1.3 million Christian votes could swing the election
Campaigning for the upcoming general election has intensified in recent weeks as the two major political parties seek to woo voters to secure a win. Jamaicans, however, have grown increasingly uninterested in the voting process.
“There is an opportunity for the Christian voice to become amplified, and to broaden it even further, persons who are grounded in ideas of justice, whether Christians or they belong to other faiths, to support their communities by amplifying those voices in a way that influences their membership and others to actually impact the voting engagement numbers, and influence the things that politicians commit to and actually do, and hold them accountable for doing or not doing,” said retired media executive Kay Osborne.
Osborne was one of three presenters on an online public forum on the Power of the Christian Vote hosted by the Association of Christian Communicators and Media (ACCM) on July 27.
With Christians making up 69% of the population based on the latest available census, it means that over 1.3 million Christians are a part of the 2.7 million Jamaicans who are able to determine who forms the next government.
Osborne appealed to Christians to select the next government based on Christian values and principles.
“Go to the Bible and interrogate the Bible about what it is that God mandates leaders to do. What is it that God mandates that leaders should not do? And how are our leaders operating in a way that is God’s will? And how are we Christians being impacted in those ways, both culturally and economically? And to make Christian-based decisions to actively engage in the system by voting the evidence,” she said.
Vice-president for the ACCM, Byron Buckley, suggested that perhaps the ACCM or another organisation should draft a charter of what the church expects to see and let the parties decide and commit themselves to who fulfils these mandates. “Perhaps they are not clear what the church in particular is asking for,” he said.
Other presenters on the panel were acclaimed pollster Don Anderson and theologian Peter Espeut.