Politics were not discussed in the house where I grew up.

I used to think it was strange that my parents didn’t talk about their escape from war-torn South Vietnam. Instead, they focused on making sure that my brothers and I worked hard in school so we could maximize the blessings of living in this country.

So I was surprised when my mother, who was in her sixties, first told me about her experience with communism in Vietnam. I sat at my parents’ kitchen table, agape as she described the day the Viet Cong invaded her neighborhood. She watched her father frantically load her young siblings into his South Vietnamese government Jeep while under fire by bloodthirsty communists. He was forced by the barrage of bullets to leave her, 15 years old at the time, and her mother behind. They were forced to flee on foot, dodging bullets from the Communists’ rifles.

My mother and grandmother survived this event, but the communists would strike many more times against their family in the coming years.

My parents’ harrowing escape from Vietnam in April 1975 is etched into their psyches. Their suffering was not merely because of the dangers of floating out on a rickety boat into the dark South China Sea teeming with pirates hellbent on robbing, raping, and killing refugees. It was the guilt and fear of never again laying eyes on the loved ones left behind. It was also the knowledge that their ancestral homeland was lost forever.

But my parents are among the lucky ones who were rescued by the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet. They were fished out of the sea and eventually given refuge in America due to the concerted efforts of President Gerald Ford and evangelist Billy Graham. Though there had been a bipartisan effort to pass legislation that would allow and fund the evacuation and resettlement of the South Vietnamese refugees in America, noteworthy opponents in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee made public statements like, “We owe no obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals.”

It did not matter to then-Senator Joe Biden that more than 170,000 South Vietnamese people who had worked hand-in-hand with the U.S. military were in danger of losing their lives if they were not evacuated. Biden ignored this reality and went on to emphasize that “the United States has no obligation to evacuate one – or 100,001 – South Vietnamese.”

Communist America

Those heartless sentiments will never be forgotten by the South Vietnamese who managed to survive the Vietnam War. But they serve as potent motivation for these legal migrants to assimilate into the American culture, gain citizenship, and prove their worth to those who fought for their safe passage and settlement in this great nation.

My parents’ gratitude and loyalty to America compels them now to speak of the dangers they see threatening this constitutional republic. Every day they see the rise of communism in their adopted homeland. When my parents came to this country, they knew they had been given a blessing by Almighty God. No other country holds the promise of human flourishing so reliably as the United States of America. There would be no need to worry about the government taking citizens to jail in the dead of night for political dissent. There would be no need to worry that private property would be unilaterally taken without compensation, as was common in North Vietnam and post-war communist South Vietnam. There would be no need to hide their religious convictions in this pluralistic American society.

But their eyes and ears do not lie. Communism has crept into America like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Democracy is no longer about “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The word “democracy” has now been misappropriated by powerful elites ensconced in American colleges, multinational corporations, the legacy media, the entertainment industry, and our own government to mask their strategies to maintain power indefinitely. Why else do those in power seek to jail their political opponents for questionable “crimes,” censor free speech, curtail the right to bear arms, “pack” the Supreme Court, “pack” the Senate, circumvent a primary process intended to allow the people to choose their presidential candidates, abolish the Electoral College, abolish the congressional filibuster, disallow voter ID, import millions of illegal aliens and encourage them to vote?

These are the means of maintaining the power of the communist vanguard party, not how democracy is preserved. But these elites are not after a classless society à la communism. No. They have learned the lessons of history. They know that people can be fraudulently led to believe that a whole community can “own” all the means of production and that private property can be equitably distributed to the people.

The reality of communism is that private property is stolen from the masses and kept by the elite few. Crumbs are handed out to the fools who fall for the mask of equity. Among the losers in this battle are those who remain silent as the evil elite rise to power.

The Only Way to Win

What now? What can be done? Today, the only solution is for Christians to pray up, stand up, speak up, and be heard. It begins with each of us daring to ask God how we can shine His light into the darkness permeating our culture and government. Scripture tells us that the “days are evil,” that we are being “sent out as sheep in the midst of wolves,” and that we will need to be “clever as serpents and pure as doves.” We are not to be “conformed to this evil world” but rather that we are to fight “against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world.”

At a minimum, this Christian duty to fight evil requires that we exercise our right to vote. This means that we vote even when our choices are between two sinful candidates, because there will never be a sinless politician. Moses was a murderer before he was tasked by God to lead the Israelites out of slavery. The Apostle Paul persecuted Christians before he met Jesus on the road to Damascus. Demonstrably, our Lord repeatedly uses imperfect people to execute His will. So our vote must be based on our obedience to the Word of God; we must carefully consider and compare the policies and platforms of the candidates and parties to discern which most closely align with God’s will and His righteous laws as expressed in the Bible. In this way, we can ensure that the values most closely aligned with God’s values will be enshrined in the law of the land.

Our political involvement is one of the most effective ways that we can ensure the welfare of those Jesus Christ described as “the least of these” – the poor, the vulnerable, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned. My refugee parents were among the least of these. But for the righteous morals of the politicians in office in 1975, pressing forward despite heavy opposition, my parents and hundreds of thousands of other refugees would have languished in communist concentration camps or perished at sea.

But there are yet more of “the least of these” that need our political action: the unborn – knit together in their mothers’ wombs by God, yet torn asunder by man; children led into sexual immorality with pornography in public schools; children encouraged to permanently sterilize and mutilate their bodies in defiance of God’s ordination of the binary sexes; parents of these exploited children who’ve been stripped of their legal authority to save them; women and children trafficked by deviants allowed into our country through a porous national border; traumatized and injured veterans left on the streets; the abandoned citizens of North Carolina who have lost everything in Hurricane Helene; and the millions of hard-working Americans who can’t make ends meet because of the games politicians have played with our currency.

And let us not forget that God’s people have also been among the persecuted in this country. Since 1954, the Johnson Amendment of the federal tax code has been used to muzzle religious leaders from speaking on political issues for fear of losing their churches’ tax exemptions. The blatant discrimination was further demonstrated during the COVID pandemic when churches and synagogues were forbidden from opening their doors while liquor stores and strip clubs were considered “essential businesses.”

How We Got Here

How have these things all happened in America, you may wonder? I cannot offer a complete explanation, but one thing is clear: The Church as a whole has largely looked on passively as Adam did while Eve spoke with the serpent in Genesis. Scripture and the wise words of G.K. Chesterton make clear what befalls a man who is silent in the face of evil: “Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion.”

Perhaps the Johnson Amendment is what understandably makes pastors leery of preaching about political matters. But I submit to you that all matters of morality are also political. Politics and morality are necessarily intertwined, as each is useless without the other. This is evident from God’s declarations of laws and establishment and destruction of rulers and nations.

If pastors are confused or leery, we should encourage and pray for them so they acquire the clarity and courage of the apostles as they set out across the ancient world. In the meantime, we, the Body of Christ, should not be timid, but lovingly speak the truth, vote, and fear not the judgment of men. Rather we should fear God’s judgment.

A unified Christian vote can deal a mighty blow against the evil holding sway in the world. But a divided Church – one that fails to “seek first His kingdom and His righteousness” – allows evil to spread and grasp more power.

This is what happened to Adam in the Garden of Eden. His first sin was not eating the forbidden fruit; it was failing to focus on God’s will as he silently watched Eve be tempted by the enemy and then fooled into sinful action.

As we cast our ballots in the 2024 election, let us set our eyes on God’s righteousness, and thereby prove that we have learned from Adam’s devastating mistake.

Michele Le is a litigator who advocates for the strengthening of the Western Church. You can read her reflections on current political and social issues on the Substack: Of Serpents + Doves.