If the Christian’s civic duty is only to vote, then it is now safe to return to life as normal, at least until the next election cycle starts in a few months. However, much more is involved in the fight for the soul of any nation, including this one. Our civic duty extends beyond the ballot box. 

The historic shifts in the platforms of both parties during this past election are not just due to changes in popular opinion. Rather, they point to how dramatically our collective cultural imagination has shifted, a shift that reflects our institutions. Public schools, universities, media outlets, digital platforms, publishing houses, Hollywood, corporate America, and even churches have become more progressive. Critical theory and gender ideology not only dominate the required reading lists of many schools but are also embedded in the community guidelines of countless digital platforms, the HR policies of many businesses and healthcare systems, not to mention the personnel of various government agencies.  

But this collective cultural drift so evident in our politics has not simply resulted from bad ideas or personnel. The conservative Jewish political scholar Yoram Hazony once argued, “It is not disbelief that plagues us but dishonor.” Specifically, he meant the dishonor of the most essential institutions and the traditions kept by them. The breakdown of the family, the compromise and collapse of our religious consensus, and the loss of civil society has contributed greatly to an uncritical acceptance of bad ideas and destructive patterns of behavior.

As Hazony reported, even those who claim to be committed to and excited about conservatism have little intention of actually engaging in those practices worth conserving. Keeping the sabbath, reading Scripture, attending religious services, and hosting regular family dinners are more than just nostalgic traditions. And yet, as Hazony explained, these essential habits of a healthy and flourishing society are losing out weekend after weekend to heading to “the mountains or the beach, or staying home ‘to finish something for work.’” 

Civic duty and political change cannot be reduced to how one votes. It’s how one lives, especially with those to whom we are (or should be) the closest, that matters more. For example, studies have long shown that regular family dinners bring enormous benefit, especially to children. According to the Director of the Family Dinner Project Dr. Anne Fishel, regularly gathering around the dinner table results in better nutrition, less obesity, and better mental health: 

Regular family dinners are associated with lower rates of depression, and anxiety, and substance abuse, and eating disorders, and tobacco use, and early teenage pregnancy, and higher rates of resilience and higher self-esteem. 

Even more, regular family dinners are also a predictor of long-term success. For school-aged kids, frequent family mealtime is “an even more powerful predictor of high achievement scores than time spent in school, doing homework, playing sports, or doing art.” 

Yet, for all these benefits, only 54% of American families sit down to a daily mealtime, and for many who do, family dinnertime is constantly besieged by digital distraction. Even before the advent of smartphones and tablets, Neil Postman warned that “(a) family that does not or cannot control the information environment of its children is barely a family at all.” 

It may sound too simple to be true, but it’s not. One way that Christians can make a lasting, significant difference in politics is by protecting and cultivating the dinner table. The future of our nation may indeed depend on whether Christians make family mealtimes, as one non-Christian sociologist has described, a “sacred space.”  

It matters greatly who is in the White House, but it matters so much more who we are in our houses, in our houses of worship, and around our dinner tables.