By Matt Friedeman, Ph.D.
November 5, 2004

(AgapePress) - The networks were flummoxed.

My favorite election night recollection was the network talking-head that bemoaned that the fundamentalist from Florida and his vote counts just as much as the executive in New York. To think!

On election night the pundits stared at exit polls and came to the throttling conclusion that it was moral issues that drove the vote which put George W. Bush in the White House for his second term. Further, a GOP Senate was strengthened and the Republicans retained the House. And, most incredibly it would seem -- in a victory as symbolic as it was a conservative pick-up -- Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle was sent packing to house himself on the ash heap of congressional leadership history.

But why?

It wasn't health care. Nor was it the Iraq war. Ditto the economy. To a network, the talking heads were shaking them and declaring, "Moral issues."

The Church showed up!

And of greater concern than prescription drugs was the fact that those people known derisively (or did it just seem that way) by the media as "born-againers" were dead set against homosexual marriage, concerned over the killing of embryos in stem-cell research, worried about what future judges might mean for the further destruction of babies in the womb, and wondering how faith converges with the most powerful office in the world.

President Bush's architect of victory, Karl Rove, apparently found his four million evangelicals, and more.

And now?

Beware of the "healing" that so many think has to happen now. If morality is really the issue, then it is not healing but repentance that is necessary. The great divide in this nation is not race, nor socio-economic status, nor "red state-blue state." It is the moral positions for and against the traditional definition of marriage, embryonic stem-cell research and abortion. "Healing" to many means ideological or theological appeasement. But morality, especially that which is at the heart of the Bible and of the Bible's God, knows nothing of compromise at the point of basic tenets of right and wrong.

Second, remember this in the week of so much celebration: President Bush came out in favor of civil unions between homosexuals, against his own stated position and his party's platform, the week before the election. The Church, having voted, must hold Mr. Bush's feet to the evangelical fire. Evangelicals must eschew the temptation to be the man's cheerleader and be his praying friends instead. And when his life and public policy looks to be veering, to be friends enough to challenge in the firmest of ways.

Third, the Church that showed up on Tuesday was called to also show up on Wednesday after, and Thursday and ....

And every day. Because it is the everyday "voting" with our jobs, and our parenting, and our involvement in our communities, and our efforts in and through our local parishes to be positive influences in our culture that matters even more than voting. We must now serve as Christian witnesses in the dark places of humanity. We must evangelize, confront, write our political letters, preach in the community prisons, run for the school boards, pen guest commentaries for the secular papers.

We must act. If we don't, we lose -- and should.