What You Need to Know About the Conservative Christian Voter Guide 2022
I keep seeing people ask where to find the 2022 version and why it matters compared to previous editions. The guide itself is pretty straightforward in its intent — it maps candidate positions to a set of issues that conservative Christians typically prioritize. But the way it's structured and distributed has changed enough over the years that people who used the 2018 or 2020 versions get tripped up. The main shift in 2022 was the inclusion of down-ballot races. Previous editions were mostly focused on the top of the ticket and Senate seats. This cycle they added comprehensive state-level coverage, which is useful if you actually pay attention to things like school board elections and state judiciary races. Most people don't, so they ended up skimming past half the content.
How to Find and Use the Conservative Christian Voter Guide 2022
The primary source for the full PDF is the Compass Curriculum website. They host the downloadable version at compasscurriculum.com/voter-guide-2022. There's also a mobile-friendly web version if you don't want to carry a print copy to the polling place. Several churches printed their own localized editions with their own cover pages, so if someone handed you one, the content inside might differ slightly from the official version. The guide organizes candidates by issue alignment rather than party. For each race, they give a rating from A through F based on how closely the candidate's recorded positions match the guide's benchmark positions. Those benchmarks cover abortion, religious freedom, constitutional originalism, immigration, education policy, and economic freedom. It's not just a candidate questionnaire — they cross-reference voting records and public statements to catch candidates who say one thing in a press release and vote another way. Here's the part people miss: the guide includes a scoring methodology appendix. If you want to understand why a candidate got a B instead of an A, you need to read that section. It's easy to assume the ratings are purely partisan, but they're actually based on a fairly rigid rubric. The scoring weights some issues higher than others. Religious liberty and judicial philosophy carry more points than tax policy, for instance.
What the Guide Gets Wrong or Leaves Out
I have to be honest about the limitations. The 2022 guide had a significant gap in coverage for certain congressional districts. In five swing House seats, the candidate information was incomplete or outdated by the time I went to use it. I ran into this specifically in Pennsylvania's 7th district and Georgia's 6th district, where the candidate questionnaires hadn't been updated after late entry replacements or primary runoff adjustments. The ratings for those races came out stale. Another issue is the religious framing. The guide is written from an evangelical Protestant perspective, which works fine if that's your tradition. But Catholic and Orthodox readers sometimes find the scoring methodology doesn't fully account for differences in moral theology, particularly around social justice issues and the natural law tradition. The guide acknowledges this in a brief note, but it doesn't change the actual ratings. There's also the question of whether following a voter guide like this is the right approach at all. The guide itself suggests it as a starting point, not a replacement for independent research. That's fair advice. The ratings can help you narrow down candidates quickly, especially for lower-profile races where you wouldn't otherwise have time to dig into voting records. But it shouldn't be the only factor you consider.
Get the Full Details
If you're looking for alternatives, the Christian Voice media group and Family Research Council both publish their own versions, though they tend to lean slightly different on certain issues. The National Association of Evangelicals has a separate guide that's less politically oriented. None of them are perfect. The 2022 edition is still the most comprehensive single-source guide available for conservative Christians, but it has real gaps depending on where you live. The download is free. No account required. Just go to the Compass Curriculum site and grab the PDF. If you're outside the United States, the guide doesn't apply to you, which some people seem to discover too late.
