In Democracy We Trust?

One might call 2024 the Year of Democracy. As Time magazine noted in December of last year, “2024 is not just an election year. It’s perhaps the election year. Globally, more voters than ever in history will head to the polls as at least 64 countries (plus the European Union)—representing a combined population of about 49% of the people in the world—are meant to hold national elections, the results of which, for many, will prove consequential for years to come.”

As more people than ever before go to the polls to determine the shape, tone, and direction of their own governments, 2024 should be the greatest year in democracy’s history. Instead, 2024 has been filled with cries from all quarters warning of the possibility of democracy’s impending demise. In Germany, news services warned that this year’s elections were really “an election about democracy.” Foreign policy experts declared that the European Parliament elections this year were vital in pushing back against dismantling and subverting democratic norms in member states.

Perhaps the direst warnings about how “democracy is at stake” have come from the campaigns of Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Polls show that a majority of Americans do, indeed, believe that democracy is in grave danger—and, importantly, each side believes that the other side is the one generating that danger.

Is Democracy the Real Reason Nations Succeed?

Yet for all the passionate pleading that we must “save democracy,” few seem to be asking an important question: Is democracy worth saving?

Decades ago, when political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man, many found themselves agreeing with his analysis that man’s search for the ultimate form of government to maximize human flourishing was over. Fascism had been discredited. Communism had been proven a failure. Socialism was clearly inadequate. The winner in the contest of millennia—the pinnacle of human political organization—was liberal democracy, combined with market-based economics. Only liberal democracies had shown themselves worthy of human investment going forward, capable of bringing out the very best in mankind.

The decades since Fukuyama’s book have seen an expansion of the world’s democracies. Yet, they have also seen the world pressed closer and closer to the brink. In times like these—in which nations are ripping themselves apart at even their sturdiest seams and international conflicts threaten to engulf us in a world war involving multiple nuclear powers—we need to know: Should we put our faith in democracy to solve our problems? Or is it possible that democracy is making them worse?

It’s time to look more closely at democracy, what the Creator of humanity has to say about it, and what hope He holds out to a world in desperate need of truly good government.

The Evolution of Democracy and “Self-Government”

Throughout history, most human beings have lived under the governance of dictators, generals, or monarchs. Democracy has never lasted. Athens, perhaps the best-known model of ancient democracy, lasted as such for fewer than 200 years. And even that “democracy” was exercised only by Athens’ free adult men—less than 30 percent of its population.

Rule by monarchy has been far more common over the centuries. Even the ancient Hebrews chose monarchy over their earlier rule by judges. Monarchs, no matter their religion, would generally claim the “divine right of kings” and consider themselves answerable only to their gods, leaving the governed citizens subject to their whims—it is one thing for the governed to challenge a ruler, but who would dare challenge God?

From this perspective, we can appreciate just how radical a step was taken by King John of England in 1215, when he consented to the Magna Carta (“Great Charter”)—a document acknowledging that even the king of England was subject to the rule of law. Though disputed and modified over the years, the Magna Carta set England apart as a nation ruled ultimately by law rather than by men.

Yet that rule became oppressive at times. Five hundred years after the Magna Carta, British colonists in North America found themselves chafing under what they considered unjust application of law. Not content to be ruled by a king and a Parliament across the ocean, the colonists rebelled and established their own constitutional republic—first with the Articles of Confederation in 1781 and then with the Constitution of the United States in 1789. Nearly 250 years later, supplemented by a Bill of Rights and 17 subsequent amendments, the Constitution is still the guiding document of U.S. law and has been widely imitated by other nations around the world.

The nation’s founders sought to vest the vast power of national sovereignty fully with the people. They were not content with a power-sharing approach between a king and a parliament, as they had experienced under British rule. In America, the citizen was to be “king.”

Nor were the architects of the American republic content to hand the reins of the American conscience to any faith. Influenced by the work of philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the founders sought to anchor government in the concept of a social contract: a mutual agreement among the peoples of a society concerning the laws they would all accept, the culture they would embrace, and the freedoms they would recognize—or, for that matter, give up for the sake of social order.

The U.S. was to be a radical experiment in freedom and liberty, grounded in a radical embrace of the sovereignty of its people. Yet the architects of the new nation’s government were not ignorant of the lessons of history. They knew, for instance, the history of Athens, widely considered to be the birthplace of democracy around 2,500 years ago. And they knew the dangers of a direct or pure democracy—one in which the people decide, directly, even the smallest matter of policy and practice.

In 1787, James Madison wrote that “such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.” One year later, speaking to the Constitutional Convention of the young nation, Alexander Hamilton noted that the ancient pure democracies of history “never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”

Among the faults of such direct or pure democracies was the tendency to drift into “mob rule,” where the majority exercised tyrannical power over the minority. Any cruelty, any injustice, any despotism could become law in a pure democracy if a majority of people willed it to be so at the ballot box.

Democracies also lent themselves to the creation of tyrants—one of the very dangers the nation’s founders sought to make impossible in their new country. To this end, they planned to divide the powers of government into separate and adversarial branches, governed by checks and balances among and between them.

