Women: Steward Your Vote Well

America’s Women is proud to have been featured in Decision Magazine, a resource by BillyGraham.org. We encourage you to check out their other excellent content. Author Sarah Holliday writes on a variety of cultural and civic issues. We’re grateful that she has given us permission to re-post her entire article for you.

This is the third part of a series Ms. Holliday published from our interview: Women, It’s Time to Engage: Stewarding the Vote God has Entrusted to You Women, It’s Time to Engage: Stewarding the Community God Has Placed You In Women, It’s Time to Engage: Stewarding a Biblical View of Womanhood and Motherhood

Stewarding the Vote God has Entrusted to You

Written by: Sarah Holliday

Decision recently interviewed Kim Miller, president of the Arizona-based organization America’s Women. As an evangelical Christian, Miller believes there are three primary areas women can have significant influence: the home, the community and the voting booth. In part 1 of this three-part series, Miller addressed the Biblical vision of womanhood and motherhood, as well as the foundation of faith underneath it all. In part two, she addressed how women can show up and have an impact in their communities.

Women are often busy, distracted, discouraged or deceived, said Kim Miller, president of America’s Women. It’s not because they’re inferior but because today’s political and spiritual landscape is laden with attacks on female dignity and a woman’s natural tendency toward compassion—especially when it stems from a Biblical foundation.

Miller and her team are working to “intercept” that messaging by equipping women to be more informed, engaged and ready to cast their vote into the ballot box.

Why politics? Why care?

Miller went straight to the heart of the matter: “God cares about politics because He cares about everything—everything belongs to Him.” He cares about both the vertical and the horizontal—the matters concerning Himself and His creation. As Miller put it, He’s concerned with “the sacred and the civic. The priest and the king. Intimacy with Him and our influence into the culture around us. And we can’t influence anyone if we’re not at least aware” of what’s going on.

Doing nothing, she insisted, is not Biblical. You’re either “allowing an impact or you’re making an impact, one way or another, if you do or don’t vote.”

She explained how “shocking” it is that roughly 40 million Christians don’t vote—many of them claiming they stay home because they don’t feel informed. This is part of why Miller has dedicated herself to the work she does. She believes real, lasting and meaningful change is possible. Many Christians in America just need a little help becoming more equipped to have that impact.

“We need both a revival of Christianity, of faith and grace, and a reformation of our civic culture,” she said. “That’s what I want Christians to understand. This is a calling.”

The issues at stake

Miller’s perspective is straightforward: If it’s important enough, then get involved!

One area of importance to most people that is “always on the ballot” is the family. And a lot of the policies on the books are anti-family, Miller said. 

There are people, corporations and movements set on “creating chaos” and tearing apart the very institution that has long served as the building block of this country. It’s prevalent in the transgender ideology that is running rampant, causing confusion over one’s body and leading many others into irreversible, experimental drugs and surgeries. It’s prevalent in the easy access to abortions. It’s prevalent in the anger between males and females.

Miller added that, in all of this, “the ultimate conspirator is Satan himself. He’s always been trying to dismantle what God has created.” Using fear and anger, it’s his mission to get us “distracted and discouraged and deceived”—male or female, young or old, believer or unbeliever.

For Miller, protecting female dignity—her organization’s top priority in the upcoming midterm elections—is not just about protecting women’s and girls’ sports from the transgender-identifying men who have invaded them. It’s also about protecting and honoring what women were naturally created to tap into.

“We have compassion that the enemy … knows how to manipulate,” Miller said. Compassion without truth or love is a slippery slope, but “if you are a strong woman who’s protecting your children … you’re probably going to be the first one to notice when a kid is struggling, whether it’s your kid or their friends. … You’re going to notice when anyone’s hurting, because that’s a gift we have. But what you do from there is the next question.” 

“There’s nuances and compassion that has to apply to individual situations,” Miller stated, “but laws are put in place to protect everyone. And that’s why, if Christians are not involved in the bigger scope of the laws that govern the most people, then … we are missing the air war. And that’s where the biggest amount of damage or benefit, depending on who’s in control,” takes place.

Change that starts with you

“We always say, ‘shift culture,’” Miller said. But that shift must start at the local level. And more importantly, while “we could pray for this culture to change and a revival to happen, it will not happen apart from God’s people. He always works through His own people first.” 

This is the heart behind Miller’s prayer for the Holy Spirit “to reignite an understanding of our identity as Christians—what it means to follow Jesus in all of its facets.”

Because God has already fought and won our battles, she added, we can stand on His truth, within His mindset of truth and love and grace—depending on Him, listening to Him, abiding in Him through His Word.

A call to ‘wake up’

In her own life, Miller feels God calling on her to “wake up.” Consequently, she said, “I want to [help] wake up my friends [and] my sisters … to the power that you already have in the Lord, and wake up to the resolve God wants you to have for your families [and] your children. Your position is strong and secure. Take it. You already have it. But you can’t do that if you are complacent and at ease.”

Discipleship is at the heart of Miller’s prayer—not merely from believer to believer, but for women to disciple their children and the other people in their lives, the very future of this world. She prays that “God would awaken us,” setting hearts ablaze and helping us “to remember who we are and to be excited about it again. It should be joyful. The joy of the Lord is our strength.”

The conversation Decision had with Miller ended with a reflection on what the 18th Century English pastor, theologian and author Matthew Henry once said: “Those that would shine as lights in the world must first be ignited in the secret place. We must first fetch light and heat from the Sun of Righteousness in private, if we would reflect it to others in public.”

As Miller emphasized, Christians ought to make it their chief business to draw from that One source, because “that’s what transforms the world.”