We are less than a month away from the midterm elections. The last midterm election was in 2022, when barely half of eligible voters nationwide exercised their voting rights. With one-third of the U.S. Senate and the entire U.S. House of Representatives up for election, plus a plethora of state and local officials, midterm voter turnout is not promising.
As people on both sides of the political aisle say our country is headed in the wrong direction, it is more important than ever to right our country’s course in your upcoming trips to the ballot box. With that in mind, I feel it is important to address a very significant portion of voters: Christians.
The University of Mississippi campus sits in one of the most Christian parts of the United States. Mississippi resides neatly in the Bible Belt, and the Southeast is known for its ties to Christianity, especially Evangelical Christianity. In Mississippi, 77% of people identify as Christian.
In a 2024 survey, an estimated 85 million self-identifying Christians were not expected to vote in the presidential election. That is about half of America’s Christians who were not expected to vote in an election that often sees 15-20% higher turnout than the midterms. That means we can expect more than half of American Christians to leave their vote on the table this election season.
It saddens me to see Christians disavowing government and politics. In Chapter 5 of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus preaches the Sermon on the Mount. He gives explicit instructions: “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”
Christians need to remember what being the salt of the earth means.
Salt used to be more than what we put on our beans and potatoes. Salt was essential for preservation and flavor. Salt kept food from rotting and made it taste better. Jesus Christ’s command is twofold — be positive, love others. The world will taste better because of it. The hard part is preservation.
Christians should be fighting moral decay in society. In America, we fight one way, and it is the same way we have fought and settled our domestic issues for centuries: We fight through our government. We have to take our fight to the ballot box. If there are 160 million eligible Christian voters, we need all 160 million to fight.
This can feel taboo. We have a separation of church and state. We are not, and should not be, a theocracy, a government run by the Church.
However, that does not require separating religion from the person. If we do, we lose our saltiness and are good for nothing more than being thrown out, like the Bible says. People are practically inseparable from the state and its elections. Voting is not a sacrament. You cannot vote for a perfectly pure person, because no such person exists.
Christians should vote for candidates whom they believe best protect the morals that are fundamental to our nation. John Adams, our second president, once wrote that our government was made for a “moral and religious” people, and that it was “wholly inadequate” for any other.
We can, and should, use elections to be the salt of the earth.
Christians must step up. President Ronald Reagan saw our liberty, the same liberty based in Christian morals, as a fragile thing.
“(Freedom is) never more than one generation away from extinction,” Reagan said.
Make a plan to vote. That is how we can be the salt of the earth. That is how we can stop societal decay. It is how we fight, and we can never stop fighting. Our freedom might depend on it.
Eli Keel is a senior public policy leadership major from Vinemont, Ala.
