Evangelicals and America’s Constitutional Order
There are some evangelical Christians who speak of democracy as if it is an essential, even indispensable, point of Christian doctrine. Strangely, many of these people are at the same time quite averse to doctrinal or confessional strictness on non-political, but fundamental, points of Christian doctrine, worship, and practice.
America, of course, was not founded as a democracy. It was, and despite some later constitutional changes, remains a republic (at least in theory). The framers of America’s constitution were fundamentally opposed to pure democracy, understood as the ability of every single member of a nation to exercise direct control over government. Hardly anyone, even the loudest advocates of “our democracy,” believes in an absolute democracy, where every decision is decided by every person. All recognize that there must be some form of delegation, that representatives must be elected, who are then empowered to make decisions for their constituents. Most would also accept that certain classes should not be allowed to vote (young children, mentally infirm, felons, etc.).
The American founders went further, however, than simply arguing for a delegated democracy. They routinely argued, in fact, that genuine democracy was dangerous and undesirable. John Adams, for example, adapting the classical arguments of Plato and Aristotle, argued that “There are only Three simple Forms of Government”: democracy, aristocracy (or oligarchy), and monarchy, and that
The best Governments of the World have been mixed. The Republics of Greece, Rome, and Carthage were all mixed governments. The English, Dutch and Swiss, enjoy the Advantages of mixed Governments at this Day.
That is to say, the best governments are not democracies pure and simple. They are governments that incorporate elements of each form of government. Adams insisted in the same speech that
The Preservation of Liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral Character of the People. As long as Knowledge and Virtue are diffused generally among the Body of a Nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved. This can be brought to pass only by debasing their Understandings, or by corrupting their Hearts.
Neither Adams, nor any other founder, would have accepted the idea that the civic order should be allowed to perish simply in order to allow every person in it a chance to vote.
James Madison, in Federalist No. 14, distinguished democracy and republicanism (defending the latter) and argued that the former is untenable except in the smallest of geographical bounds. Even in a small nation he insisted that “pure democracy” almost inevitably descends into “the violence of faction” (Federalist No. 10), though he would agree with Alexander Hamilton that a necessary prerequisite of good government is that the power of government is “lodged in the hands of [the] people” (Federalist No. 8).
Madison, in Federalist No. 39, accepts that the “Senate, like the present Congress, and the Senate of Maryland, derives its appointment indirectly from the people” (emphasis mine) since senators were elected by the individual states’ Houses of Representatives, not directly by the people of each state. The way senators were chosen revealed the “mixed character” of America’s government, which was founded on a federal model, not a directly national, democratic one. This was a prudential compromise solution (see Federalist No. 59 and No. 62) to mollify the smaller states, who feared being unable to resist the power of the larger states if both House and Senate elections took place according to a direct, democratic vote of all citizens. A federal republic was also necessary, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 51, because of the danger of pure democracy, in which “the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker,” with the result that “anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; . . .”
One of the chief ways in which those shaping the Constitution distinguished their view from that of pure democracy was expressed by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 68 regarding “the mode of electing the president” via a “small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, [who] will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.” This is the foundation of the Electoral College. Because of the Constitution’s Seventeenth Amendment (1913) mandating direct election of Senators, the Electoral College is one of the only remaining safeguards against pure democracy. It is no surprise, then, that a future Harris administration would seek to eliminate it.
For many evangelicals, there is another idea that seems to be of the essence of good government: universal suffrage. It appears that any questioning of the idea is tantamount to unqualified support of brutal authoritarianism. This is a strange argument, given that women did not have the vote in America until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. Regardless of what one thinks about the merits of the Nineteenth Amendment, are we to believe that America was an authoritarian dictatorship for nearly 60% of its history? Or, might it not be better to believe that universal suffrage (whether good or not) is not of the essence of a republican form of government, the very political system the Constitution put in place? The same could be asked of the Seventeenth Amendment: did America only become a free nation with its passing? Prior to 1913 was America locked in the throes of dictatorship?
