Thoughts on Democracy
By: John Snyder
Host of In the Public Square
john.snyder@inthepublicsquare.com
Part Three:

To refresh your memories, the question posed in parts one and two of this series was: "how do we construct a state when every faculty of man is so damaged and corrupted by sin that he is too wicked to rule himself?"

This was the most difficult hurdle in political philosophy. The brightest and wisest men in history were unable to find a solution to this problem. Then about 350 years ago, the answer came in the form of the English or Anglican brand of Calvinism called Puritanism. The Puritans' insightful accomplishments were: first, to discard the unbiblical notion that monarchy was God's preferred form of civil government, and, second, to discard the classic assumption that man and the state are perfectible.

Before the year 1630 or so, the settled opinion of Christendom, and more particularly Catholicism, was that human government should shadow the heavenly order of God; that is, men should be ruled by monarchs, just as creation is governed by Our Heavenly and Celestial King-which is to say,

with absolute authority. Before you judge too harshly, remember that Christianity was not alone in embracing this doctrine; so do not accuse Christianity or Catholicism of some special kind of benighted ignorance. Christianity inherited and developed in a fallen world. Indeed, monarchy-the rule of the strong over the weak-is the "natural" order of a fallen world. It is, and remains, in fact, the dominant form of government around the world. [1]

To make this clear, every civilization on earth has been governed by this principle of monarchy. Priest kings in pre-Columbian America , both Inca and Aztec ruled by the power to propitiate gods who they claimed demanded human blood. The Caliphs of Islam claimed their rule by the authority of a blood linage from their founder Mohammed, the Popes of Rome, assert an apostolic succession deriving from the authority of Peter, the Caesars claimed authority first by genealogy, and later, by claiming to be deities in their own right. From emperors, to tsars, to khans to kings to kaisers, rulers in ever corner of the world and in every age have embraced the concept of order being derived from special status, because they recognized that ordinary men need to be ruled, and rulers need to have authority.

Long ago, The Judeo-Christian God declared His opposition to monarchy in the book of Samuel in a lawless age governed by the dissipations of contentious men. What God had said was the He preferred Israel not to have a king , but rather to be governed by judges . More precisely, God wanted man to be governed by law - His Law . But how could ordinary men, in this case Englishmen, or Spaniards or Frenchmen or Germans, Jews or Gentiles, or Eskimos or Chinese, know this law without reading the Bible?

In Europe , the Catholic Church had declared reading the Bible a capital offense for those not ordained as priests or doctors. As hard as it is to believe, the Catholic Church condemned men to be burned for the audacity of reading God's word.

But then, in the mid 1600s, there came a tide of men carried forward by the momentum of the Reformation who were willing to be immolated for the crime not only of reading the Bible, but of communication the Word of God to people directly without the doctrinal obfuscations imposed by a corrupt priest-class.

Men such as Huss, Tyndale, Latimer, and Cranmer-there were others whose names are less familiar or whose names we shall never know-but they began to carefully read the Bible in the original Greek and Hebrew and to challenge church doctrines and traditions that were choking out the actual express meaning of scripture. Often what the Catholic Church taught did not comport with what the Bible actually said. Despite papal injunctions and threats of persecution, these reformers translated the Bible into languages that were spoken by ordinary people. The result was an explosion of Bible literacy and scholarship. These heroes preached and exhorted and wrote commentaries on scripture so that the Truth would no longer be a commodity owned by an exclusive class of Pharisees. Over millennia, priestly obscurantists had come to stand between Christ and man. By so doing, they had cut the people off from the Word of God. But now scripture, widely read and disseminated through the new invention of the printing press became the touchstone for a massive reexamination of church doctrine, theology, anthropology, and most important to this essay, civil government.

Christianity thus underwent a radical transformation.

What needs to be understood is that only Christianity underwent this re-examination of questions pertaining to civil government and the nature of man. Half of European Christianity refused to yield to scripture and rather clung tenaciously to tradition. The tragedy is that by so doing the Catholic Church held and continues to hold to doctrinally incoherent ideas about civil government superimposed on scripture by the accretions of tradition and the adulterations of classical pagan Rome . Hence there remains a Roman Catholic Church. One wonders why the church should be Roman.

Anyway, no other part of the world outside of Europe ever challenged the idea that there might be something wrong with absolutist monarchy. The transformation of human society toward the idea that law and not men should be sovereign was born out of Christianity-and Christianity alone. The search for Biblical foundations to human government which could properly be anchored in something other than absolutist authority or tradition brought about a centuries-long reevaluation concerning the attributes of good government.

The Calvinists, who carried the Christian doctrine of man's fallen nature to its proper conclusion, slowly evolved a new conception of civil government. He discovered that the answer to human government cannot and will never be found in the vain hope of a perfect ruler. Nor is there such a thing as a perfect human society.

What followed was a Calvinist revision of political philosophy, an actual Christian political theology freed from the cultural hegemony of classic pagan Greek and Roman ideas. Rather, building on scripture and experience they could now see, what is so obvious to us now, that there is no morally superior class of men and that even the best and brightest among us are subject to the insinuating lusts of power and corruption. The hope of human government rested in law and not men. There was no Christian foundation for believing in a special "gentleman's" class of kings or popes or priests, who are morally superior to the larger unwashed class of we "inferior" beings.

