(Photo: Unsplash/Element5 Digital)
According to a recent article within the Los Angeles Times, a record 4.2 billion people could vote in elections around the globe this yr. Ballots will probably be solid on every continent except Antarctica, and that is only because penguins cannot vote.
To make certain, too a lot of these elections is not going to be free, fair, or secure. And, in too many places, an election could only escalate political tensions and further the lack of freedoms. A pair weeks ago, voters in Taiwan elected a recent president from the Democratic Progressive Party, increasing tensions between the independence-minded Taiwanese and the Chinese Communist Party.
India’s incumbent prime minister, a Hindu nationalist, is predicted to simply win a 3rd term this spring, which likely means persecution against Christians and Muslims will intensify there. The election in Bangladesh earlier this month is widely believed to have been a sham, and the upcoming election in Russia will likely have even less credibility.
Some view these failures as proof that democracy doesn’t work. LA Times columnist Joe Mathews predicted that after seeing all of the “ugliness” on display in so-called democratic elections the world over this yr, people might finally start searching for a “higher way.”
Still, the very undeniable fact that a lot of the worldwide community recognizes corruption and unfair elections as “ugliness” is itself a testament to the facility and sturdiness of democratic ideas. The world wasn’t at all times like this. Before America’s founding, representative democracy was removed from the norm, and even then, it wasn’t expected worldwide. As Christian ideas about universal human value and dignity expanded across the West, so did the notion that each one people must have the best to take part in their very own governments. These same ideas are why we reject sham elections and authoritarianism. These ideas are why nations aspired to equality and honesty, and why they now seem obvious goods.
Though the ancient Greeks are sometimes credited with “inventing” democracy, women and slaves had no right to vote or take part in government. Often, free men of wealth did not have the choice to participate but were mandated to accomplish that.
In the early 1800s, French philosopher and political historian Alexis de Tocqueville visited the newly independent United States. In his published collection of observations, Democracy in America, de Tocqueville credited Christianity with giving the world its first real philosophical foundation for real democracy: “Christianity, which has rendered all men equal before God, is not going to be loath to see all residents equal before the law.”
The concept that humans had inherent dignity and were due to this fact equal to 1 one other is a uniquely Christian idea, de Tocqueville argued, and fundamentally unlike the utilitarian philosophies that gave rise to the so-called “democracies” of ancient Greece: “It was mandatory that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that each one members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.”
Obviously, democracy in America on the country’s founding also fell disastrously in need of this ideal. Slaves, women, and even free African Americans were denied the best to vote and, particularly within the case of slavery, were treated as subhuman. The truth held to be “self-evident, that each one men were created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” was an aspiration not met. However, it’s for this reason aspiration that we recognize our profound moral failures as a nation.
In the identical way, the corruption and dishonest elections we are going to likely witness across the globe this yr don’t prove that democracy is a foul idea. Rather, they’re proof of one other biblical description of the human condition. Humans are fallen and are subject to sin’s corruption.
The LA Times could also be concerned about whether humans can survive democracy. A greater query is whether or not democracy can survive fallen humanity. This was one other of Alexis de Tocqueville’s observations: That just as Christianity provides the philosophical and moral grounding for democracy, Christian morality is the one system that may keep democracy from devolving into tyranny.
A democracy can only be sustained if informed residents operate inside an ethical framework. This, in turn, requires an understanding of the world because it actually is, especially what it means to be human. Elected representatives who cannot distinguish good from evil, or “man” from “woman” can hardly be expected to enact policies that allow men and ladies to hunt the nice. As John Adams, the second U.S. president, wrote, “our structure was made just for an ethical and spiritual People. It is wholly inadequate to the federal government of some other.”
God has placed us on this moment, a moment that is de facto a historical anomaly. Among other things, this means we’ve a responsibility to be the moral people upon which democracy depends. Thus, we must commit again to loving each other, to governing our tempers, ambitions, greed, and tendency toward selfishness, and to never compromising on the reality of what it means to be human or what it means to hunt the nice.
Copyright 2024 by the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Reprinted from BreakPoint.org with permission.
