As Christians go to the polls, we must remember the biblical distinction between earthly power and God's kingdom.

Kudos to believers who strive to vote like Christians. Some do so by electing candidates who best represent the Christian values they cherish most. Others do so by electing candidates whose overall approach to government they believe best serves the good of all. By voting in these ways, believers attempt to love and seek the peace of their neighbors.

Unfortunately, many people who are attempting to vote Christianly are actually voting Christendomly. By “Christendomly,” I mean striving to retain or recover the collaborative relationship that Christians have long enjoyed with Western governments. (See this recent Wayne Grudem column as an example.) Such collaboration began in the fourth century, when the Roman Empire went from ignoring and persecuting Christians to tolerating and eventually embracing Christianity as the state religion. Since then, believers have grown accustomed to promoting Christian values through civil mechanisms. In several places, Christianity became the mandatory state religion.

Christendom in the United States has always been more complicated. Though Christianity was never the official religion, civic leaders exercised considerable liberty in applying Christian convictions to public governance. This yielded a variety of benefits for Christians, including the protection of Sundays as a day of worship, holidays in the civic calendar, clergy presiding over civil ceremonies, chaplains in hospitals and the military, support in public education and the media, and generous tax exemptions.

Nothing in Scripture requires governments to bestow such favor. Christians simply convinced the authorities that it was in their best interest to do so. Likewise, nothing in Scripture suggests that Christians ought to work their way into positions of civic power or otherwise influence governing authorities. Nonetheless, this began happening at a certain point and has long endured.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the American experience of Christendom has been waning. Evidence of this is undeniable: desacralizing Sundays, secularizing holidays, overhauling marriage, excising Christian evangelism from chaplaincy, disparaging Christian beliefs in education and entertainment, and attempting to withdraw tax privileges from religious institutions.