What would Jesus have done if he’d had to vote in the recent WA State election or perhaps in the Werriwa by-election held just yesterday? He looks at the ballot paper and sees not one, but two gold-plated, dyed-in-the-wool Christian ‘family’ parties, Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party (CDP) and the Pentecostal-based Family First Party (FFP), just begging for his vote.

Of course, Jesus didn’t have to vote in either of these elections, but surely we should be able to get some idea of his preference by looking at the election results. I mean, assuming that he was subject to a similar amount of prayer by the partisans of both CDP and FFP, he must have leant one way or the other to indicate his approval of either Fred Nile (a Congregationalist) or Family First (overwhelmingly Pentecostalist).

Alas, we can make little of the electoral outcomes. In the WA Legislative Assembly the CDP scored 2.93% of the vote while the FFP trailed on 2.02%. However, the CDP contested all seats while the FFP only ran in about 60% of them, so we may as well call it a tie. In the Legislative Council, the CDP also had its nose in front - 2.28% against 2.01% - but again Fred Nile’s party contested all six electoral regions while Family First ran in only five, so I think Jesus must have given FFP the nod here, but only by a whisker.

In Werriwa yesterday, Family First tipped out the CDP, 4.34% to 3.83% , but I think we have to rate this as a Family First slam-dunk as it took place in Sydney, heartland of the CDP. The parties’ combined total of over 8 per cent looks pretty cool until we recall that the absence of a Liberal candidate left thousands of conservative-leaning voters looking for a home and not many opted for either Religious Right party.

So where does this leave Jesus? Well, Labor won both elections by a substantial margin and well over 90% of voters ignored the Christian parties entirely.

Jesus must have been otherwise engaged.

Filed in: Christian Right, Politics