The result of their effort was to embed American democracy within a constitutional republic. Making the government a republic, in which the citizens would democratically elect leaders to represent them in the matters of governance, was intended to be a barrier against the chaos that accompanies pure democracies. The people would remain sovereign, since the leaders served at the will of the people—and those leaders who did not satisfy the people’s desire would be replaced by new leaders at the end of their terms.

And making the government constitutional—organizing it under a written constitution that would serve as the law of the land—meant that American democracy could be greatly constrained. Rights and protections could be codified in the U.S. Constitution to preserve them from alteration even by a majority. The people’s sovereignty would be preserved, as even the Constitution itself could be altered by the people through their elected representatives—but through “super majorities,” helping to guarantee the broadest possible agreement and preventing hasty, radical changes.

The Constitution would also define the cooperative—yet adversarial—nature of governmental authority, preventing too much power from residing in the hands of a few. Executive power would rest with a single individual—a democratically elected president. Legislative power rested with a congress of democratically elected representatives in two chambers. And supreme judicial power rested with appointed, independent judges. Each branch was designed to be dependent on the others for functions it could not accomplish and checked in its power by the others so that it could not turn its functions into an opportunity to take larger control.

While many claim that being a constitutional republic means that the U.S. is not a democracy, they need to read the founders’ words more carefully. As Alexander Hamilton noted during the U.S. Constitution’s ratification, “the true principle of a republic is, that the people should choose whom they please to govern them.” And concerning the constitutions of the nation or its component states, no lesser a light than George Washington himself stated, “The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.” The Constitution was to be considered “sacredly obligatory on all,” yet only “until changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people.”

The nation forged by the founders of the U.S. placed sovereignty democratically on the shoulders of citizens while ingeniously safeguarding against the abuses of a direct democracy by placing the exercise of that sovereignty within the structure of a constitutional republic. The nation truly was, to borrow Abraham Lincoln’s turn of phrase, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” This grand experiment in self-governance has generally been considered a dramatic success, and the wisdom and foresight of the founders of the U.S. is almost universally acknowledged.

Why Do Democracies Fail?

The poet T. S. Eliot wrote that men “constantly try to escape from the darkness outside and within by dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” This is exactly what the founders of the U.S. sought to do—what the architects of every liberal democracy seek to do. So that the people are not dependent on a potentially corrupt monarch or a potentially corrupt aristocracy, democracies make the people their own rulers.

But the fundamental flaw remains: People are not good (Matthew 19:17). And no system of self-governance can separate people from the corruption they, themselves, bring into it.

To their credit, the founders of the U.S. recognized this. In 1788, James Madison concisely stated, “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.” Ten years later, John Adams noted that if the morality of citizens became only superficial—a veneer that looked good on the outside while hiding covetousness and vulgarities within—then “this Country will be the most miserable Habitation in the World,” with nothing in the American form of government able to restrain the people’s immorality.

And many would say that some democracies are, indeed, becoming some of the most miserable habitations in the world. With no culture or ethical system beyond what everyone agrees to in the “social contract,” societies are disintegrating into competing collections of ideologically driven camps, each accusing the other of destroying what’s best about our nations. With no recognized source of right or wrong that transcends the ballot box—no internal check against the degradations of human nature—the most perverted of acts and lifestyles increasingly take place under the protection of misguided laws. And with no acknowledgement of the authority of the divine Designer of humanity—having replaced Him with the sovereign will of the people—even the most fundamental institutions of man, such as the family, are redefined and recast according to the political whim of the moment.

In fact, even the plagues of direct democracies that the founders sought to avoid—tyrannies, easily manipulated voters, degradation in the quality of leadership—have begun to manifest in spades. Whatever systems the architects put in place have only been able to delay, not halt, the inevitable.

The philosopher Plato—surrounded as he was by the “mother” of all democracies in ancient Athens—often railed against the idea that a people could rule itself democratically. In his classic work The Republic, he warned millennia ago that democracies don’t produce leaders of high virtue, rulers possessing profound wisdom and ability, or representatives who truly care about the people who elected them.

Rather, democracies produce leaders who excel in one specific skill: getting elected.

In his classic work, Democracy in America, the nineteenth-century French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville saw the same forces at work in the young nation. He saw that those most able to lead were rarely elected to office and that voting decisions were generally—almost unavoidably—made on relatively superficial bases. Consequently, de Tocqueville noted that the public “often assents to the clamor of a mountebank [fraud or huckster] who knows the secret of stimulating its tastes,” while those who might actually serve the people well are ignored by the electorate (Book 1, Chapter 13, trans. Henry Reeve).

Can we see these truths on display in our own nations? We must ask ourselves honestly: Are our democratic processes—in whatever form they take—producing the wisest leaders? The most capable?

We would have to be delusional to think so. Our nations are increasingly run by individuals with neither the wisdom nor the abilities demanded by their office. Rather, they excel in one, single skill our system of government requires of them: the ability to convince voters to give them the job.

