"Your Ballot is a Message" | August 23, 2026

In this episode, we take a hard look at why self-government demands more from us than showing up on election day and then tuning out. We connect Catholic faith to civic responsibility, media wisdom, and the kind of moral realism that helps us vote with both hope and clear eyes. 
• our responsibility as citizens between elections, not only at the polling place 
• politics as a vocation that deserves honor, even across disagreement 
• why campaign media is built to capture attention more than convey truth 
• “the medium is the message” as a tool for election-season discernment 
• choosing as moral agency, and living with the consequences of our choices 
• weighing public skill and private integrity without chasing impossible perfection 
• redemption, fairness, and resisting rumor when judging candidates 

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Father Don Wolf is a priest of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City. Living Catholic also broadcasts on Oklahoma Catholic Radio several times per week, with new episodes airing every Sunday.

Transcript

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Welcome And The Weight Of Self-Government

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This is Living Catholic faith with Father Don Wolf. Deals with Living Catholic faith in the Living Catholic cousins in the minds and finding hope in his word. And now, your host, Father Donwolf.

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Welcome, Oklahoma, to Living Catholic. I'm on Senior Don Wolf, rector of the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother here in Oklahoma City. You know, we are political people who entrust ourselves to self-government as we approach midterm elections. While all people are political in that they together create a community in which they exist together and find a way to make their lives tolerable, not all are entrusted with the reins of governing themselves as a body, as we are. The history of political understanding and experience is full and fraught. Spanning the collected volumes of Plato and Aristotle, passing through the kingdoms and prophets of the scriptures, and coming to the last campaign ads that fill our airwaves. All this being said, we in our time have a niche in which we're responsible for selecting those who will lead us and enact the means and the laws by which their leadership will take place. The weight of leadership rests on our shoulders. This responsibility is not commonly remembered. In all of the passions swirling about one election after the other, we tend to forget the mean times, the moments in which those who are elected by us actually enact the promises of self-government they embody for us. When laws are being debated in the legislatures and agenda are being formed among the agencies of our government, we tend to absent ourselves as if what we long for or what we approve of doesn't matter. Our participation is imagined to be solely at the polling place, not within the halls of power. But as political people, we're never truly absent from the challenge to govern ourselves. We're not a community that passes its time in absentia from the issues of how to live and prosper. Governance is for all of us. The author Michael Waltzer wrote once that the problem with socialism, he said, was that it takes up too many of our evenings. It was a sly critique of the passions for elections and governance that fills up every space in our lives. It's not limited to socialism. Enter a contested seat or come across a controversial measure, and everyone has an opinion. It'd be hard to find someone who isn't passionate about one side or the other, one candidate or the other. Have a series of candidates lose and then added to the passionate advocacy for one of the other, there are additional discussions about the procedures of governance and the integrity of the political process. After a while, it'll seem that politics are the only thing anyone can talk about. Legislation indeed will take up all of our evenings, and our days, our money, and our passions. These are actually superior, though, to the lassitude surrounding boring candidates and do-nothing legislatures. By way of passing laws and enacting the will of the people, the great questions of state and common life are hammered out among the visions and tolerances of the people. Just as the forges shaping metal from powder into blades, great heat and pounding blows are necessary to form what's useful, even in legislatures. So it is in the active procedures of bringing forth a nation to vent it with security and identity and prosperity. It demands attention and skill. It's not simply a matter of tossing off a few stray thoughts and then being done with it. The will of the people has to be sought and then enacted for the ones who are to be governed to be content. And those things aren't easy. The worst thing is that in our inattention, we become strangers to the policies and activities that are done in our name. While the consent of the governed is the basis of our republic, it's not uncommon to turn over the big questions of state to those who are the professionals, entrusting them with the details of how we live and get along. And there is a good argument for that. After all, it was Winston Churchill that opined that the best argument against democracy is a 10-minute conversation with the average voter. And I can testify that I found that conversation can be just as disappointing with someone who's been in the legislature for years, not just somebody who corners you at the neighborhood and barbecue or decides to start talking to you at the barber shop. We all have a responsibility for what goes on in the hallways of governance, even as we are insulated from the day-to-day working and decision making, enacting the deliberations and activities of the whole body politic. All of which is an overarching way to say that what we do as citizens ought to matter to us and to everyone.

