The Temptation of Democracy

This post originally appeared at Misfits Theology Club.

Democracy muddles the Christian ethics of power. In a world where most people have no say in or control over the selection of governmental leaders, it’s relatively easy to determine how God’s people should respond: give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. Follow the laws so long as they don’t violate the gospel and be willing to suffer the consequences gracefully when you must disobey.

Democracy changes the equation, though. It gives each voter a position of power. Christian ethics move from a discussion of our relationship to power to a discussion of how we use the power we’ve been given. Whether we hold elective office or not, by voting, we become part of the power structure.

There’s an argument that this is a positive development. By receiving a place within the power structure, God’s people have some ability to shape it, perhaps in ways that reflect the Kingdom of God. The question I’ve been pondering, though, is whether or not the Kingdom of God can ever be served by the use of coercive power.

The power of God, as demonstrated in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is entirely non-coercive. God loves us and forgives us and bears with us in radical patience as we continually refuse to be shaped by that love. God is relentless in love, returning over and over again with a divine faith in the power of love to outlast all opposition.

By that I don’t mean God’s love will eventually wear us down in the end – that would be coercive – simply that our power to reject God’s love and refuse the transformation it offers can never outlast God’s ability to keep loving. Christians believe in a world that never ends, because God’s non-coercive love can never be exhausted.

What does that have to do with democracy and power? Well, even the most benevolent governments are coercive. The very nature of worldly power is its ability to force reluctant participation. There will always be some part of us (both individually and collectively) that spurns coercion, even for the common good.

The most good for the most people is still coercion, because it doesn’t allow real freedom for the minority who are negatively affected. It might be the best any human authority can muster, but it falls short of the gospel ideal and of the Kingdom of God.

So, when we vote, aren’t we just contributing to the coercive authority of whoever happens to be in charge of government? Yes, one could argue one candidate is better than the other for the majority of people, but that’s still a short sighted goal achieved through coercion. The Kingdom of God promises a world in which all people live together in peace and love; there is no human system that can promise or produce this eventuality by way of coercion.

I wonder if the opportunity to vote is not the same temptation faced by Jesus when he was shown all the kingdoms of the world and offered authority to rule them all. Certainly the reign of Christ would be preferential to whatever human leaders would emerge in those kingdoms. There would be less suffering and more freedom is Jesus were on the literal throne.

Jesus refused that option, because to take it would be to endorse coercion, even perfect, holy, divine coercion. This was, evidently, unacceptable to the mission of Jesus Christ.

When we vote in elections, we’re expressing a preference. We believe the government of one candidate or party would be better than the government of another. That is almost certainly true (even if we make the “wrong” selection). But neither government could ever advance the Kingdom of God, because coercion is anathema to God’s eternal future.

What if one government would alleviate the suffering of one or more oppressed groups? Shouldn’t we be able to choose the best available human government for the thriving of the most people AND also work for the coming of God’s eternal now and future Kingdom?

You’d think so. I’d hope so. And yet we’re left with the decision Jesus made on that mountain. He forsook the immediate help he could offer to the suffering and oppressed in all the kingdoms of the world to embrace a non-coercive mission of love that led to his own torture and execution.

Couldn’t Jesus have chosen to rule the kingdoms of the world and usher in the Kingdom of God? One would think so and yet he didn’t. The fact that Jesus did not choose both immediate and eternal good leads me to the conclusion that perhaps both are not possible – at least on the level of governmental authority.

I can surely feed the hungry and clothe the naked and work for the freedom of the oppressed in my own individual ability, but to employ the means of coercion to that end on a grander scale just isn’t morally responsible given Jesus’ example.

I don’t like it, but that’s the only conclusion at which I’ve been able to arrive. Voting is an endorsement of coercion and even if that coercion is in line with the principles of God’s Kingdom, it violates the principle of non-coercion and thus can’t be the means through which the Kingdom is fulfilled.

I wonder if, like with issues of violence, there are moments where voting for (or against) a particular candidate or party might be preferable to abstaining. I don’t think, though, in those moments, we can justify our actions as “right” or “moral” or “correct.”

It just seems impossible to believe voting is a particularly Christian or moral duty when Christ himself had the ability to be elected King and refused. He rejected coercion and I think, no matter how reluctantly, we should reject it, too.

**Edited for clarification: 1) This applies largely to Presidential elections (and to a lesser extent, Governors and Mayors) – the notion of singular executive authority is one that pretends (even unintentionally) to compete with God.  Politics, in general, is just how we get along with each other.  At the neighborhood level, we talk to each other and work things out.  As we get into larger societies, we have to elect representatives – there’s a different power dynamic there, although I see elective office as more important, the lower the level.

2)This shouldn’t be seen as abdicating the importance of political action.  Christians should continue to march, protest, advocate, and evangelize on behalf of food for the hungry, equity for the foreigner, and release for the prisoner.  We should do so, though, not with an aim at changing laws, but with an aim at inviting people into the Kingdom of God.  As our collective heart is changed, our laws will follow; they just shouldn’t be driving the ship.

