Is democracy no better than terrorism? That's a hard premise to defend, but it's precisely what some people believe - specifically, the people who don't agree that individual human being should have the right to make their own decisions about their lives. In America, it's the view of Christian Reconstructions and adherents of Dominion Theology who favor theocracy over democracy.

Patrick Johnston writes:

The United States of America is not and should not be a democracy. Our forefathers bequeathed us a constitutional republic.

Patrick Johnston seems to think that “democracy” and “constitutional republic” are mutually exclusive; the truth, however, is that they aren’t. A democracy is a system where the people are sovereign and rule themselves; our constitutional republic is the governmental structure which creates the context and limits in which democracy operates.

In a democracy, the majority can abuse the minority, the poor can rob from the rich, the white can persecute the black, and the born can terrorize the unborn, because they can “out-vote” them.

The exact same things can happen in any government system. They can happen in a constitutional republic, too, given the right conditions. America’s constitutional republic is designed to make such abuses more difficult, but obviously they don’t stop it completely — has Patrick Johnston not heard of slavery and segregation? But the above issues aren’t his real problem:

In a democracy, popular leaders can usurp their God-ordained limits... Our government was designed to primarily be a rule by law that is based upon Divine Law, not a rule by men. We were given a system of checks and balances that appealed to divine authority as the basis of the Bill of Rights, as the basis for the limitations of the power of the majorities and those in leadership.

Patrick Johnston doesn’t like democracy because in a democracy, the people are sovereign and rule themselves. In a democracy, God — or more specifically, God’s self-appointed representatives — aren’t sovereign and don’t control society. Johnston is convinced that the government was designed to be based on Divine Law, but that’s obviously false given the opening of the Constitution: We the People... it doesn’t say God....

Might doesn’t make right. A vote doesn’t determine right from wrong. What is the basis of right and wrong? God is the arbiter of right and wrong, and He has given us His revelation in the Holy Bible. What does the Bible have to say about a democracy? In one of the first attempts at a democratic vote in Scripture, the ground opened up under the majority who tried to oust Moses and they were swallowed alive down into the pit of hell (Numbers 16)!

This is Patrick Johnston’s opinion of people who think that they should determine how they will be governed and course which society takes. It's remarkably similar to the opinion held by radical Islamists, like Osama bin Laden.

A democratic vote is fine as long as they vote for what is right, but when the democratic consensus prefers to violate God’s will, they have voted for something that is unlawful and something that will ultimately bring God’s wrath upon them.

In other words, “democracy” is fine so long as people vote the way they are told; when they don’t, I guess their votes shouldn’t be counted — and perhaps denied a right to vote at all. What’s the point of voting when you are only allowed to vote for one thing?

Why does a democracy tend to evil? The Scripture says that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God: people are sinful and, unrestrained by the law of God, they will vote sinfully.

Of course, the same is true of the God’s self-appointed representatives, which is why theocracy is never any better than democracy — and often quite a bit worse. Patrick Johnston says that democracy and terrorism are two faces of the same evil, which I guess is the “evil” of denying the sovereignty of his god over our lives.

I say that the Muslim terrorists and Patrick Johnston are two faces of the same evil: the evil of denying the legitimacy of humans making their own decisions about their own lives, regardless of what religious panjandrums have to say.

 

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