The Myth of a Christian Democracy

Ask any Christian about democracy today, and chances are he or she will tell you that democracy is part of the Christian tradition and that without Christianity there would be no democracy.

They are free to claim anything they want, of course, but one has to be unusually uneducated or religious (which happen to correlate well) to make such a claim.

No Christian country was democratic until a few centuries ago. Before that time, most of them were kingdoms where the church and the royal court had a well-functioning relationship, except in financial matters. After all, the king held his position by the grace of God.

Any insurgencies attempting to introduce semi-democratic kingdoms were quickly crushed as heretic. Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism, made his position perfectly clear in my country, which is today considered one of the best democracies in the world: when the peasant insurgents rose against absolute monarchy, Luther recommended that they be "slain as rabid dogs" for daring to oppose the god-given power of the king.

It is only within recent History that the Church has spoken for the people, and we need not go far back until the Church was opposed to the power of the people. Under the French Revolution, it was the priests and the royal people that lost their heads--the people was fully aware of its enemies.

One might argue that these examples aren't up to date, of course, so how about democracy in its original context? Well, that was in Greece: at that time, a non-Christian, polytheistic society, long before anyone had thought of Jesus.

Granted, that is long ago albeit quite authentic in terms of democracy, so perhaps a few visits to current or very recent Christian states where democracy thus must be guaranteed (were the Christian claims of democratic tradition true) are appropriate.

We can find interesting experiments in an African country where an army general insists on using the Ten Commandments as law, and where child soldiers are mutilated under a terrible dictatorship. In Chile, Pinochet was a sworn Christian, and near the cradle of democracy we have found Slobodan Milosevich, who was the son of a Christian priest and Christian himself. Perhaps these people had fallen by the wayside according to Christian self-righteousness, but how about a peaceful state such as the Vatican then? No, it certainly doesn't adhere to principles of democracy either.

But then perhaps at least the opposite is true: if we find democracy somewhere, then certainly that would imply the existence of a Christian state? Again, the answer is no. Turkey is a democratic state but Muslem. Thailand, Taiwan, and Japan are democratic states but buddhist. Israel is a democracy, but they're Jewish.

In short, Christianity is neither sufficient for democracy, nor necessary. It is a mixture of religion and politics when people equate Christianity and democracy or claim that democracy requires Christianity.

We can easily recognize the combination of religion and politics in the Middle East, but claiming to rule a country according to the will of Allah is no better nor worse than to equate democracy with Christianity. As long as democracy is equated with a specific religion, the peoples of the Middle East are going to view democracy not only as a change of politics, which is difficult enough, but also as a change of religion. Equating Christianity with democracy, Christians turn the conflict of a change of government into a religious conflict as well.

Christians of the West may consider that a dual victory, of course, but to an atheist democracy is incompatible with any authoritative religion. Democracy means that the mandate is given to the people. If one believes that metaphysical entities can overrule laws made by human hands, and that the rules set by these metaphysical entities are known by a theocratic elite that has convinced the people that they derive their authority from a higher being, then one rejects the core democratic principle of government by the people.

Replacing Islam with Christianity will be just as contradictory to democratic principles. It does not matter who you place above human beings, but whether you invoke such an authority at all.