The American Spirit Broke America

I read this article in Time by Edward Felsenthal this week. He was talking about the general situation of the Supreme Court now that we're in the midst of a fairly significant transition. He especially talked about the changes made by Scalia's participation on the Court, specifically his penchant for ideology over process or cohesion or compromise. He's oft quoted as saying he's in the business of law to shape ideas, he wrote his scathing, lengthy dissents "for the law books," and didn't care much for deciding cases, but for being right.

Perhaps because of his thirty year tenure in the public eye, his ability to tell a story and ingratiate people to himself, Scalia's been among the most prominent political figures for two generations. He exemplifies the rugged individuality and moral and intellectual superiority that's come to be known as "the American Spirit." Of course, this is not his invention, but his death is an avenue for exploring this singular particularity of our nation... and what affect it's had on our way of life.

We're not a country that tolerates gray areas, at least corporately. Even as we become more comfortable with ambiguity in private, we like to know where we stand when it comes to right and wrong. When we go to war, it's never a complex, multi-faceted issue; it's either pure good or pure evil. When we get hit, we hit back harder. It's this need to win, to be right, to defeat evil and wrong, to punish the enemy - this is the American Spirit and it's pretty much crippled good governance.

Congress is hopelessly mired in gridlock, partly because we've got two entrenched parties who see their only way forward as assuming opposing polarized positions, but also because state level political victories have led to punitive redistricting, which provides most of our Representative virtually no real danger in re-election.

The Presidency has become a game show, with otherwise intelligent egomaniacs fighting over who looks better on camera - which has now culminated in the ultimate channel of the American Spirit reigning on high and espousing exactly the kind of rhetoric we've been taught, deep down, to embrace, but have also been taught not to express out loud. We've got the reality show ringmaster breaking that unwritten rule and the people are just following their training in this combative, superior American Spirit.

Not to get too deep, but we've been seeing it in the Court for a while now. The very fact that we see jurisprudence divided by right and left is indication enough. There are at least five commonly accepted methods of constitutional interpretation - even the "conservative" members of the bench often disagree strongly on how things are decided - but we're more concerned with who's "winning" and who can be proved "right," when right and wrong, for our political and judicial purposes are really just decided by the whims and biases of five people in black robes.

"We can't win unless everyone wins," is usually the response from people like me - re-framing the competitive drive to encompass a more communal outlook on things, but that doesn't go over well with the cowboy ethos of the American Spirit. It becomes a dismissive platitude because it's saying that opponents aren't just wrong, their also ignorant. It's saying, "they'll thank me later." You may have seen the two competing memes that bear this out: "We'll make American great again for you too," or "Elect Bernie so those Trump supporters can get the mental health care they so desperately need."

It's one thing to say: we don't need to be right or to win, or, at the very least, in being right and winning, we don't need to demoralize, dehumanize, and destroy our opponents. That's true, but it just feels so icky to the American Spirit.

Well, it's time we recognize that it's this American Spirit that has broken America. It's not the wackos on the right or the wackos on the left (and they're all wackos to each other). We all embody this win-at-all-costs ethic. That's never going to change until we address the stark individualism that we inherited from the enlightenment.

The founds of the US were almost entirely influenced by French modernism, the triumph of the individual. Our political class might disagree about the extent to which individualism should be protected and catered to, but they all accept it as a core value - even our most popular democratic socialist. Everyone, almost to a person, sees the US as a collection of individuals. We've got it on two levels - we're a collection of individual states, each made up of individuals. This all sounds great in books or in speeches, but we've long seen, addressed, and quietly ignored the real problems this presents.*

We might be able to address that notion of everyone wins or no one does, but we can't do it with the individualism inherent in the modern American system. We can't see the whole as a collection of individuals, but an indivisible singularity (and we can't just see America this way; we sort of have to see all of existence this way). It's really the only answer.

I don't mean that we should forget individuality, but that we need to understand our individuality only exists as we participate in the whole. You can't actually separate any individual from the whole - at least outside of a philosophy textbook.

That's the reality. Our American Spirit leads us to deny this with every fiber of our being, but reality bears out the result of that stubbornness. We're looking it in the face right now, in every form and facet of government. I suppose it's not unique to America - it's the spirit seen in every empirical nation in history, the sense of superiority and dominance - but it's always been couched in selfishness, in focus on the individual - whether it was the individual monarch in years past of the individual everyman that rules modern democratic thought.

We've gotten what we deserve, but it doesn't have to be this way. The question is whether we're capable of doing the hard work it takes to change the very core of our being and thus the core of a nation.


*Look up "tyranny of the majority" sometime - it's far too off topic fort his post, but it presents one of those gray areas we've lived in since 1776 and just refuse to talk about.