My Political Pilgrimage

A few years ago I had some of my artwork in a booth at an outdoor art fair in Peoria. A man stopped and looked at my work. He said he had seen my artwork in other places and knew who I was. He shook my hand and told me his name. I thought his name seemed vaguely familiar.

“Your name sounds vaguely familiar,” I said. “Have I met you somewhere before?”

He told me that he was Illinois State Senator Dave Koehler.

I felt really dumb. An Illinois State Senator knew who I was (“Daniel Botkin, local artist”), but I didn’t know who he was. (“Dave Koehler, Illinois State Senator.”)

One fall around election time, we got political ads in the mail almost every day, urging us to vote for various candidates. Each time we got an ad from Dave Koehler’s campaign, I would tell my wife, “Well, I got something in the mail again from my buddy Dave.”

Even though politics bores me, I have painted portraits of three politicians. In 1998, when President Bill Clinton’s scandalous behavior with young intern Monica Lewinsky was fodder for gossip in the news, I had a dream one night. In my dream I looked, and lo, I beheld President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky in front of the Capitol Building, posed like the farmer and his daughter in Grant Wood’s famous painting American Gothic. So I painted the vision and titled it American Gossip.

In 2006 I painted a series of 16 portraits called “Monochromatic Oldies For Boomers.” Each portrait combined the name of a famous person with an oldies song title or oldies band name that included a reference to color. I painted President Rutherford B. Hayes in purple and called it Purple Hayes, in reference to Jimi Hendrix’s hit song Purple Haze. I painted President Grover Cleveland in crimson, with a clover blossom pinned to his lapel, and called it Crimson and Grover, in reference to Tommy James and the Shondell’s song Crimson and Clover.

Even though I have painted these three portraits of U.S. Presidents, I can think of very few subjects that bore me more than politics. Studying about politics and government has been boring to me ever since I was a kid in school.

To graduate from high school, we had to pass a test on the U.S. Constitution. Any grade below 70% was a failing grade. On my test, I scored exactly 70%. I hated being forced to memorize stuff that bored me, so I just memorized the amount of information that I thought would get me a passing grade. My method worked, but just barely.

In college I had to take a semester of political science. This too was very boring for me. But I studied hard and got a good grade. I studied hard in all my college classes, mainly because I did not want to flunk out of college and get drafted into the army and then sent to Vietnam to kill strangers who had never done anything to me. I could understand Americans fighting Nazis and the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor, but I could not relate to the war in Vietnam, even though I had taken a semester-long class about Vietnam in high school.

I got a good grade in my political science class (an “A” or a “B”; I can’t remember which). Curiously, though, today I cannot remember a single piece of information that I learned in that class. I memorized political facts only long enough to pass the course, then I promptly forgot them.

As a fun-loving hippie, I felt detached from the world system. When I became a born-again Bible believer, I felt even more detached from the world system. I had zero interest in the politics of this world, and I felt zero obligation to learn about or participate in the politics of this world. I had no desire to vote in elections, and I felt no obligation to vote.

I did not think it was a sin for a disciple of Jesus to vote, but I did think that voting was something that was irrelevant to disciples of Jesus. I had read all those negative things that the Bible says about the world system. To me, voting in the elections of this world seemed like a worldly thing to do. I wanted to be spiritual, not worldly. Therefore I did not vote.

On one election day, I happened to walk past a polling place and saw people going in to vote. I was a new believer at that time. I felt something akin to pity for those voters, because I saw them as slaves to the world system.

When Reagan was running for President, the church I attended strongly encouraged people to vote. I had been getting involved in supporting the pro-life movement. I was strongly opposed to abortion. I knew that a vote for Reagan was a vote against abortion, and a vote for the other guy was a vote for abortion. So for the first time in my life, at 30 years old, I voted.

I saw the abortion question as a moral issue, not a political issue, so I continued to vote, always for pro-life candidates. My main concern in every election has always been: Which candidate is pro-abortion, and which candidate is pro-life?

In the 2016 election I voted for Trump. I would have preferred one of the other men as the Republican candidate, but Trump got the candidacy. So I held my nose and voted for Trump. Actually I was not really voting “for” Trump; I was voting against Hillary the pro-abortionist.

In the 2020 election I voted again for Trump, rather than for the pro-abortionists Biden and Kamala.

I do not promote conspiracy theories. I think most of them are utterly ridiculous. However, it is very, very difficult for me to believe that Biden won that last election fairly. That election, with all its credible allegations of fraud, has made me wonder if perhaps my first instincts as a new believer were correct. Maybe voting in elections really is a worldly thing to do, especially when there is so much election fraud that takes place.

Right now I am inclined to never vote again. However, I probably will vote again, but only if there is a good candidate with a Biblical worldview running against a bad candidate with a non-Biblical worldview. But if it is just a lukewarm conservative running against a lukewarm liberal, I will probably not bother to vote.

The only comfort I take in having Biden and Kamala in the White House is this: If the spirits of Ahab and Jezebel, in the persons of Biden and Kamala, are allowed to be in authority, then we should likewise expect the spirit and power of Elijah to come upon a faithful remnant to bring down Ahab and Jezebel - in a spiritual sense, of course, because “the weapons of our warfare are not carnal.” If someone else wants to use carnal weapons to put Ahab and Jezebel in their proper place, we will let the Jehus handle that job.

| DB

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Images: American Gossip (Top), Purple Hayes (Middle), Crimson and Grover (Bottom) by Daniel Botkin. See these and all Daniel’s art pieces at his art website, DanielBotkin.com.