Faith Belongs In Public Life

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We are free people who enact and protect our freedom by the exercise of our prerogatives and our possibilities. And not only that, we're believers. As believers, we live out the faith by way of each part of our lives. The kingdom of God isn't absent from the halls of power or the hype of elections. It's present among us. This is especially true by way of the world we create, by our values and actions. We don't just believe in ideas and subscribe to dogmas, we enact our world by what we choose to do, and by way of choosing those who act in our name. Being political is part of being human. As believing human beings, we make sure our values and our decisions result in actions that build this kingdom among us. He said that in every place where abortion is practiced, we should place a sign saying, quote, the actions performed here are done by way of the permission of all of the believers in this area, unquote. He was making the case for serious belief enacted in practice. Substitute any issue or concern for the word abortion, and the case remains the same. And I want to remind that I said that in his voice, which was ironic, sarcastic. It's not enough simply to say, I believe. True belief is enacted and practiced firmly and straightforwardly through the choices we make as members of the body politic. In all of this, we have to affirm that political life is a valid calling, an arena for the doing of good and the enactment of blessing. Not only is it an inevitable element in the human community, it's a calling from God and should be honored as such. It's far too easy to dismiss those who engage in real political discourse and true political skill as somehow outside of the normal range of our concern. But the presence of God is everywhere, including in the structures and procedures of our governing process. And we can certainly trust in the blessings of God to be alive in their lives with as much intensity and as much potential as any other aspect of human communal living. In the Gospel of Mark, the apostles are told to go forth and proclaim the good news to all creatures under heaven. This isn't the command to preach to the birds of the air or to the raccoons in the trees. The creature, Jesus intends, are the realities that fill our world and occupy our spaces with their presence. Many of them are what we have invented and placed in the world to help it function. The army is a creature in this respect. It is to be affected by the truth of God's love for the world, according to Jesus. The post office is a creature, deserving the same the deserving of the same kind of consideration. So is capitalism and fall football and the fashion industry, the Boeing Corporation and the Elks Club. All of them are to have the proclamation of Jesus be offered to them as a source of hope and as a destination for their energy and purpose. It's no stretch at all to understand how the challenges and opportunities of government have the same invitation. Those who occupy it are worthy of every consideration as they go about making the interlocking machinery of government work. Politics is a vocation. We should honor it as one. And by the way, this honor extends to all those who strive to enact governance for the people, not just those who happen to vote our way or put our agenda into practice. Just as the legal profession is a vocation to be honored by all, even when the decisions of court go against our case, so is the choice for political life and the opportunities of political action. We should honor all those who become politicians. All

