Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies

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Defining and Defending Democracy

Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary. In all non-democratic political theories the state or the ruler is invested with uncontrolled power for the sake of achieving order and unity in the community. But the pessimism which prompts and justifies this policy is not consistent; for it is not applied, as it should be, to the ruler.

—Reinhold Niebuhr (1944)¹

This is a book about the relationship between Christianity and democracy. Before going further, we need to try to define what we mean by that weighty word democracy. It is not at all simple. There is not agreement in the popular or scholarly literature about how to define the term, or whether it is accurate to describe countries like the United States as actually being democracies, or whether democracy should be the aspiration of the people who live within these countries.

This itself is highly disorienting. It will be our first important discovery as we try to make sense of today’s political chaos: the supposedly democratic political systems that some of us took for granted are conceptually messier than we knew. And here is the second discovery: In some of our countries, internal social and political divisions may be exposing and worsening that conceptual messiness and testing every bulwark of political stability that we once thought was solid and substantial.

Democracy as Rule of the People without Rule of the Mob

One must begin somewhere. So, just to pick a place, we begin with the thumbnail definition of democracy offered by Yale University political scientist Bruce Russert, who says that a democracy is a political system in which nearly everyone can vote, elections are freely contested, the chief executive is chosen by popular vote or by an elected parliament, and civil rights and civil liberties are substantially guaranteed.² For Russert, then, a democracy is a political system in which the people choose their leaders and in which the civil rights and freedoms of all are protected by law. This seems a familiar and reasonable starting point.

Political scientist David Koyzis defines the shared characteristics of Western-style democracies more extensively: universal franchise for adult citizens; equal franchise power (every vote is weighted the same); majority rule; competitive elections and the right to stand for public office; freedom of speech and of the press; rights charters aiming to protect core citizen liberties and minority rights; and the rule of law, embodied in a written or unwritten constitution.³ Koyzis reminds us that the concept of the rule of law long preceded the idea of democracy.⁴ Indeed it did, by many centuries; consider the eighteenth-century BCE Babylonian Code of Hammurabi. But, of course, this was law as dictated by an absolute monarch. It is when rule of law and democracy are put together that we get into the neighborhood of modern democracy, which both aims to reflect the will of the majority (popular sovereignty) and to set limits on the majority’s powers through constitutionally based legal structures (rule of law).

In a democracy, the people or their representatives write the constitution and make the laws, so the principle of popular sovereignty is protected, and even the rule of law appears to be subsumed under popular sovereignty. But, on the other hand, wise constitution-drafters recognize that irresponsible or impulsive exercises of popular sovereignty must be constrained; this is why the constitutions and the fundamental laws of most democracies are crafted so that they are very difficult to amend.

Legal theory has discovered and frequently explores a profound paradox in relation to democratic lawmaking: in a democracy, law is made by the people, but it somehow must reflect transcendent principles that go beyond merely popular will. Conservative Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule has recently argued, in a powerful (though in some ways alarming) treatment of US constitutional law, that in the classical legal tradition law is not viewed merely as the product of the legislator or the popular will.⁵ Law gains its moral legitimacy insofar as it reflects principles of the natural law (ius naturale) that both transcend and ground civil laws.

Natural law is essentially transcendent, objective, universal moral truth. In Catholic natural law thinking, the natural law is understood to reflect God’s moral will and to be accessible to human beings through their God-given reason, which has been damaged but not ruined by human sin. Reason survives sufficiently to discern natural law and to conform the human will to its principles. Natural law thinking can be and has been secularized in modern times to strip out reference to God but to retain the rest of the theory: there is rationally discernible moral structure to the universe, this grounds human moral obligation, and laws should correspond within their proper purview.

Vermeule argues that the core natural law principle related to government is that the fundamental purpose of political authority is to advance the common good of the community. He draws on ancient thought to define the common good as the highest felicity or happiness of the whole political community, or specifically as peace, justice, and abundance.⁶ Rulers’ actions, including lawmaking, that advance the common good fit with the natural law. Not everyone accepts the concept of natural law, but even if one does not, it should be clear that for laws to be received as legitimate in a democracy, the vast majority of the citizenry must agree that they are reasonable and just. Otherwise, law is merely an expression of raw power.

We will return to this difficult conversation about natural law at various times in this book, for it is an important part of the current debate over democracy. For now, let us simply say that democracy consists of popular sovereignty through the rule of laws that are not arbitrary but grounded in moral principles that the people themselves respect.

In a democracy, people rule themselves, directly (direct democracy) or through elected representatives (representative democracy) who make laws that govern the community. Political communities and democratic political associations such as clubs and sports leagues seem normally to develop in something like this order: a group of people first create (or recognize) the existence of themselves as a polity (a human group or community) that wants to gather for a shared purpose. Then they agree together to develop the polity’s initial governance structure, either as a committee of the whole or through representatives. This usually involves establishing a constitution, then writing at first basic and eventually more elaborate rules/laws, and finally developing sturdy processes for that community’s ongoing management and continued vitality. This latter task includes maintaining agreed procedures for determining the best interests and will of the community, revising the rules/laws, periodically selecting new leaders, and protecting the interests and rights of all who are members. This, I argue, is the core of democratic self-government. Note that patterns of human voluntary association at a grassroots level precede the development of larger-scale political communities but require (and develop) similar skills. We will discuss this matter more thoroughly later in this book.

