The Sacred Right to Vote
Photo by Arnaud Jaegers on Unsplash
By Jim Antal
AS THEY DO every January, the richest and most powerful people in the world gathered in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum. Jane Goodall, perhaps the world’s most celebrated primatologist, was a somewhat unexpected guest. She leveraged her familiarity and respect to deliver an uncompromising message. “This year could be the most consequential voting year in terms of the fate of our planet.”
In 2024, over four billion people will have an opportunity to go to the polls. Fifty countries—including seven of the ten most populous nations in the world—will hold elections. As many have observed, this is the biggest election year in history.
Many of these elections will have authoritarian candidates on the ballot. Voters will be pulled and pushed in ways similar to what the voters in Poland experienced in 2015. As Michelle Goldberg reports in The New York Times, in 2015, “the deeply Catholic, reactionary Law and Justice party [came] to power as part of the same populist wave that brought the world Brexit and Trump.” She reports that since that election, Poland’s “institutions have been hollowed out. Many experienced technocrats and neutral judges have been replaced by lackeys and ideologues.”
But after eight years of authoritarian rule, in October 2023 “voters — especially women and young people — rebelled against a punishing religious nationalism to demand the restoration of their rights.” Goldberg continues, “A stunning level of voter turnout — over 74 percent — overcame the ruling party’s advantages. Young people flooded the polls; according to exit surveys, those under 30 voted at higher rates than those 60 or older.”
HERE IN THE UNITED STATES, for many decades (perhaps centuries), leaders have reminded us that we have a “sacred right to vote.” It’s a phrase worth unpacking.
Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick did just that in an Op Ed published by the Boston Globe on January 13, 2022. He points out that while America has no official religion, we have a civic faith “organized around ideals of liberty and justice for all, not geography, culture, or religion like other countries.” He notes, however, that while the Founding Fathers were geniuses, “they did not get voting right. They left out most Americans, and over the decades we have kept our civic faith by making sure every citizen can vote. We kept the faith when we extended the vote to white men who were not wealthy landowners in 1856; to formerly enslaved people after the Civil War; to newly naturalized citizens in 1868; to women in 1920; to young people old enough to serve in the military in 1971. We keep the faith when we remember the connection between the right to vote and freedom itself.”
When Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock delivered his maiden floor speech in the Senate chamber on March 8, 2021, he chose to focus on the sacred right to vote. His address was necessitated by what he described as the “full-fledged assault on voting rights” and the need to “defend the viability of our democracy.” Not only did he detail numerous examples of this assault, he demonstrated how federal voting rights legislation like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the For The People Act could overcome the deluge of voter suppression bills proposed at the state level in Georgia and nationwide. While every American would do well to read and reflect on his entire speech, I want to shine a bright light on this brilliant insight. “Democracy is a political enactment of a spiritual idea. The sacred worth of all human beings, the notion that we all have within us, a spark of the divine, to participate in the shaping of our own destiny. Reinhold Niebuhr was right: ‘[Humanity’s] capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but [humanity’s] inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.’”
When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1957, he referred to voting as a “sacred right” in his “Give us the Ballot” speech, pointing out that “the denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition.”
In 1838, when Abraham Lincoln was only 28 years old, his attention was focused not on the sacred right to vote, but on the foundation upon which that right, and all rights, depend: the need to protect the rule of law on which the country was founded. As historian Heather Cox Richardson recently reminded us, “worried that his generation might not preserve the republic that the founders had handed to it for transmission to yet another generation,” Lincoln addressed “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” saying: “As the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence, so to the support of the Constitution and Laws, let every American pledge his life, his property, and his sacred honor…. Let reverence for the laws…become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars.”
In a democracy, there is no more responsible way for a person of faith to show their faithfulness than to uphold our sacred right to vote.