There simply is no system of human government that can protect us from human nature.

Democracy vs. God

Some have sought to see the principles of democracy, especially in America, reflected in the inspired words of the Bible—hoping to gain God’s endorsement for the form of government they have chosen.

For example, some have claimed that the tripartite separation of powers is supported in the praise given to God in Isaiah 33:22: “For the Lord is our Judge, the Lord is our Lawgiver, the Lord is our King; He will save us.” It is true that all three categories of power—the executive, the legislative, and the judicial—are mentioned. But who in their right mind would call three powers united in the one Almighty God an example of separation of powers? It is, in fact, quite the opposite!

However, a scriptural principle does apply—a principle delivered by the Lord Himself when He said, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation” (Matthew 12:25). While there is much human wisdom in how the founders of the U.S. arranged the separation of powers—setting human ambition against human ambition, as James Madison framed it—the revealed godly wisdom states that such a state of affairs is bound to end in desolation.

So, who do we expect to be proven right—the architects of our modern democracies, or Jesus Christ? In fact, the Bible is filled with revealed truths that make utterly and unavoidably plain that democracy—in all its forms—is not godly government, no matter its lofty aims.

For instance, democracy’s fundamental concept—that sovereignty rests with the people and that rulers derive their authority only from “the consent of the governed,” in Thomas Jefferson’s famous words—is utterly foreign to Scripture in all but the most radical readings, twisted takes, and imaginative interpretations. Indeed, the universal testimony of God’s word is entirely against democracy.

Consider the correction given to Nebuchadnezzar. When the great king of Babylon lost sight of how dependent he was on the God of heaven for his place and position, the Eternal temporarily gave him the mind of an animal, stripped of all rationality, “in order that the living may know that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, gives it to whomever He will, and sets over it the lowest of men” (Daniel 4:17).

This truth—that God reserves to Himself the appointment of authorities and powers—is seen in many passages throughout the Bible. As God inspired Daniel to state elsewhere, “He removes kings and raises up kings” (Daniel 2:21). And in every form of government God creates—including the ancient nation of Israel, the first-century Church, and even the family, itself—that government is always structured from the top down, with positions given by appointment based on discernible fruits (e.g., Titus 1:5).

In fact, when you do find places in Scripture in which the people decide the form of government, you don’t see God’s approval. Again, quite the opposite—in the case of the people’s rejection of Samuel’s sons as judges over them, even when those sons were doing a lousy job, the Eternal declared that He saw this rejection as a refusal of His own rulership over the people (1 Samuel 8:7). And the only clear mention of a vote in the pages of the Bible is that of Paul’s in the days before his conversion—and he cast that vote to put Christians to death (Acts 26:10). Fundamentally, for all the worldly wisdom of democratic government and its placing sovereignty in the hands of the ruled instead of the rulers, it does not reflect the wisdom of God.

It does, however, reflect the spirit and nature of Satan the Devil, the first ruled being who sought to rise above the One who ruled him and take authority for himself (Isaiah 14:12–14). It is his spirit that now works in this world (Ephesians 2:2). Should it surprise us, then, that the spirit that dominates our politics is one of taking control for ourselves—seizing power as if the wisest and safest place for it to be is in our own hands?

The Glorious Promise of a Perfect Government

Part of the dream that continues to drive the democracies of the world—even as they increasingly generate the chaos inherent to them—is that life free from abusive tyranny, free from oppression, and free from corruption, can be achieved through human effort alone. Yet humanity’s every effort is doomed from the start, due to its one, essential ingredient: us. We fundamentally cannot be trusted with our own government.

We do not know the way to the peaceful lives we long to live (Jeremiah 10:23; Isaiah 59:8). And even if we stumble across it, we find it is a narrow path and a difficult way (Matthew 7:13–14). It does not involve creating systems that allow us to avoid choosing the good, but rather requires us to yield ourselves, as individuals and as a civilization, to the laws of God—something utterly antithetical to our nature (Romans 8:7).

But the Creator of humanity has not left us without a solution. The Bible reveals that God is sending His Son, Jesus Christ, back to this earth to rule this world and reign in the Kingdom of God. That government won’t be ruled by competing crowds or polarized parties. It will be ruled by Christ Himself, “He who is the blessed and only Potentate, the King of kings and Lord of lords” (1 Timothy 6:15).

Over the course of a thousand years, that Kingdom will finally achieve what no government of man has ever been able to do. It will transform flawed human nature until it conforms to God’s own, “for this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people” (Hebrews 8:10). Wars will cease, inequity will be abolished, and every individual will have the opportunity to live a fulfilled and abundant life under the liberating laws of his Creator (James 1:25).

God the Father is looking for those who understand that they are not called to trust in the governments of this world and fight with this world’s broken and carnal tools, as if they could enthrone His Son before His time (John 18:36). He is looking for those who, instead, are ready to put their trust in Him—allowing Him to transform their own hearts and minds today, that they might help Him transform the hearts and minds of mankind tomorrow.