In November 2004 I stood in a voting booth in South Boston, where I was living at the time, and flipped a coin.

I felt unable to choose the conventional evangelical Christian choice, George W. Bush, and equally unable to choose against the conventional evangelical Christian choice and check John Kerry.

So I tossed a coin, went for two out of three, and then wrote in John McCain because I was sure I could spell it.

I had the voter’s luxury of knowing my vote would not affect the outcome: Massachusetts was not up for grabs like Ohio or Florida. But I would have coin-tossed in those states, too, because it was the only honest action I could take.

Now it’s 2008, with another presidential election on the horizon, and I’m expecting another bout of voting booth ambivalence. I imagine I will be joined by countless other Christians. As every major and minor news outlet in the United States is reporting, evangelicals are in a political diaspora.

There is no clear evangelical-friendly candidate. It’s not just because the candidate field is barren; it’s because no one knows anymore what it means to be evangelical-friendly.

And this news makes me very, very happy.

No doubt some Christians have more clarity on these issues. Some evangelical leaders hope for a Hillary Clinton nomination, because they cynically (but accurately) believe that conservative evangelicals will rally against her.

Others are drawn to Barack Obama’s apparent attention to the least of these or to Rudy Giuliani’s appearance of strength in the fight against terrorism.

But this election year, there is no single candidate for whom evangelical Christians will—or will be assumed to—vote for automatically. God is neither a Republican nor a Democrat, as Jim Wallis often reminds us. Although many suspect he would prefer that God be the latter, what he says is true enough—and can also be said of many Christians. We are not politically indifferent, by any means; but our own reality-based approach to politics means that we won’t be attending primary parties anytime soon.

When the Rev. Jerry Falwell died last year, few assessments said what I knew to be true—that Falwell inspired political ambivalence in large swaths of evangelicals. For people like me who were raised in evangelical households in the 1970s and ’80s, Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right helped foster identity confusion. While those powerful white men made triumphant declarations of Christian supremacy in all matters moral, political and social, many of us became anxious about being known as Christians at all.

Falwell’s passing, along with other end-times signs for the old guard of the Religious Right, may or may not be an indication that “evangelical politics” (as if it exists) is about to undergo a wholesale change. The media seems to think we will see a shift to the left, or at least to a political moderation among evangelicals.

Instead, I think we’ll see an unveiling of what has been there all along: uncertainty, ambivalence, honest “I’m-not-so-sure”-ness about political parties and candidates and about their exact relationship to the life of faith. This is not cynicism, but critical awareness that the gospel we live by makes us agents of re-creation in the here and now; and politics is but one small part of that work. It’s a reclaiming of Christianity from the trappings of contemporary American politics.

If we’re politically scattered, it’s because we have to be. A diaspora can be good for a people, because it forces them to work harder to find the ties that bind instead of relying on easy proximities.

The primary tie that binds is a belief that God entered the world in Jesus and in an embrace of the call to be like Him. As long as we focus on strengthening that tie, we’ll always be in the political diaspora. May we wander there forever and never feel at home.