Letter to America – use your vote for all of us

As a rule I avoid politics in this blog. I’m not sure politics and theology mix too well, and I think I’m better as a theological writer than a political commentator. I also don’t kid myself that this blog has any significant influence in the world. But despite all this, there are times when you have to speak even if it seems foolish and unlikely to make any difference.

So I’m writing this to letter to America, because you are poised very shortly to elect both a president and a political party. The result, which is in your hands, will shape not only your own lives and immediate national future but will affect all of us largely helpless onlookers in the wider world, and will impact on the very planet itself.

This is an appeal to all you good people. Please, please choose wisely, and not based on mere partisan prejudice, nor out of short-sighted or short-term self-interest, nor on single issues such as abortion, gay marriage or Israel.

America, you are probably the most powerful and influential nation on the planet. Your electoral decisions matter to all of us, both for good and ill. Your economic and foreign policies shape the fate of nations and of countless people. The ‘War on Terror’ began largely in America (helped of course by the UK), but now affects most of the world. It’s arguable that much of the current global economic crisis began in America, with unregulated hedge funds, sub-prime mortgage selling and so forth, but now the whole world is caught up in it. This is not to point the finger; merely to point out that US policies often have global consequences.

Indeed, the very future of the planet could be in your hands. America is the highest per capita food consumer and among the very highest oil and energy consumers in the world. The US also produces more CO2 emissions than any almost other nation except China – yet some leading American politicians refuse to believe in man-made climate change. Again, this is not to lay blame, but just to stress that your political choices hugely affect the world we all share.

Many of us in the rest of the world look on in bewilderment at US politics, at all the glitzy showbiz razzmatazz surrounding the most crucial decision-making process on the planet; the bizarre idea that presidents need to be like movie stars. We cross our fingers and pray that you won’t let in another George ‘Dubya’ Bush, a presidency seen by most of the rest of us as unmitigatedly disastrous; many of us are still feeling its toxic fallout. We wonder why so many Americans make such a fuss about something that seems as patently sensible to us as ‘Obamacare’. (And by the way, most of us don’t have a clue what the GOP means – though I’ve looked it up now.)

We also scratch our heads over the importance placed on a candidate’s religious beliefs – it sometimes appears to outsiders as though the US were almost a quasi-theocracy rather than a modern secular democracy with a separation of church and state. We fear the power of the religious right, of the fundamentalist and ultra-conservative evangelical lobbies. We struggle to understand those who conflate Christianity with Republicanism, and who don’t seem to be able to see past single issues like abortion, gay marriage or Israel. However important those issues are, they cannot be allowed to trump all else when so much is at stake. Please, please don’t let that happen.

Of course I can’t tell you who to vote for. I can only say that the idea of a Republican win and a Romney presidency fills me, and countless others in the non-American world, with utter dread. Republican presidencies may (or may not) be great for America; I don’t know. But they’ve rarely been unmitigated blessings for the rest of us.

America, in many ways as you vote you hold the fate of all of us in your hands. Please don’t vote on your own behalf alone, but for all of us who are powerless to influence the outcome yet will be hugely affected by it nonetheless. Particularly if you are Christian, vote also for the alien and foreigner and the rest of the world who have to live with the consequences of your leaders’ policies.

I’m not quite saying vote for Obama, but if I did have a vote in this election, that’s certainly how I’d use it.