how churches differ

Why it is in the news

Americans vote in the midterm elections on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, the Tuesday after the first Monday in November that federal law sets for congressional elections (2 U.S.C. § 7). All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are on the ballot, along with about a third of the Senate, according to the federal government’s USA.gov guide; ballots also carry state and local races. Each state sets its own registration deadlines, early voting and mail rules; check them with your state or local election office or at vote.gov. This page does not give legal advice and does not favor any party, candidate or ballot measure.

Churches are preparing in their own ways. In September 2026 the US Conference of Catholic Bishops released Outlines for Clergy Formation on Faithful Citizenship and homily guidelines for the election season, companions to its long-standing statement Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship (Aleteia, Joanne McPortland, September 16, 2026). Before the 2024 election, the president of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod wrote to members encouraging them to vote (LCMS Reporter, November 1, 2024). Every election season the question comes back from the other side as well: Christians tired of politics ask whether they may simply stay home.

What the Bible says

Five passages carry most of the argument. Each was written to people who could not vote, so each has to be applied, not just quoted.

Jeremiah 29:4–7: seek the good of the city. Jeremiah wrote to Jews deported to Babylon, the empire that had destroyed Jerusalem (Jeremiah 29:1). He told them to build houses, plant gardens, marry and multiply, and then: “Seek the prosperity of the city to which I have sent you as exiles. Pray to the LORD on its behalf, for if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jeremiah 29:7, BSB). The exiles had no say in Babylon’s government. They were told to work and pray for its good anyway. The Hebrew word behind “prosperity” is shalom, which Strong’s Hebrew dictionary (H7965) glosses as welfare, health, prosperity and peace; the older translations render it “peace” (table below).

Romans 13:1–7: what you owe the authorities. Paul tells the Christians in Rome to submit to the governing authorities, which God has appointed, to pay taxes, and to give “respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.”

¹ Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which is from God. The authorities that exist have been appointed by God. ² Consequently, whoever resists authority is opposing what God has set in place, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. ³ For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Do you want to be unafraid of the one in authority? Then do what is right, and you will have his approval. ⁴ For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not carry the sword in vain. He is God’s servant, an agent of retribution to the wrongdoer. ⁵ Therefore it is necessary to submit to authority, not only to avoid punishment, but also as a matter of conscience. ⁶ This is also why you pay taxes. For the authorities are God’s servants, who devote themselves to their work. ⁷ Pay everyone what you owe him: taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.

The passage is about submission and paying what is owed, not about choosing rulers; Paul’s readers lived under an emperor they had not elected. Christians who argue for voting from Romans 13 make an application: in a republic, the citizens themselves are part of the governing order, and taking part in choosing its officers is one of the things a citizen owes. That is an inference, and the Christians who abstain do not accept it.

Matthew 22:15–22: Caesar’s coin. Jesus’s opponents tried to trap him with a question about paying tax to Caesar. He asked whose image was on the coin, and said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (Matthew 22:21, BSB). The answer gives the state a real claim and limits it in the same sentence. It does not say what belongs to Caesar in a country where Caesar is elected; that is the question every tradition below answers differently.

Acts 5:27–29: God first. When the Sanhedrin ordered the apostles to stop teaching in Jesus’s name, Peter and the apostles answered, “We must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29, BSB). Every tradition below accepts this limit. They differ on what it requires at a polling place.

1 Timothy 2:1–2: pray for those in authority. Paul urges “petitions, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgiving” for everyone, “for kings and all those in authority—so that we may lead tranquil and quiet lives in all godliness and dignity” (1 Timothy 2:1–2, BSB). This is the one civic duty every Christian tradition agrees on, voters and non-voters alike.

Two more passages come up often. Paul used the rights of his Roman citizenship: he protested a beating without trial at Philippi (Acts 16:37), refused a flogging in Jerusalem (Acts 22:25) and appealed to Caesar (Acts 25:11). Voters cite this as a precedent for using the rights a state gives. On the other side, Paul also wrote that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20), and Jesus told Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Christians who abstain read these as a call to keep out of the world’s contests for power.

What the Bible does not say

• It has no command to vote, and no command not to. Elections of rulers by the whole people do not appear in Scripture. Any answer, either way, is an application of principles.
• It does not describe a Christian voting bloc. The New Testament addresses believers as a minority with no political power. Nothing in it tells the church to win elections.
• It has examples of a community choosing its own leaders, but not rulers of a state. Moses told the tribes to choose “wise, understanding, and respected men” whom he would appoint (Deuteronomy 1:13), and the apostles asked the Jerusalem church to select seven men “full of the Spirit and wisdom” (Acts 6:3). These are the closest biblical pictures of choosing leaders, and they stress character. They are not about civil elections, and they should not be stretched into a voting command.
• It does not say God’s will is done by the winning side. “When the righteous flourish, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan” (Proverbs 29:2) shows that rulers matter. It does not tell anyone which present-day candidate is righteous.

