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

So why is it that this country and this government called the United States of American founded just two hundred and twenty-five years ago should become in so short a time, the preeminent power on the earth? Is it only an irony of human history that of all countries in the world, we, one of the most recent arrivals on the stage of human events, should become the leading actor in the story of human liberty?

How is it that a trackless continent, which four hundred years ago contained not a single road or dam or city, that had within its vast compass not a single mill or bridge, inhabited only by primitive Neolithic tribes of Indians, should within two centuries eclipse all the powers of the earth to become the foremost creative culture, the great arsenal of democracy, the defender of civilization against the scourges of Nazism and Japanese expansionism, the shield against the aggressive expansionism of international communism, and, in our own time, the bulwark against the spread of hateful Islamic Fundamentalism? Remember that we did all this while simultaneously developing nuclear power, microcircuits, biotechnology, the computer, the supermarket, the internet, and just to make it interesting we put a man on the moon. How did this infant nation, founded neither on race nor class, ascend so swiftly to become the center of world cultural creativity, economic power and technology and also become the paradigm of human freedom around the world?

In short, how did this miracle happen?

First, the founders of this nation gave up on the idea of human perfectibility. Second, we also gave up on the idea that man was naturally good. In short, we undertook to construct a government on the assumption that the Bible was true.

In abandoning any hope of a class of superior men to guide us in the governance of the state, we became by default democrats. And by flatly disavowing the idea that the common man had any special wisdom to govern himself we implicitly became republicans Americans accepted a pre-supposition that we, like all men, highborn or low, if given unchecked power to vote our desires into political dominance will evince the selfsame wanton and capricious appetite to abuse as the worst tyrants of history. In short, we are all democrats. We are all republicans.

And so with no other theory to rely on but the sovereignty of law, we turned to the authority of a constitution.

Few people today know that the Constitution of the United States is the first written constitution in human history to govern a whole nation. [1] It is the oldest constitution in the world. Prior to our great experiment, constitutions were fashioned only by private organizations and business enterprises. Constitutions were not documents made to limit sovereignty. The sovereign was always above the law. Indeed he who is sovereign is the law. Any other idea would have been preposterous. For instance, in Britain , Parliament is supreme. In every nation contemporary with our founding the power of the state resided in princes or religious figures or military despots. No other nation was ever founded on a document called a constitution. The universally modern idea of states being ruled by the authority of codified bodies of law is purely an American idea. Completely American. Those who look to England and speak of the authority of law need only reflect that there is not a single right or privilege of the English people that cannot, even today, be voted away by the simple expedient of a majority vote of Parliament. The United States alone in the history of mankind placed itself and all men in it, under the supreme authority of a universally applicable law. America placed even the Congress and the President under that law. Everyone.

Only Israel in the time of the Judges ever attempted such a noble enterprise. And we know from the Book of Samuel that it failed tragically. Therein rests the sage fear of repeating the tragedy of the Judges that every man unconstrained by a powerful government will devolve into doing only what is "right in his own eyes." But in the supremacy of law, we Americans placed our trust in the most revolutionary idea in the history of political philosophy. And more, much more particularly, we further affixed the idea that all just laws are derived from the authority of God. In God We Trust . That is the motto of the United States of America . For us, the great Jehovah is the author of human liberty and just government. God is the only just and wise lawgiver.

Little do we understand today that America is unique for these assumptions. And these assumptions are the direct and necessary antecedents to the notion that governments must be limited, that they properly exist to preserve the natural rights ordained by the authority of God, and that law, derived from a proper Biblical understanding of human nature, preserves and protects us, not the will of men.

It is a curious fact that few people actually realize that the only person voted to office by all the people in America is the President of the United States . We don't generally think too much about that unique fact. But in all this country of 300 millions souls, only one elected man serves all the people. That is the President of the United States . And yet, despite our instinct to the contrary, the President has no actual affirmative responsibility to the people. He takes an oath, which few of us fully comprehend in its profound implication. The President swears an oath to God to preserve the rule of law. His oath is not to the people. It is not even to the country! The President's oath is to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States . That is his sacred duty. Everything else is secondary.

Think about that.

Do you really realize what that means? It means that law is king in America . It means that law is the actual sovereign of this country. Not the people. But Lex Rex. This fact expresses the powerful and astonishing assumption of our founders: men are answerable to law as the expression of God's sovereignty. In particular, it means that our constitution is really a description of the processes by which the conflicts of competing interests will assert themselves in the governance of the state. It is a procedural document that shapes the discourse and will of the people and stands, in a certain way, above the will of the people. It is amended by a substantive document called the Bill of Rights. And so, in a very real sense the only man over all of us is answerable to a piece of paper called the Supreme Law of the Land. In the legal sense, he is not answerable to the democratic will of the people.

These notions about the supreme authority of law are purely the children of Judaism and Christianity and more particularly the Puritan Revolution. These ideas are NOT the intellectual progeny of the Enlightenment or the French philosophes or the German idealists, or historicists or the Catholic Church. Rather it was the Puritans, simple Bible-reading men and women, who forsook the Old World and fled to the New, who loved humanity so much that they would not give us over entirely to our own free will. It was these Calvinists, who respected the dignity of man so greatly that they encumbered us all with the supremacy of law. To these men and women who have passed out of time, who loved human autonomy so much that they devised a government balanced against itself, separated it into branches and states-that limited the adjudication of law by the power of juries and independent judges. It was these people who loved the freedom of self-government so much that they declared to a candid world that all rights come from God- and that governments, even duly elected governments which usurped those rights-are illegitimate! To these children of the Calvinists, these rare and unexpected heroes, we owe our thanks for the fruition of liberty around the world.

It is to the American Puritans and their Calvinist forebearers to whom we owe the nation that matured into that colossus that stands as a beacon to the world, that lights the way to freedom as it was understood by people who read the Bible. It was their counter-intuitive understanding of government that gave us liberal democracy.

That by limitations- we are empowered to excel.

By checks upon our will- we attain liberty.

By constraints- we find freedom.

By law- we are emancipated.

This is not human wisdom. This is the power of believing what God has told us about ourselves, about sin nature which corrupts, and fallenness which usurps the order of creation. This is the result of taking scripture seriously. We once believed these truths enough to construct the architecture of a great nation on it. It means that the Bible and what it teaches us, whether one is a Christian or not, whether one likes it or not, is foundational to any proper understanding of the operations and purposes of civil government in America. Without an understanding of these Christian presuppositions we cannot hope to long adhere to the scheme of ordered liberty devised by them.

What they gave us works. Take care of it.

To these men and women, the Puritans, the Calvinists, to the Prophets who instructed us about our own wickedness, to the God who sent them, we owe the blessings of liberty in this, our country, the last best hope of Earth .

*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

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[1] Before this time, written constitutions were entirely the creatures of corporations, charters for self-governing of business affairs, as with the charters of the various colonies in British North America (viz., the Virginia Company, or the Massachusetts Bay Colony). When one spoke of a constitution for civil government and not business, one was speaking of unwritten organic rules established by tradition, modified by the dictates of Kings, the acts and statutes of parliament or common law. They were hodgepodges of incorporated rules gathered from various sources. The "British Constitution" so called, is such an amalgam. A profound distinction between the British and the American constitutional systems is that in America , when there are incongruities between statutes and the constitution, the Constitution trumps congress and the law. In Britain , all acts of Parliament are, de jure , the constitution.