Alan Jacobs proposed an interesting thought experiment yesterday:

You (in this thought experiment) are a Christian and a strong supporter of religious liberty; you are also strongly opposed to unnecessary military adventures and foreign intervention more generally.

How do you vote? And on what grounds do you make that decision?

Noah Millman has already offered his response, and I thought I would add mine as well. In this experiment, the Christian voter has a choice between voting for a reflexively interventionist party and a party that is “disinclined to adventurism, not isolationist but not interventionist either.” If there were such an alternative, I would say that this voter ought to support the latter party, and it would be a fairly easy decision to make. The reasons for doing so are straightforward enough. Given a choice between a party that would commit the U.S. to near-constant war in various places around the world and one that wouldn’t, the voter’s commitment to protecting human life and dignity would easily outweigh other considerations and would oblige him to vote for the less warlike party. That is not only because he would be inclined not to waste the lives of his fellow Americans on unnecessary wars, but he would also recoil from the advocates of inflicting death and destruction on others created in the image of God. Since this Christian voter is presumably also convinced that he should be trying to be a peacemaker, it would not be a difficult choice to reject a party of militarists.

As we all understand, however, there is no such alternative available (and there definitely isn’t one in the upcoming presidential election), and the compromises one would have to make to support either major party should be unacceptable to the sort of voter Jacobs describes here.