Can Christians please stop relying on candidate scorecards?

Among the many, many downsides of the 2016 presidential election, one potential upside is the overdue demise of the candidate scorecard that has been popular in Christian circles since at least the early 1990s when Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition promoted them heavily.  The 2016 election brings their flaws into stark relief:

1) It is impossible to distill a candidate's character into a scorecard format.  Both candidates this year present character questions that are central to voters' evaluation of their candidacies to a degree that we have not seen in recent elections.  To imply, as the Family Research Council scorecard does, for example, that a Christian's choice should boil down to a list of questions such as, "Do you support or oppose the federal funding of embryo-destructive stem cell research?" misses the elephant in the room.

 2) Even when it comes to the issues themselves, a scorecard is often unhelpfully simplistic. Both Bill Clinton (1992) and Hillary Clinton (2016) support a constitutional right to abortion, but are there meaningful differences between the two on this issue that should matter to Christians?  How much should Donald Trump's support of religious liberty matter if he understands the primary threat today as the inability of pastors to endorse candidates?  Should a Christian ever be content to know whether a candidate "supports or opposes the repeal of Obamacare" without knowing what the candidate would offer in its place?

3) Scorecards do not capture the depth of commitment reflected in a candidate's past statements and actions.  It's easy to check a box.  It's much harder to expend the political capital necessary to push change on an issue, as we've seen with candidates on both sides of the aisle regarding issues that matter to Christians.

4) The scorecard approach prioritizes stand-alone issues over coherent governance.  Support deficit reduction? Great.  Support increased infrastructure spending? Super.  Support protection for Social Security?  Fine.  Now tell me how you're going to make all of it work together.  Being the President is complicated, requiring difficult trade-offs.  Christians have been too focused on a candidate's stance on particular issues, as opposed to more comprehensive (and admittedly messier) questions of how the pieces will fit together. 

5) The lineup of "Christian" issues that has populated scorecards since their introduction is increasingly narrow and short-sighted relative to the worldviews represented by the candidates and their platforms.  If this election represents a realignment, Christian voters are not being well served by the premise of scorecards -- that we can simply tally up the checked boxes on a few issues that we have cared about over many election cycles.

Issues matter (and I wish they mattered more in the current campaign) but they need to be analyzed in the context of the candidate's character, worldview, and track record.  We need more nuance, not less, and scorecards feed our culture's seemingly limitless appetite for easy, quick and categorical judgment.  When the 2016 election is mercifully behind us, I hope that scorecards are too.