Democracy and faith

A young FB friend yesterday was soliciting a ride to the polls from "anyone who's voting for" the same guy he was planning to vote for.  I was kind of confused by the request: wouldn't he accept a ride from someone who was voting for the other guy?  Or did he not expect he could get a ride from someone who was?

Maybe we have citizens who would withhold transportation from someone who they felt would "cancel out their vote," but I'd hope that the majority would invest more faith in the democratic process than in their ability to control it.  I get concerned, sometimes, that we have some groups of people who think that lower participation in the election is a good thing.

I think that attitude is a combination of elitism and lack of trust.  It isn't so much that I trust the citizenry to make the right choice; we see people make a variety of choices in everyday life that are obviously not right, rooted in their self-interest at the expense of others or in common misunderstandings of how things really work.  Elections are often no different, and the electorate largely seems to make its collective decisions based on a world view that I make a conscious choice to reject, thereby finding truth that I could not recognize otherwise. But - at the risk of seeming like a religious nut who "sees the Virgin Mary in the grass over the septic tank" (thanks for the image, Bill Maher) - I trust God to be at work in and through the world, including when others make decisions that I don't agree with.  Salvation history is replete with examples in which the actions of one person or one group of people in the grand scheme of things turn out to have very different meanings than they intend.  (assuming, of course, that there really is such a thing as the grand scheme of things.)

So maintaining my own peace of mind and spirit over our national direction is a matter of taking God at his word, which says very clearly that he has ordained all authority.  In a democracy, there must be a degree of submitting control of things beyond me (that is, beyond my own decisions; none of us has true control of our circumstances) to the will of others.  We have the perfect example of this in God himself, who as the omnipotent creator of the universe submits to the free will with which he has endowed us.

Any vitriolic response such as I am seeing from some friends is rooted in the frustration of wanting to exercise control in ways that go beyond our actual realm of control.