Election Media And Curated Reality

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this being the case, there are a few elements we should pay attention to as the political energies heat up during this midterm election season. Already it's not possible to turn on TV without being immersed in the decision-making and candidate selecting process going on all around us. Everyone's vying for our attention and competing for our time. We should remember there's a deeper substrate to these elements, and often they are silent reminders of what's really going on among the contests and passions of the elections. The first to remember is that a great deal of what we hear is designed to capture our attention, and not much more. More than 40 years ago, Neil Postman reminded us that even the deep questions being debated about the future of ourselves as a people can be reduced to entertainment and diversion. More and more often, the concerns of our civilization are condensed into eight-second sound bites or reduced to a brief image. And all of this because these are effective in keeping our attention or remaining memorable. Not because they truly embody the issues or reflect the substance of the concerns. We have to know that we're seeing what we see because of how the sites come to us, as much as what there is to see. It's simply a continuation of the insight from Marshall McLuhan that the medium is the message. Entertainment TV, which is all of TV programming, as well as most of the content of our different platforms, entertainment TV shapes what we see and what we pay attention to. This shaping, in turns, becomes the molds into which the politics of the moment are poured into. Just as the issues and crises of our time are fitted and twisted into the stories and presentations we see, so the politics becomes shaped and bent into those precise shapes. When we hear what we hear, we owe it to ourselves and our decision making to know that what reaches our ears is curated and formed according to the ones who are trying to convince us. Not just because we're simply receiving information or encountering the entire subject. When I was growing up, it was commonly presumed that when Walter Cronkite said at the end of his 24-minute nightly broadcast, that's the way it is, he was telling us the truth of the world. We never imagined there was an entire world passing by his windows he chose not to tell us, or that he figured we didn't need to know. We trusted in him and his attempt to let us know. Only much later did we wake up to the truth in all of its complication. Every part of the news was subject to the demands of the presenter's point of view about what was important and what wasn't. The entire news department was aware of the needs of the networks to keep as many people watching as possible. And so what was of interest trumped what was timely or most notable in the long term. And the advertisers' concern was to keep us paying attention. Reporting that wasn't interesting didn't stay news for long. As time went by, we found out there was a whole world of interest and commitment and values lying under every minute of the news we watched, and all of it remained invisible to us. It may have been invisible to Walter. We don't have to be geniuses. We just have to be aware as we hear the news and keep track of what's going on. The medium is indeed the message. We just have to make sure we can lay that message alongside the true messages of what really matters to

You Choose The Future You Get

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us. The second truth is that we do, in fact, determine that what we do, in fact, determines the future of our political life. What we decide helps to create what we get in terms of policies and actions. Our choosing enacts the substantive will of the nation by way of our elective choices. By focusing on the good of all and by orienting ourselves toward the prosperity of the whole people, we can create a society of opportunity and progress for everyone. On the other hand, by focusing only on our individual good and our private concerns, we can create a society of uneven success and thwarted opportunities. These outcomes don't come about by accident, nor do we stumble into them by tripping over the unexpected. They are chosen. And they're chosen as real options among other options, as desirable possibilities among other less than desirable ones. We get what we choose, which is the reminder that we have to keep at hand always. Whenever we look out and see something that catches our attention, we have to remember that this topic or policy or situation didn't just happen as if it were no more than the force of gravity pulling out the options for life. Whatever we see becomes, it has been chosen. If it's disagreeable, we should find out how we can choose differently. If it's conformal to our wants and in line with our agenda, we can study how we can continue to support it. In our public participation in the politics of our time, we get to choose. We're not passive agents, simply pushed around by the force of our history or the weight of another's choices. What we choose makes a difference for us and for those around us. True, we've been awakened to some of the hidden currents at work in our history and among our institutions. In fact, much of the last 50 years has been spent in uncovering and dissecting the implied and often unnamed power structures at work among us. But as we begin to bring these forces into the light of day, the ultimate truth of our situation becomes more and more forthright. We're not simply pinballs rolling past the obstacles on the flat surface of life pushed here and there by a directing hand. We're agents who have the capacity to learn and to know so that our decisions become apt and directive. Of course, we're not able to see every aspect of life in all of its perspective. We're not pure intelligences, we're fallible, limited human beings who can see things only in part and experience them only sequentially. But as we face our choices, they are part of our freedom. We can choose. Our choices are ours. We even have the option to choose poorly. When we do, we live out the consequences of our choice. The other aspect of this part of our choosing is that there is no one coming to rescue us from tragic decisions or bad reasoning. We make our choices and we live with them. In fact, we don't want someone overriding what gets decided, as if there were some intervening authority hovering over us to make sure that we think and decide as reasonable adults, not petulant children. If this were true, we wouldn't be the arbiters of our own future. We'd be merely the subjects of those who really ran our society and actually controlled our lives. This level of authority would be antithetical to our participative government. We are able to make our own lives. That's what we vote for. But it means we live with the bad as well as the good. Make bad decisions, elect the wrong agenda, choose the wrong representatives, back the wrong platform, ignore the deep truths, and we're forced to live with the unfortunate or unfortunate consequences that result. Choosing matters. Choosing badly matters.

