By Kaleb Nyquist
As our divided nation grapples with the prospect of a contested presidential election, leading voices in government, media, and activism have been preparing response plans in anticipation of volatile tensions. The bipartisan Transition Integrity Project’s report has warned these leaders to “take seriously that this may well be a street fight, not a legal battle.” Recent initiatives like Faith Leaders United to Support Free and Fair Elections and the Poll Chaplains movement have stepped up to make sure the American Church is part of these response plans. Largely omitted from this conversation, however, has been the role of local congregations — the communities in which we experience fellowship, worship, prayer, and lament. With a possible constitutional crisis looming, I believe Christians must now start thinking preemptively about responding to election disruption at the spiritual and liturgical grassroots.
The connection between elections, spirituality, and liturgy may surprise those who associate elections with rigorous statistical forecasts and enlightened forms of government. But at their most basic level, elections are a form of ritual: a series of actions taken regularly that help make meaning of and shape our shared public life. Similar to how regular Christian worship helps form a church community, the American election ritual helps to form our nation. We can take this one step further: when the election ritual is disrupted, Christian liturgy and pastoral care can provide guardrails to ensure a peaceful continuation or transfer of power and steward our nation’s democratic covenant.
Before the era of social distancing, watch parties were an intimate component of the election night ritual. On Election Day 2016, my watch party gathered fellow Chicago youth ministers. We considered what it meant to “raise up disciples” who had a theological dual citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven and this democratic republic. What would we text our students the next morning, many of whom belonged to a city that identified with the outgoing president?
The next day I met with a student who grieved for family members whose legal status in our immigration system became even more tenuous. I compared notes with my senior pastor who had met with a group of retired men who were celebrating that our nation’s political elites had finally been put on notice. These “day after” meetings, we realized, were another key part of the election ritual: making space to make sense of our new shared political reality.
“At their most basic level, elections are a form of ritual: a series of actions taken regularly that help make meaning of and shape our shared public life.”
I was on pulpit rotation for the Sunday after the election. Faced with a multi-generational congregation where the pews were evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, I had to preach a sermon that would resonate both with those who were feeling despair and those who were feeling triumphant. The Gospel text I had been assigned was Luke 21:5-19, where Jesus foretells the destruction of the temple, a gospel text that nearly spoke for itself as I reflected on the impermanence of our own political order.
My goal for that Sunday had been to preach a sermon that met people in the moment they were in, but that was not so controversial that I would become an agenda item at the next church council meeting. It was only through the grateful emails and follow-up coffee chats that I realized I had tapped into a particular type of religious authority — the authority to permit a person to grieve. This is not a command to tell people to “get over themselves” and pledge their allegiance to a particular public official. Grassroots organizing and peaceful protest can be healthy forms of expressing grief. What matters is that a person accepts the results of a legitimate and fair election so that they can move forward constructively.
In American political culture, often characterized by the rhetoric of triumph and dogged resilience, grief is an emotion often reserved only for emergencies and memorials. Democracy inevitably involves loss: our peaceful transitions or continuations of power require voters whose favored candidate comes up short to accept the results. Without this psychological acceptance, those who are frustrated by the election’s outcome become susceptible to political extremism and violent civil conflict in light of power they perceive as illegitimately bestowed.
With Election Day upon us, I worry that a ritual we have taken for granted is bound to be disrupted on numerous fronts: from delayed ballot counts leading to ambiguous results, to threats of taking advantage of legal loopholes in the Electoral College process. The National Task Force on Election Crises has put together a useful list of resources to better understand each of these vulnerabilities and how to respond appropriately. However, our nation’s political polarization remains so severe that even with appropriate precautions in place, partisan echo chambers may block out the authority that allows a person to start grieving a lost election. This spiritual crisis of denial is even more dangerous in the aggregate, potentially threatening the norm of a peaceful transition of power that has been — despite our nation’s many flaws — one of our outstanding historical strengths.
Christians have a responsibility to be a guiding presence for our nation through these potential disruptions. Through our Constitution, the United States is a nation of people (of various faiths, and no faiths) who are historically covenanted to each other — what sociologist of religion Philip Gorski calls “America’s vital center” in his book American Covenant. I believe Christians are called to be stewards of this covenant, just like we are called to be stewards of all of God’s creation. From this perspective, elections become a sort of secular sacrament: a “covenant renewal” declaring who is recognized in the covenant and who are the elected officials set apart for this work of leading our covenanted people.
Between now and Inauguration Day, American Christians must prepare ourselves for our role in the nation’s election ritual. Beyond the ballot box, there may be legal battles going up to the Supreme Court and mass mobilizations happening throughout the streets. The Church must stand up for truth, affirming election results determined by democratic processes, calling for transparency, praying for public officials, and bringing liturgical creativity into the call to be peacemakers. By doing so, we work towards fulfilling Christ’s command to “love our neighbor as ourselves” at the national level, simply by caring for the fabric that stitches us together in the first place.
Kaleb Nyquist, a former youth minister at Ravenswood Evangelical Covenant Church in Chicago, is currently a Louisville Institute Pastoral Study Fellow and a communications strategist for multiple political campaigns and faith initiatives. He holds a Master of Divinity and Master of Public Policy from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Arts from North Park University.
Editor’s Note: The Center for Public Justice’s Prayers for Our Political Community is a series of short essays and daily prayers on key themes, written by Christians, starting the evening before Election Day and continuing through the day after the 2021 Presidential Inauguration. Sign up to receive a daily prayer in your inbox, or follow along on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook .
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