First, we put candidates on display and hurl ludicrous accusations-he hates poor people; she won’t let fat people visit the doctor. Then we add superficials-he looks good in a suit; he had a spot on his skin; he can’t speak coherently without a script.

Underneath this perpetual pattern, we whisper a yearning to “focus on issues” and “discuss policies.” We really need to go one step deeper. We must ask why the candidates propose their policies. As Martin Luther King put it, “A just law. squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law. is out of harmony with the moral law.”

Atheist feminists, Taliban clerics, and Southern Baptists could agree on a policy regarding pornography, but their coalition to implement the policy would collapse under internal bickering about the moral foundation on which to build it. They would fail because they couldn’t agree on the “why.” Today, one candidate wants to take more money from my paycheck to give to people who do not work. Both candidates want to take higher proportions of income from wealthier people than they take from me. One party wants the government to take over the private oil industry. Another party wants to permit industry to drill oil more freely. Why? By what moral law do they favor these policies? Once we can answer these questions, we’ll know which policies are just.

Unless we can articulate our reasons for things like expecting government to maintain the military while private citizens print newspapers, we will not be able to discuss our reasons for electing one candidate or another to do anything. Without the deeper discussion, we are inescapably trapped in mud-slinging, skin-deep elections and in living under the governments such elections provide.