Private Character Versus Public Skill

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The third aspect to keep in mind is to ponder the connection between the personal and the political. This often a contentious part of our decision making because the private and the public are expressed in two different realms that don't always coincide well when it comes to the politics of decision making. What we look for in a candidate is a measure of integrity and the capacity for a vision we share. These attributes are not equally distributed, and sometimes they hardly seem to exist at all. Our history is full of those who were great and effective politicians, whose policies enabled the common good and improved the lives of millions, yet whose private lives were filled with wreckage and ruin. There are others whose personal lives were impeccable in every way, but who were hopelessly inept political operatives, and whose place in governance was marked by ineptitude on an epic scale. It really is the case that public sphere and private spheres do not always or completely intersect. To exclude a person from the public exclusively because of the deficits of the private would be to disenfranchise some of our options. There is a quote, and it's been associated to thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to Winston Churchill, that goes something like this I'd rather be governed by a capable moor than a depraved Christian. The point is that excellence in the capacity to govern ought to have a place in our scale of values when it comes to making a choice for those who represent us. It may be the case that a particular depraved husband will be a much better prime minister than the devoted family man if the former knows how government works and will be an effective leader, while the latter may be in all of his virtue, inept in every political skill. The greatest politicians of all time carry with them their failures and their weaknesses. There have been many men who are great in their stature, but who have never mastered the art of politics. At the same time, there are connections. It's hard to ignore that if one of our representatives is willing to cheat, lie, and steal at every opportunity in the private part of his life, that behavior would be a warning about our trust in the integrity of the public service part of his life. It seems unlikely that honesty will appear in one if it has disappeared in the other. So we certainly have a responsibility to do our best to measure who it is we're electing and what the content of their lives mean for us and the world we're striving to construct. There are two caveats. The first is that we have to be attentive to what we hear and how we know of the personality and history of another person. It's a long-established political tactic to maximize the positive attributes of a candidate while minimizing those same ones of the opponent. And in the heat of political fortunes, slinging accusations about wrongdoing or even not enough right doing is nearly irresistible. It's up to us to be attentive to what we know of those who present themselves for our consideration. We should also be aware of how we know what we know. It can be embarrassing to assess what everyone says about a candidate and then find out how the knowledge is discovered or presented. If we're going to make a choice, we should be careful to make one based on the truth, not just on a feeling or an accusation. And the second caveat is that we do believe in redemption. A strike against a person because of a nonce from the past or because of a statement made from a generation ago, or because of a rash moment, shouldn't be the only or the sole evaluation of a person's potential. In the crisscross of political life, there are those who would be forgiving of any indiscretion, exaggeration, or poor choice in any part of life concerning themselves or anyone they know, and yet at the same time would solemnly condemn someone for a word or a phrase put on a paper at age 16 or a joke told around a table at a party on New Year's. Our choices should be something more substantial than that. Of course, we have the right to consider every aspect of a person's life and can bring all of the elements of their history to bear on what we decide, but we do owe it to ourselves to seek just valuations and decent mores as we do consider. The contest is not between angels and men, only men. Waiting for perfection can be more destructive than the worst depredation of the dishonest and the depraved, since we'll all end up with a false sense of empowerment and a hollow notion of representation if we imagine we're waiting for and choosing purity as the only measure. As human beings, we're always a mixture of the good and bad, imprisoned in the fallen nature we've inherited in this world, pretending there is an option for the perfect in every way, is to abandon ourselves to pretense and to lose the pathway of true self-governance. We'll always be forced to choose between candidates who each have their own weaknesses and have made their own mistakes. It's up to us, in the pursuit of true wisdom, to know what to measure and how to evaluate. And while we're Do, we have to extend to all those who might lead us the same measure we would extend to ourselves. Which takes us to the wider and more general question of the choice we make for our future. Most of us don't have the chance to vote on our personal agenda. Seldom is there on the ballot the clear concern of all of the issues we hold most dear. As we all know from the long struggle against the Roe v. Wade decision, there was never a chance to vote outright on this aspect of our communal life. There were candidates who affirmed their opposition, and there were those who were willing to promote change concerning the policies that decision left in place. But there was never a simple one-to-one correspondence between candidates running and the votes that were cast. Opposition was always a part of a larger reality. It was woven into a matrix of other concerns and other issues. The most sincere voter had to weigh all of the elements in the political mix at the time and cast a vote for the candidate who most fully represented who most fully represented what would be better for the sum of societal concerns, since it wasn't possible simply to vote up or down on this one issue. In truth, most political issues are just this way. We end up making a weighted decision about what a person represents, the issues, concerns, vision, and tolerance that he or she stands for, rather than simply voting for this one thing, whatever it is. It's one element of the complications of our world. Politics is like every component of our community. It's complicated.

