Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar. My Kingdom is not of this world.
Jesus does not give electoral advice. Jesus is interested in YOU and you are accountable to Him for the way YOU live, He does not appear to be very interested in your judgments about others.
No, Jim, it was that very faulty form of pietism you seem to be recommending that led to American Christians having a greatly reduced role in American government. So much so that Falwell et al came back with the Moral Majority to try and reverse the damage done.
But if you go back to the Reformers, there was no shortage of good, godly men and women willing to step up and get involved in civil policy, allowing their faith to inform all their thinking for the whole of real life, not just in some safe little Sunday School sandbox. Nor would they have tolerated the isolation of the Christian community into a kind of ghetto just begging the secular powers for permission to exist.
Indeed, Calvin had worked out an entire theory of “vocation,” systematic Christian involvement in life and culture, followed up by other great thinkers like Abraham Kuyper, who helped us think deeply about the two spheres of human authority, civil and ecclesiastical, and how they might be harmonized. Christians are to be salt and light in a wicked world. Our first mission is the preaching of the Gospel. But the Gospel has consequences to the culture and the body politic when it is adopted on a large scale.
And so we do render unto Caesar, but given the chance to elect who Caesar shall be, we should not choose a Caesar who is oblivious to his own lack of deity. It’s not just bad for Christians. It’s bad for everybody. If we are given, in our participatory form of government, a way to stop that bad thing from happening, why wouldn’t we do it?
Peace,
SR