What I'm Reading

Part I.: Calvinism and the Success of Liberal Democracy

John Snyder

Have you ever wondered why political liberty seems to be primarily the creation of Christian civilization? Even more precisely, have you even wondered why the development of liberal democracy was the "creation" of 16^th and 17^th century Christian Protestantism? Let me give you a very simplified lesson in history. It is not a "politically correct" history or one embraced by the "muticulturalist" academe or the political left, but it is, nonetheless absolutely true.

The first successful democracy in the history of the world was England. I know that you've heard it said that it was Athens. But that experiment vanished in the dust of history two thousand years before the Puritan Revolution established the first lasting liberal democratic state. Before British Parliamentarianism came to fruition under the Puritans no one really toyed with the idea of democracy. It was John Locke, Samuel Rutherford, and John Calvin who were the true progenitors of liberal democracy, not Pericles or Themistocles.

It is true that Athenian democracy was first in time, but it did not last. In fact, it was a decided flop. Whereas the success of modern countries like the United States and England are uniformly held to be the result of their political institutions, it may be strongly argued that Athens was culturally successful despite its democracy. In fact, the architects of our own constitution used the Athenian experience as an example of what not to do! While it is true that the plays and philosophy of the Golden Age survive, the political experiment did not survive and only continued for a very short time.

The fact is that until the Puritan Revolution in England, democracy was roundly rejected by all learned men as a political monstrosity. Plato, who is really the father of all western philosophy, wrote his greatest work The Republic as a discourse against the evils of democracy. In fact, his entire project is to construct a state around the contemptible whimsy and folly of the "people". Despite the blabbering nabobs in universities, prior to the coming of the Puritans, democracy was a very bad word. And rightfully so; it really had a very poor track record when in comes to wisdom or success. Socrates, you may remember, who was probably the greatest teacher between Moses and Jesus Christ was put to death at the hands of Athenian democracy. For that matter, Jesus Christ was condemned by a simple voice vote 400 years later in Jerusalem. Not a very pretty record.

I write this to clarify some things that have been deliberately "unclarified" by our modern secular universities. Democracy, prior to the Calvinist habit of mind, was a flat failure. And despite the pretense and assertions to the contrary that democracy is a product of the Enlightenment or the Renaissance or a growing national prosperity, liberal democracy is entirely the product of the Protestant Reformation. Yes, that is what I said. Liberal democracy is a "Christian" creation.

Now those are fighting words! But I am prepared to defend the statement.

Today there are about 70 democracies of various health in the world. But every single one of them has derived the principles of democracy either directly or indirectly from the Protestant Reformation and most particularly from the strain of Protestantism called Puritanism (i.e. Calvinism).

For starters, the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, are all the direct inheritors of this great tradition begun in England. The Puritan model had a few Protestant cousins, the Christian Reformers of Holland and the Calvinists of Switzerland. But prior to 1800 there were the only five or so democracies in the entire world and all of them were Protestant Christian.

Europe was not Democratic. Please get this straight. In fact, Europe was dead set against democracy and this Calvinist model of liberalism, so was Asia, the Middle East, Africa or South America.

Liberal Democracy was planted in the world by Calvinists.

It's first great opponent was Louis the XIV, the second was Napoleon, then came the earlier socialists, the Communists, the Fascists, then the deconstructionists of all the great universities. This is the real continental model. All these anti-democratic concepts are really just repackaged derivatives of the age-old total state principle. That is the idea that the state's purpose is to keep people for the temptations of evil. And consequently the great problem of government is control.

At first that doesn't sound all that bad. Maybe it even sound like a good idea. But that's why liberal democracy has remained the decided minority opinion in the great court of political history.

But about 350 years ago, against this model, Calvinist Protestantism began to produce something called Liberal democracy which stands as the only real viable and successful alternative to the idea of the total state. Despite alternative and clever teachings to the contrary in our modern philosophy departments, despite the genius of modern political scientists, and the theories of modern sociologists, There really are no successful alternative models that produce political and social liberty.

But then there are those other European states, which had not truly achieved stable democracy until it was... well... forced on them by... yes... those same children of the Calvinist revolution: the United Kingdom, the United States, and our cousins, the Aussies and Canucks. You may remember that it was they who imposed democracy on Continental Europe, Germany, Italy and Austria, not to mention Japan. Today the success of the liberal democratic idea is seen in the political inheritance of India, South Africa, the Philippines and South Korea. All these are the second cousins of the British or American Empires.

Then, of course, there are those "other countries" who aspire to political liberalism. They having some distant intimation of the power and genius of democracy while not quite attain it. Their scholars visit our western universities and parliaments and listen to our speech in the UN and attempt to mimic the language and values of liberal democracy without really understanding what it's all about or learning the source of it. For that matter, most Americans no longer understand what "it's all about" either. But at the top of that list are the dysfunctional poster boy countries like Russia, Mexico, Nigeria, Venezuela, or Indonesia.

And then there are the other 100 tawdry little countries that revel in the hideous darkness of despotism. Top of the list: China, North Korea, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Iran, Sudan and the other litany of human horrors that occupy seats in the United Nations.

If the Calvinists haven't touched it democracy did not flourish there. Period.

Why? That's the $100,000 question, isn't it?

Now let me tip my cards and tell you that the answer has to do with the Protestant-Calvinist conception of man. And more to the point: it has to do with the Calvinist idea of original sin... what is sometimes called "total depravity".

That is the starting point in this Christian civics lesson. And it is not a socio-economic lesson. It is a religious statement of fact. I understand that this is deeply disturbing to secularists who believe that man is inherently good. It is a squeamish point to Marxists who see all questions of human society through the prism of economics. It is a hateful notion to the sociologist who comments on behavior though the lens of gender, or race, or urban and rural dynamics or class structure. It is a frightful hobgoblin to the philosopher who sees conflict and misunderstandings as disjunctions of mind and ontological reality. But the only beginning point of any meaningful question about civil government is the first question of anthropology: what is man and what is his nature?

That will be the topic of my next article.