THE REASON I PRESENTED THIS ACCOUNT in reverse historic order is because today, we find ourselves in an all-consuming struggle to determine whether we will perpetuate such political institutions as the sacred right to vote and the application of the rule of law to all citizens equally. While some aspire to join John Lewis in the struggle to guarantee the sacred right to vote, much more of our national attention is currently directed at the foundation upon which that right and all rights depend.
Those who would embrace voting as a sacred right join Senator Warnock in accepting “the sacred worth of all human beings.” They join him in recognizing “that we all have within us, a spark of the divine.”
In contrast, there are many who are doing their best to prevent their fellow citizens from exercising their right to vote. Since the 2013 Supreme Court Shelby County v. Holder decision that struck down the enforcement provisions of the Voting Rights Act and eliminated the pre-clearance requirement for states to change their election laws, “more than 20 states have passed restrictive voter laws, gerrymandered districts, made it harder to access the voting booth by closing polling places, especially in communities of color, limiting early voting, placing restrictions on vote-by-mail, requiring stricter voter ID, and by putting people in positions who will enforce these restrictions no matter the infringement upon their fellow citizens’ rights.” In her essay, “The Theology of Voting: The Right to Vote is A Sacred Right” Joan Neal continues, “All of these actions are designed to discourage and suppress the Black and non-white vote, the votes of young people, poor people and people who do not share the political view of one party.”
How has it come to this? How can this be? Could this be a reaction to the profound impact voting has had over the past several decades? Anand Giridharadas reminds us, here and around the world, we have done more to enhance the status of women in the last 50 years than in the previous 50,000 years. We have done more in the last 60 years to become true to our founding commitments around racial equality than in the previous 340.
VOTING IS ABOUT WHAT MATTERS and who counts. Voting, understood as a sacred right, affirms what so many people of faith believe and what Senator Warnock asserts: “the sacred worth of all human beings” and the recognition “that we all have within us, a spark of the divine.” But, as Deval Patrick reminds us, the Founding Fathers didn’t understand voting as a sacred right in this sense. They understood voting as a privilege accorded to land-owning white men.
For almost 200 years, Americans have made progress towards embracing a more expansive understanding of the right to vote. But, as Richard L. Hasen reminds us in his important New York Times opinion article “The U.S. Lacks What Every Democracy Needs,” “Unlike the constitutions of many other advanced democracies, the U.S. Constitution contains no affirmative right to vote.” He understands this as a “fundamental constitutional defect” that cries out for correction.
While the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the For The People Act could provide that correction, no one expects that Congress will consider such federal voting rights legislation before our November elections. Nevertheless, the next months offer America a crucial opportunity.
If you are a person whose faith encourages you to see the spark of the divine in every person you meet, I urge you to hear God’s call to do whatever you can — in your community and within your sphere of influence — to join others and prepare for a free and fair election.
For example:
Volunteer to become a local poll worker.
If you participate in a religious community, ask your clergy to preach an election sermon.
If there’s a need for your local community or state to do something that will help assure a free and fair election, write a letter to the editor of your newspaper explaining what others have done. Get some ideas for your letter by reading about what some elders did in the run-up to the 2023 election or visiting Third Act’s Safeguarding our Democracy page.
Join others who are taking action in your state, or others in your profession, by signing up to part of a Third Act Working Group. People of faith led the civil rights movement and the voting rights movement. Join the Third Act Faith Working Group and you can learn how to engage your local church, synagogue, mosque or temple in strengthening our democracy.
In a democracy, there is no more responsible way for a person of faith to show their faithfulness than to uphold our sacred right to vote.
About Jim Antal
A member of Third Act Faith’s Coordinating Committee, Jim Antal serves as special advisor on climate justice to the United Church of Christ’s general minister and president. His 2023 book, “Climate Church, Climate World — Revised and Updated,” is being read by hundreds of churches. From 2006-2018, Antal led the 350 UCC churches in Massachusetts as their Conference Minister and President. He has preached on climate change since 1988 in over 400 settings and has engaged in non-violent civil disobedience on numerous occasions.