By Jonathan van Tongeren

As we all know, there is no clear cut case for democracy in the Bible. At best some basic principles about government can be derived from scripture. This explains why some Christians are convinced democrats, while others only tactically accept the democratic rules or principally oppose democracy altogether. Each position has its merit.
Winston Churchill is often quoted as having said that democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others that have been tried. With G.K. Chesterton one might retort that one of the forms of government that has never been tried might be better.[1] I would like to add that Churchill also said, there’s nothing wrong with a good dictator. This is exactly the point when we look at a Christian politician such as Engelbert Dollfuss. Dollfuss was the leader of the Austrian Christian Social Party. Now, as a Christian Democrat, he was responsible for the end of the democratic system in Austria in the 1930’s. He introduced a system that centred around pre-democratic institutions such as family, church, guild and neighbourhood. It is always tricky to hypothesise about what might have happened, but the fact is that Dollfuss deprived the national-socialists of any chances in Austria before the ‘Anschluss’ (the annexation of Austria by Nazi-Germany), at which time Dollfuss was brutally murdered by Nazis. Apart from the question whether Dollfuss was right in abolishing democracy, he understood quite well that democracy is not a goal in itself, but that the aim of Christian-Democracy is to serve public justice. Democracy can be a means towards this end, but that is not to say there are no other means towards the same goal.

Historically, Christian politicians such as the Dutch leader of the Anti-Revolutionary Party Groen van Prinsterer have criticized the basic tenet of democracy, the ‘sovereignty of the people’. Groen believed that all sovereignty comes from God, and this is (or should be) still a basic tenet of Christian-Democracy, which we will discuss further on.[2] For now we should conclude that this basic tenet of Christian-Democracy is at odds with a basic tenet of modern democracy, at least as it came to be perceived since the French Revolution; sovereignty lies either with God or with the people.

In current politics I would like to identify two evidently flawed views on democracy. The first is a technical and power-focussed view on democracy, which could be observed with American neoconservatives, who basically assumed that all that was needed for democracy to function in a country such as Iraq was regime change. The good thing about the invasion of Iraq is that it has proven the neoconservatives wrong in this respect.
The second is the idea that not only the state should be democratic, but that all communities in society should be governed democratically. This includes families, churches, private schools and other associations of free men. These radical democrats believe that individuals have to be protected (by the state) from their own communities. This will lead, for example, to pressure on Christian schools to hire atheist teachers on the ground of so called ‘anti-discrimination’-legislation, pressure on churches to have homosexual ‘marriages’ and clergy and so on, and when pressure doesn’t work, the state has the means to enforce its views. It is only consistent for democrats to propagate this, because ‘the people’ are sovereign and have to ‘protect’ the children against ‘indoctrination’ by parents, school or church. The only answer to this can be the non-democratic view that children belong to their parents, that all authority comes from God and hence parents have more sovereignty over their children than does the state.

This is a basic problem of democracy: that it has a tendency towards becoming a dictatorship of the majority, even if the majority is not so clear. This has been a problem of modern democracy from the outset, when in the name of the common will of the people, king Louis XVI was beheaded and a quarter million innocent French citizens were slaughtered, as the government had meanwhile designated them as the ‘internal enemy’.[3]
These quarter of a million people fell victim to a so called ‘general will’, in which they were apparently not included. Some well known revolutionaries, who suggested some ways of tempering this inherent problem of democracy, such as Robespierre, were later beheaded – again by order of the ‘volonté générale’ of the people – themselves.

What the aforementioned two groups of neoconservatives and radical democrats have in common, is that they assume that democracy is everything. Even those who see that democracy needs some restraints, will, like Montesqieu, tend to suggest some constitutional restraints (division of power etc.). But in fact the only effective restraint on democracy can be provided by pre-democratic institutions. Precisely these pre-democratic institutions are targeted, in the name of the rights of the individual, by the radical democrats.
Paradoxically it is exactly because of the pre-democratic institutions, such as families, churches, enterprises, news media, that democracy could arise in the western world and that it could be maintained. This also explains why it is a foolish idea to ‘spread democracy’ by means of regime change. The civil society of Iraq is hardly comparable to the civil society of western countries at the time when democracy was gradually introduced.

At this point Christian-Democracy comes in. Christian-Democracy is not about a blind faith in the workings of democracy. What Christian-Democrats have historically understood is that the usefulness of democracy is limited. Democracy is just a system of regulating the relations between the different spheres of sovereignty but it should not enter into the realm of the spheres itself.[4] Authority in such spheres is naturally non-democratic. Families don’t have a vote who will be in charge for the next four years, the children obey the parents and what would be the point of a faith community without a central point of authority (revelation)?

Under the influence of radical democrats, European governments are venturing into the spheres of these pre-democratic institutions more and more. Historically the pre-democratic rights of these institutions have been included in the constitutions of many countries, but nowadays, radical democrats aim to undermine these constitutional rights, exactly because they have a pre-democratic origin.
For a long time Christian-Democrats have emphasized the rights of the pre-democratic institutions as they are included in the liberal-democratic constitutions of the western world. By now it seems that Christians are the only ones that still believe in these liberal formulas, whereas liberals themselves claim to do so too, but meanwhile act contrary to them. European Christian Democrats have to realize that while they fight for their constitutional rights, radical democrats are working to undermine those rights. By the time this struggle is over, the constitutional rights will be reduced to empty shells. Christians in politics should reconsider their strategy and focus on strengthening the pre-democratic institutions. Only these enclaves on non-democratic authority can save us from an overdose of democracy. Constitutional rights are not everything either.

[1] Gilbert K. Chesterton, What’s wrong with the world (1910).
[2] Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer, Ongeloof en Revolutie (1849).
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
[4] Abraham Kuyper, Soevereiniteit in eigen kring (1880).