“Seek the peace of the city” in five editions

The five public-domain Bibles we quote show the range in one word. The Berean Standard Bible has “prosperity”; the older translations keep “peace,” a narrower English word for shalom, which covers welfare and well-being as well as the absence of war.

Either way, the command is for the good of the whole city, not of the exiles alone, and the reason is shared: “in the peace thereof shall ye have peace” (KJV). Read it in context in the KJV.

Resident aliens: the early church and Augustine

The earliest Christians could not vote for the emperor, but they did think about their place in the city. The anonymous Letter to Diognetus, usually dated to the second century, says that Christians live in their own countries “simply as sojourners,” and that “as citizens, they share in all things with others, and yet endure all things as if foreigners” (chapter 5, in the 1885 Ante-Nicene Fathers translation). They obey the laws, it adds, and surpass the laws by their lives. The Catholic Catechism quotes this passage in the paragraph that calls voting a duty (no. 2240).

Augustine, writing The City of God in the early fifth century, read Jeremiah 29 the same way. Christians belong to the heavenly city, but while the two cities are mixed together in this life, “we also enjoy the peace of Babylon”; that is why, he says, Paul told the church to pray for kings and Jeremiah told the exiles to pray for Babylon (Book 19, chapter 26, in the 1887 Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation). Both texts hold the same tension this page is about: Christians are foreigners in every nation and still responsible for its peace.

How churches differ

Catholic. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that submission to authority and co-responsibility for the common good make it “morally obligatory” to pay taxes, “to exercise the right to vote,” and to defend one’s country (no. 2240). It also says citizens are bound in conscience not to follow civil directives that contradict the moral order, citing “We must obey God rather than men” (no. 2242). The US bishops’ Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship says that in the Catholic tradition “responsible citizenship is a virtue, and participation in political life is a moral obligation” (no. 13). The document says it is not a voters’ guide: the bishops’ 2011 note says it does “not offer a voters guide, scorecard of issues, or direction on how to vote.” It asks Catholics to weigh candidates’ positions in the light of Catholic moral teaching, and it treats abstaining as an exception, not a default: when every candidate holds a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act, the bishops say a voter “may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate,” or may vote for the candidate judged less likely to advance that position (no. 36).

Lutheran. Lutherans speak of God ruling through “two kingdoms”: the church with the gospel and the state with the law. Some Christians take that teaching to mean the church should keep out of politics. The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod’s president, Matthew Harrison, wrote in 2024 that urging Christians to vote “is not a violation of Lutheran teaching on the Two Kingdoms,” and recalled a 1986 convention resolution, “To Encourage Political Involvement of Individuals as a Christian Witness,” which asked congregations to “remind eligible members to register and to vote as a matter of good citizenship.” The synod, he added, “does not align itself with any particular party or endorse any political candidate” (LCMS Reporter, November 1, 2024).

Evangelical. Billy Graham answered a reader who had decided not to vote by saying that Christians should be good citizens and work for the betterment of society, and that “one of the ways we can do this is by voting.” He cited Jeremiah 29:7, warned that nothing will change if concerned people refuse to vote or “if good people refuse to run for office,” and noted that first-century Christians “didn’t have the privilege of voting” and were told to pray instead (1 Timothy 2:1–2) (Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, “Answers” column). The Minneapolis pastor John Piper, writing in 2008, urged Christians to vote but to hold it loosely, applying Paul’s “as if not” in 1 Corinthians 7:29–31 to the polling booth: “We should do it, but only as if we were not doing it” (Desiring God, October 22, 2008). The outcome should neither crown a Christian’s joy nor crush it, because Christ reigns whoever wins.

Anabaptist. The churches that descend from the sixteenth-century Anabaptists have traditionally taught a sharper two-kingdom view: the kingdom of God stands over against the kingdom of the world, so Christians pay taxes and obey the law but keep out of the political process. Practice has changed. According to Steve Nolt of Elizabethtown College’s Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, as reported by Christianity Today, only about one in ten members of Mennonite Church USA does not vote, while abstention stays above 90 percent in some circles, particularly among the Amish and Old Order Mennonites (Megan Fowler, October 28, 2020). A study by the sociologists Donald Kraybill and Kyle Kopko of the 2004 presidential election, mainly in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, found that registration among Old Order groups had risen sharply but that the share who actually voted “remained quite small” (Mennonite Quarterly Review, April 2007, as summarized by Goshen College).

Churches of Christ, in one historic strand. David Lipscomb (1831–1917), the long-time editor of the Gospel Advocate in Nashville and a leading voice of the Churches of Christ, argued in his 1876 article “Voting” and in his book Civil Government that Christians should not vote or take part in civil government, because civil power rests on force. The Churches of Christ later moved away from his position, but some teachers still defend it (Christianity Today, 2020; John Mark Hicks, 2012).