No matter his station, talent, or class, Calvinists rejected the notion that any man was entitled by virtue of any reasoning to rule by fiat over another man. The problem is that mankind is universally damaged by an unchecked appetite for corrupt institutions that give him unjust power. So the Calvinist operated on a supposition that all men are inclined to distort and abuse their offices and institutions. The problem is not local. The problem is universal. No one is exempt. Monarchy could provide no reliable check upon this disfigurement of power. Oligarchies, plutocracies, condottieri , all provided insufficient checks upon the fallen appetite for unjust power. Something had to change. Governments, obviously, are composed of men, not oracles or wizards or congresses of angels. What to do?

The nagging historical problem was that ambitious men somehow always get their hands on concentrated political power, seize civil offices, overturn the rule of law and turn states into personal fiefdoms. The reformers held to a Biblical standard that was hard to imagine: that civil government should be ordered by the mind of law and not the arbitrary will of men. But how could such a notion be converted into an actual political system?

The Puritans solved this problem by doing something unique in the history of the world; they formed compacts and agreed to set themselves under the lawful rule of elected men. [2] And over time, as their children's expertise grew by experience, they constructed, in this continent a government that was intentionally set against itself. They conceived a government made of opposite and contrary forces that would make it nearly impossible for any one man or coterie of men to gain power enough to dispense with the rule of law. They developed and put into effect "checks and balances" and forever discarded the idea that good government was perfectible or efficient. They insisted that men should "consent" to government and have the power to create or execute new laws only when many contrary forces were willing to agree to do so.

It is difficult to fully comprehend the genius of this insight. Many of us today still want government to have lots of power. We are, in this way, holding to the failed pagan idea of human perfectibility through the leadership of the better educated and more virtuous. We are trusting in the idea that if we can just give enough power to someone or some group of people, they will solve the big problems for us. Our fallen nature rebels against any suggestion that the problem with human government is, in fact, "us" - that we ourselves should never be given too much power. Hence we live in a political culture dominated by perfectionist ideologies that blame the trouble with mankind on racism, class struggle, economics, anything but sinful man himself.

Despite civic lessons about checks and balances, few understand why this is a truly revolutionary idea-most of us still entertain the idea that democracy, in itself, is a good thing. Nevertheless, the system of checks and balances invented by our Calvinist forbears, (it was enunciated best by the French thinker Montesquieu) [3] expressly defies the notion that there is implicit wisdom in a plebiscite. It rightly restricts the will of people to do whatever they want. And this idea, which is an intentional and deliberate check on the power of democracy, is an infinitely more revolutionary idea than anything that silly dreamers like Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Marx, Robespierre or Mao ever dreamed up in their hyper-intellectual universes of nifty ideas. The Puritan Revolution, the revolution that gave rise to actual human freedom and liberal democracy, is arguably the only political solution in more than three millennia that can claim to have borne fruit.

In short the Calvinists embarked on a terribly inefficient and troublesome political experiment. And that experiment became the most dynamic in history. Under it, whole nations have risen to magnificent prosperity and freedom. By it, every culture, sex, race, class and interest group has grown and thrived more than at any other time in history.

In the next installment of this series, I will give reasons for the fruition of human creativity, prosperity, and dignity under the counter-intuitive checks and balances called the American constitutional order.

*John Snyder is host of In the Public Square heard every Friday night in Sacramento California , from midnight to 2am on KTKZ 1380 AM. Other materials are available along with archived radio programs at www.inthepublicsquare.com . Programs are also podcast through itunes . You can contact John Snyder at: john.snyder@inthepublicsquare.com

[1] We should not allow ourselves to be confused by nomenclature. Any form of government, whatever its name, that does not allow for consent and general plebiscites in the making of law are but variations on the old idea of monarchy: the rule of one over the many. No monarch in history has ever ruled only by authority of office. Kings need a body of loyal men to enforce wanton and unjust prerogatives and uphold the fear that under girds the claim to power. Hence in Mediaeval Europe Kings were surrounded by a peerage, by knights, and barons and earls, and counts, and dukes. In communist China or the former Soviet Union, or in Nazi Germany or the Islamic republic of Iran , the same types of men surround the authority of the autocrat. The names are different, but we are dealing only with variations on the age-old theme.

[2] The Mayflower Compact (1620) is not merely a charming historical footnote, it fully expresses the belief among the Puritans that power must be by consent and that the right to make the laws under which we live is fundamental to being free. Nevertheless, the Pilgrims (Pilgrims are the non-conformist branch of Puritanism) did not elevate their wills over the law, but rather subjugated their wills to the law. The Puritan of Boston followed suit ten years later with the Constitution of the Massachusetts Bay Plantation (1629). Another ten years later Connecticut and New Haven Colonies established a much or specific and ordered document providing for elections, offices, powers, terms and more. This document is called the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (1639) which is regarded by many scholars to be the first written constitution in the history of the world! The Puritans were Constitution-makers.

[3] Here too we find reformist tendencies even in this French thinker. Montesquieu is sometimes identified as a proto-Huguenot. His wife was a Protestant in a very Catholic autocratic France governed under both Louis XIV and his son. A century before the Catholics had exterminated and viciously suppressed the Protestants during the St. Bartholomew Massacre. For a Baron, I believe he was too careful of his political standing and his head for that kind of recklessness. It is not wild to adventure that he harbored many protestant influences for a man that was probably not of a religious nature. And if for no other reason than the autocratic power of the Louis' was so contrary to his sensibility and his ideas, it is easy to image that below it all he admired the reformist instincts in an age when expressing such affections were always dangerous and even sometimes treasonous.