I can imagine some evangelicals responding, “Yes, of course, we know all of this. America was founded as republic, not a democracy. That’s Civics 101.” To which I would respond: That’s great, but if you claim to adhere to America’s constitutional order, you also must accept what was most important for the founders: a nation free from tyranny. The founders and the framers of the Constitution insisted on the political participation of the populace only because they saw that as the best safeguard against the tyranny of unchecked power in a king or cabal of elites. They were just as worried about the unchecked power of a degenerate voting majority of the populace. Never would they have countenanced what many evangelicals seem to see as the sine qua non of good government: allowing a people to destroy the constitutional order simply because they were in the majority, that is, pure democracy. They therefore placed many checks on the power of the masses: the Senate being chosen by each state’s Houses of Representatives, the electoral college, and many warnings about the dangers of a morally corrupt population. It is exceedingly strange to see certain evangelicals castigate fellow evangelicals who happen to adhere to America’s original constitutional order, including its deliberately mixed, and non-purely democratic, form of government.
Image Credit: Unsplash
Why don’t conservatives who discuss Republicanism and the founding of our nation first provide the context for that founding? The Articles of Confederation had failed seeing that angry farmers who could not pay high state taxes were losing their land. And so there was widespread dissent and Shay’s Rebellion. Henry Knox mentioned Shay’s Rebellion when writing to tell George Washington that something must be done to quell the disapproval of many people.
We should note that when The Constitution was written, only white male landowners could vote. That was unaddressed by The Constitution. Perhaps it was not addressed because of what James Madison said during the secret Constitutional debates found in Yates’s notes:
‘In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be jsut, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.‘
There are several things to notice here. First is Madison’s objection to the opening of elections in England to all classes of people. But then is the most basic fear that Madison had of majority rule: the loss of his land, his wealth. This shows how at least Madison viewed the conflict that was going on in America. It also shows how some, like Madison, viewed the purpose of the government: to protect their privileged place in society.
If we read what the founding fathers said about those who were dissenting, we see some of the first use of pejoratives in political speech: the calling opponents ‘factions.’ Why? It was because what those who were dissenting called for would threaten the wealth of many of the Founding Fathers. And so for at least some of the founding fathers, perhaps most of them, those who had a different vision of America’s future, which included the elimination of debts, the use of paper money, and agrarian land reform, were to be targeted by the writing of The Constitution and other documents like some of the Federalist Papers. Another way to describe how the founding fathers started to use pejoratives to attack those who were dissenting is that they reacted in self-interest alone.
Of course at least most of the Founding Fathers believed in white supremacy. That is not just illustrated in the Naturalization Acts that were written in the 1790s, but in The Constitution itself as well as the promoting and practice of racially based slavery. This adopting of hierarchy both based on race and biological sex illustrates the authoritarianism that America embraced back then. Authoritarianism does not necessarily mean being led by a tyrant. There are other forms with lesser degrees of authoritarian rule. That tells us that the opposite of authoritarianism with hierarchy is democracy with equality. The employment of democratic processes alone does not imply a democracy. A true democracy must include equality. Otherwise we get hierarchy and with hierarchy we get different forms and levels of authoritarianism.
We religiously conservative American Christians have always had a penchant for authoritarianism. Why? It might partially be because of all of the authority structures we are told to submit to. There are so many of them that it is difficult to imagine a part of life not being governed by some authority figure. And if we Christians must live all of life under various authority structures, then unbelievers must too; after all, misery loves company. And so regardless of whether we are Christian Nationalists, many of us view our elected officials as the government’s equivalents to the elders in a Church. That our elected officials must rule over us for our own, but primarily for their, own good rather than to represent the will of the people. And granted that the will of the people is not always good or just, in a democracy in which the will of the people is determined by elected representatives of the people, we get a first glimpse of what a democracy can be. At the same time, if the will of the people does not recognize the equal rights of the minorities of their nation, then, according to Jefferson, we have oppression. We could add to that that we lose the sense of the literal meaning of the word ‘democracy‘: the people rule.