Sin, Realism, And Taking Voting Seriously

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Finally, we should be savvy about evil. We have a system of self-governance and representative decision making that empowers us to direct the communal life we enjoy. It carries with it all of the benefits of making our way through the world and enacting our values and visions for everyone, especially the ones we value and love the most in our lives. But the system we have in all of its benefits isn't better than the sum of ourselves. Every aspect of weakness and sin will be present in those we elect and the decisions they make. Sin can hide in the personal and the private, just as it can hide in the public and the corporate. But sin can also hide amid lazy definitions and careless procedures, amid sloppy rationales and indefinite timelines and entrusting presumptions, and all of the other aspects of how we end up getting things done. We owe it to ourselves to know our process will be fallible because it will always be put into practice by people like us. While we look at the specter of our elections in the scenario of governance, we must remember that it will be part of the darkness of our dark world. There's no way around this truth. Sin touches everything, and we cannot lift ourselves out of it on our own. At the same time, even though sin is present and the temptation and temptation is part of life, we can make some decisions that will be better than other decisions. The genius of cooperative governance is the trust we can invest in one another, to operate from our weakness and to strive for the good. Even though what we know is limited and what we want is incomplete. Being aware of sin is not to abandon ourselves to it. It is, in fact, the opposite. Coming to the awareness of sin is to be aware of the possibility of reaching for the offer of redemptive hope. As God's promise of redeeming love comes among us, we're given the certainty of the divine accompaniment and the pledge of God's presence. This means we can encounter the divine even in the small truths and the minor efforts of our political process. We don't have to be perfect to become more perfect in small victories and in tiny increments. It's what we're given to hope for. There's nothing quite as solemn as the vote we cast. It's not divine, it isn't sacramental, but it does contribute to the good of all. We should take it seriously enough to invest in it. Remember, our society operates according to the votes cast. If we choose not to cast them, the choice of another will determine our futures. Our future deserves our investment in our present. So cast your vote best you can. Back in a moment.

Faith In Verse And Closing

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Welcome back to our final segment, Faith in Verse. We have a poem today called The Sights. The sights around us that capture the eye in the quick flight of day into night hold us quite long enough, can freeze us by our rapt attention. We reason thus, remembering upon looking, evaluate, size, direction, purpose, shape, and place, measure also upon seeing options to take, what doing or not doing will implicate, and all this in but a moment's pause. Add to our thinking a plan and its flaws, part of our normal cunning and cleverness into our softest humanity pressed, not uncommonly testified to, in the same moment new ideas ensue. We think of the eternal hidden there. Infinite truths come brightest as now glares, to find that in the briefest occasion the unexpected work of God is done. That's the sights. I hope you can join us in the weeks to come.

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Living Catholic is a production of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City for Oklahoma Catholic Radio. To learn more, visit okcr.org.