Stop Voting for the Trolley Problem
There is a famous thought experiment in moral philosophy called the trolley problem. A runaway trolley is barreling down the tracks. Five people are tied to the rails ahead. You are standing at a lever. Pull it, and the trolley diverts onto a side track — but there is one person tied there. Do nothing, and five die. Act, and one dies by your hand.
Philosophy professors love this problem because it forces students to choose between competing moral frameworks — utilitarian math versus the ethics of direct action. It gets people talking, gets people arguing, and it feels urgent and real.
But here is the question nobody asks in the classroom: Who tied those people to the tracks?
The Lever Is Not the Problem
We have been trained, in church and in civic life, to think of moral seriousness as crisis response. Who do we save? How do we minimize harm? What is the least bad option available to us right now?
These are real questions. They deserve real answers. When you are standing at the lever, you pull it. That is not the argument here.
The argument is this: if we spend all of our moral energy at the lever, we will never ask who keeps tying people to the tracks — and we will never stop voting for them.
This is the trap of crisis ethics. It feels responsible. It feels humble. It sounds like the serious, grown-up alternative to idealism. We have to deal with the world as it is. And so we pull the lever, election after election, budget cycle after budget cycle, church board meeting after church board meeting — accepting the terms of a dilemma that was constructed for us, by people who benefit from our never looking upstream.
Romans 13 and the God Who Ordains the Trolley Operator
The most abused passage in American Christianity right now is Romans 13. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.
This verse has been weaponized to silence Christian political conscience at exactly the moment it is most needed. It has been used to baptize cruelty, to bless deportations, to tell suffering people that their suffering is divinely ordained. It is the theological equivalent of telling the person tied to the track that God put them there and resistance is sin.
But this interpretation requires us to ignore the rest of the letter — and the rest of the Bible.
Paul writes Romans 13 from within a tradition that includes Moses defying Pharaoh, Shadrach defying Nebuchadnezzar, the Hebrew midwives defying the edict to kill infant sons, Esther risking her life to expose a genocidal official, and Jesus himself standing in the temple calling the religious-political establishment a den of robbers. The same Paul who writes Romans 13 also writes that our struggle is against principalities and powers — the very structures of governance when they become instruments of evil.
Romans 13 teaches that government has a legitimate function: to restrain evil and commend good. It is not a blank check. It is a job description. When the governing authority uses its power to tie people to the tracks, it has violated the very mandate Paul describes — and the church that calls that violation holy has stopped being the church and started being the chaplaincy of empire.
Naming this is not rebellion. It is discernment. It is, in fact, exactly what the Bereans were commended for — checking whether what they were being told actually held up.
The Prosperity Gospel Built the Tracks
We also need to talk about the theology that greased the wheels.
Prosperity gospel — the teaching that faithfulness produces material reward and suffering signals spiritual failure — is not a fringe phenomenon in American Christianity. It is the background radiation of our entire culture. It is why so many Christians instinctively read poverty as a character flaw and wealth as a divine endorsement. It is why a billionaire can stand at a podium and be received as proof of God’s favor.
This theology does not just distort individual piety. It builds policy. It shapes budgets. It determines who deserves healthcare, housing, food, legal protection. It is the theological engine behind the politics of collateral damage — the framework that treats suffering people as acceptable losses in someone else’s prosperity calculation.
When the church blesses this framework instead of challenging it, it does not just pull the lever. It donates to the trolley operator’s reelection campaign.
The prophets had a word for this. Isaiah 10 names the leaders who decree iniquitous decrees and write oppression into law, who turn aside the needy from justice and rob the poor of their right. That is not abstract spiritual commentary. That is a policy critique. The prophet is looking at the track-layers and calling them by their function.
We have too many churches that have traded the prophetic tradition for the pastoral brand — where the goal is to comfort the comfortable and never, under any circumstances, inconvenience the donor class.
Voting Is Upstream Ethics
Here is where it gets direct.
Every election cycle, Christians are handed a version of the trolley problem. The framing is always the same: these are your only two options, the lever is all you have, choose the lesser harm. And there is something true in that — the lever is real, and pulling it matters.
But the trolley problem framing, when it becomes the only framing, is also a suppression tactic. It keeps us focused on the immediate and prevents us from asking who constructed the choice, who benefits from our panic, and who will be building the same track again before the next election if we never hold them accountable.
Voting for leaders who consistently produce suffering — and then calling it faithfulness because the alternative was worse — is not moral seriousness. It is moral exhaustion dressed up as realism. The two-lesser-evils frame has a shelf life. At some point, asking why we keep electing trolley operators is not naïve idealism. It is the only way the tracks ever get torn up.
This is not a left-wing argument or a right-wing argument. Tracks get built across the political spectrum. The question is always the same: who are the people in this room who keep proposing policies that tie people to rails, and why do we keep handing them power?
For the church, this is not a political question first. It is an ecclesiological one. What does it mean that the body of Christ — a community formed by the death of an innocent man executed by the state — routinely provides moral cover for state-sanctioned suffering? What happened to us?
We Still Pull the Lever
To be clear: this article is not arguing for political abstention or the luxury of pure hands. There are people on the tracks right now. Immigration enforcement is separating families. Healthcare policy is killing people who cannot afford to be sick. Housing policy is warehousing human beings in conditions no one would accept for themselves. These are real tracks with real people, and the lever is real.
Pull it.
But pull it while also asking who tied them there. Pull it while building the kind of church community that produces voters who are not just reactive but formative — people who can read a platform, track a voting record, and recognize the theological shape of a policy before it becomes a crisis.
The lever is not enough. It has never been enough. Mercy without justice is sentimentality. Charity without accountability is donor management. And a church that processes crisis after crisis without ever confronting the systems that manufacture crisis has confused pastoral care with complicity.
What the Prophet Actually Said
Isaiah does not end with the trolley problem. He ends with a vision of a world where the tracks do not exist — where the wolf lies down with the lamb not because the lamb finally figured out how to survive wolves, but because the conditions that produced predation have been transformed.
That is not a distant eschatological comfort designed to make the present bearable. It is a political imagination. It is the refusal to accept the terms of a dilemma as permanent. It is the insistence that the shape of the present is not the shape of the possible.
The prophets were not crisis managers. They were systems analysts with a theological framework. They looked at the tracks and said: someone chose to build this, and someone can choose to build differently, and we are going to say that out loud until it happens or until they make us stop.
The church in America needs to recover that voice. Not the voice that soothes. Not the voice that endorses. The voice that looks at the trolley, looks at the tracks, looks at the operator, and says clearly:
We see you. We know what you’re doing. And we’re going to stop voting for you.