Note that democracy as defined here already carries far more meaning than simply rule of the people, its Greek etymological derivation. It was discovered as early as the first Greek experiment in democracy 2,500 years ago that rule of the people alone is not sufficient as a governance philosophy, for several reasons: the problem of the tyranny of a majority over various kinds of minorities, the ability of sophisticated but amoral rhetoricians (sophists) to sway the emotions of the people in unconstructive and irrational ways, the unwieldiness of mass-group decision-making processes in a community of any size, the possibility of a descent into bitterly conflicted factions who hate each other more than they care about the well-being of the community, the lack of readiness of many ordinary people to exercise the informed and wise judgment necessary for democratic self-government, and the instability of a political community not governed by some fixed basic laws. An effective democracy looks like the wise self-rule of a people without the collapse into mob tyranny, faction, irrationality, or self-destruction.

Does My Liberal Democracy Look Too Thin?

Democracy is not just a theory but a long human experiment in community building that by now has solidified into a democratic tradition.⁷ In Western culture, democratic theorizing and tradition began in ancient Greece. But modern democratic theory making and governance are generally traced to stirrings in medieval Christian Europe (such as Iceland’s parliament, created in 930, and the Magna Carta in England in 1215), and then the quickening of a serious democratization movement beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with breakthrough developments occurring in the democratic revolutions in France and the United States in the late eighteenth century.

The most important, or at least most remembered, democratic theorizing in the formative early modern period of the late seventeenth century was offered by English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704). Locke’s contribution to democratic theory was deeply affected by the bloody political conflicts in his nation, which included violence, revolution, and counterrevolution in the name of competing versions of state Christianity.⁸

In this context, Locke developed the core elements of what became known as liberal democratic theory. His approach was essentially individualist, libertarian, and negative. Locke imagined government as emerging from the self-interested decision of free individuals (implicitly: landed, wealthy, educated males) agreeing to form governments powerful enough to protect each individual’s security, freedom, privacy, and personal pursuit of happiness but uninterested in advancing a substantive shared vision of what is true, right, and good. The latter project had over centuries led to religious coercion and civil strife. Liberal democracy would limit government’s role and maximize individual liberty of conscience and action.

This formative early vision is sometimes described as creating a thin, liberal, or libertarian democratic tradition. Its strength was its realistic recognition of the reality of convictional pluralism and the dangers of government meddling in matters of conscience so important to people that they will fight and die for their beliefs. Its weaknesses, however, were at least twofold. Its social imagination focused on individuals and their personal preferences rather than communities and their shared needs—but it is really communities that build associations and ultimately national governments. Further, its realism did not extend to recognizing that some shared account of the good life and the good community, and some way of forming good citizens who can exercise responsible freedom, is required to sustain a viable human community—even a political community. Liberal democracy has been described as a thin tradition because of these omissions.

An instructive project for any reader might be to pick up the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution and read these in their entirety. These hugely influential documents offer relatively little by way of a shared communal vision. The Declaration mainly protests the depredations of British rule and demands political independence based on the fundamental created equality of all men and their unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. While much has been made of this language, in context the main point appears to be that colonists laboring under the British yoke were entitled to exercise the same rights of self-government as other peoples.⁹

The US Constitution’s Preamble does a bit more, claiming that it is written in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. After that, it focuses on setting up rather detailed governance structures. The Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution), added four years later under the pressure of the ratification debate, mainly protects a list of specific individual freedoms from government overreach, in a classic libertarian move. No effort is made in the Constitution to specify a substantive vision of justice or of the general welfare.¹⁰ It can be argued that this substantive vision was assumed, or that it was purposefully omitted. Either way, later generations have had to deal with its absence.

Even a Democracy Needs Moral Virtues, Values, and Vision

It is highly doubtful whether human communities can function without any kind of shared values or a vision of what a good life and good community look like. Even the relatively minimalist kinds of goals that are articulated in liberal democratic constitutional documents, like advancing the general welfare, would benefit from a shared understanding of what that might look like. But no such substantive vision is on offer, because the individualist-libertarian vision prevails, quite intentionally. There is no collective common good; there is only the aggregation of individual goods as we each pursue our own version of happiness.¹¹

As we will discuss in chapter 12, it helped quite a bit that in the societies within which early democracies developed, the religious loyalties of the people were predominantly Christian. Many of the very earliest democratic writings in the Western world—decades before Locke—were offered in much thicker and morally substantive Christian terms. And some of the very earliest experiments in democratic polity-building were undertaken in dissenting free churches, almost two hundred years before the late eighteenth-century democratic political revolutions. (The minority Jewish communities in this period also had distinct moral traditions, especially sharpened by their very difficult experience as a religious minority in discriminatory Christian lands. These traditions formed the values and vision of Jewish citizens—when they were allowed to be citizens—and shaped their support for the essential principles of early modern democracy.) This religious, moral, and political background filled in much of the moral substance that was intentionally left out of liberal democratic constitutional