Jehovah’s Witnesses. Jehovah’s Witnesses say they remain politically neutral for religious reasons: they “do not lobby, vote for political parties or candidates, run for government office,” and they do not “interfere with those who choose to vote.” They point to Jesus withdrawing when the crowd wanted to make him king (John 6:15) and to his teaching that his disciples are “not of the world” (John 17:16) (jw.org, “Why Do Jehovah’s Witnesses Maintain Political Neutrality?”). Witnesses describe themselves as Christians. Britannica describes the movement as non-Trinitarian and “Christian-based,” and notes that some mainstream churches have denounced the Witnesses for that doctrinal deviation, especially their rejection of the Trinity, which Witnesses state openly. They are included here because their position is often what people mean by “some Christians don’t vote.”

The case for not voting, at its strongest

The abstainers’ argument deserves a fair hearing, because it is not apathy. At its best it runs like this:

• Allegiance. A vote ties a Christian, however loosely, to a party’s program and a candidate’s conduct. “Our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20); a church that campaigns risks confusing the kingdom of God with a national cause.
• Force. The state governs by the sword (Romans 13:4), and Lipscomb argued that to direct it is to share in its force. Christians are called to overcome evil with good, not to take hold of the sword’s power.
• Unity. Elections divide congregations. Witnesses, and some Anabaptists, argue that staying out keeps believers of every nation and opinion united as one people.
• Witness. A community that neither campaigns nor votes, but prays for its rulers and serves its neighbors, shows that its hope is not in the next election.

Those who make this case need not be withdrawn from their neighbors: Lipscomb, who would not vote, wrote against greed and the neglect of the poor (Christianity Today, 2020). Their question is whether the ballot is the right tool for a Christian, not whether Christians should care about the city.

Our take

This is our own view, not a ruling for any church, and some readers will disagree with it. We think Christians who live in a democracy should vote, and that the burden of proof lies on abstaining, not on voting.

Jeremiah 29 is the decisive text, and it cuts against staying home. The exiles in Babylon were told to seek the good of a pagan city they had not chosen and could not govern. If God asked that of people with no voice at all, it is hard to see why Christians who have been handed a voice should leave it unused. In a democracy the ballot is one of the ordinary ways to seek the city’s peace, and it costs an hour.

A vote is part of what a citizen owes. Paul’s rule is to “pay everyone what you owe him” (Romans 13:7). In Rome that meant taxes and honor. In a republic, the citizens share in governing, and we read Paul’s principle as reaching to that share. This is an application, as we said above, and the Anabaptist tradition reads it differently, but we find the Catechism’s word, “morally obligatory,” closer to Scripture than the view, common among Christians of many churches, that the vote is merely optional.

The abstainers are right about allegiance and wrong about the remedy. The danger they name is real: some Christians do treat a party as if it were the church. But the answer in Scripture is a divided heart put right, not a ballot left blank. Jesus refused to be made king (John 6:15); a citizen marking a ballot is not seizing a crown. Piper’s “as if not” is the better guard: vote, then go home and pray for whoever won.

“Both choices are bad” is usually a reason to vote further down the ballot, not to stay home. Every vote in a fallen world goes to flawed people. The headline race is rarely where a single vote does the most good for “the city”: school boards, sheriffs, county officials, in many states judges, and local measures shape a neighborhood’s peace more directly, and they are decided by far fewer votes. The Catholic bishops call not voting for any candidate an “extraordinary step”; we agree it should be extraordinary, and we would add that even then the rest of the ballot is usually still worth filling in.

Principled abstention is a real Christian position; disgust is not. We do not think an Amish farmer who prays for his rulers and serves his neighbors is sinning by staying home. He is acting from conscience (Romans 14:5, 23), and he deserves respect rather than scorn. What we argue against is the much more common case: the believer who skips the election because politics is ugly, while still expecting the city’s peace. That is not a two-kingdom theology. It is opting out of a neighbor’s duty.

And one line for churches: tell people to vote, teach them how to think, and pray for every candidate by name from the front. Telling them whom to vote for is where the Catholic bishops and the Missouri Synod draw their own line, and we think they drew it in the right place.

If you vote: five habits from Scripture

1. Pray before and after. Pray for every candidate, including the ones you will vote against, and for whoever wins (1 Timothy 2:1–2).
2. Speak for those without a voice. “Open your mouth for those with no voice, for the cause of all the dispossessed” (Proverbs 31:8–9). Ask who in your city has the least say, and how each choice affects them.
3. Weigh character as well as promises. The leaders chosen in Exodus 18 were to be “God-fearing, trustworthy men who are averse to dishonest gain” (Exodus 18:21).
4. Keep the peace with those who vote differently. “If it is possible on your part, live at peace with everyone” (Romans 12:18). The person in the next pew who votes the other way is still your brother or sister.
5. Hold the result loosely. “This world in its present form is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31). Christ’s reign does not depend on November 3.

A prayer for election week

Lord God, you set rulers in their place and you hold every nation in your hand. Give wisdom to all who stand for office and to all who vote. Make us seekers of our city’s peace, honest in what we say, gentle with those who disagree, and steady whatever the result. Keep our hope in your kingdom, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This prayer is original to this page.

Over to you

If you could change one thing about how Christians you know approach election season, what would it be, and which passage above would you point them to? Share this page with a friend who votes differently, or not at all, and compare answers.

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