Americans have been casting ballots for nearly 400 years
In 1629, the first American balloting for an election occurred in Salem, Massachusetts. The matter at hand? Choosing a minister and choosing a Christian teacher for the colony. “Such is the origin of the use of the ballot on this continent; [Samuel] Skelton was chosen pastor and [Francis] Higginson teacher.” So writes George Bancroft, an early American historian, on this first election on American soil, in Volume I of his 6-volume, “History of the United States of America”(1882).
Historian Paul Johnson writes in his 1997 classic, “A History of the American People”: “In a sense, the clergy were the first elected officials of the new American society, a society which to that extent had a democratic element from the start.”
And Christians in America have been voting ever since.
Founding father Samuel Adams once said, “Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote … that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.”
However, there has arisen a feeling among some professing believers that somehow it is spiritual not to participate in something as earthly as politics.