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A question that does not get asked very much, especially in public, is if Christianity is compatible with democracy. Organized Christians in this age make a point of supporting “democracy” because the people in charge cannot stop talking about it, but that speaks to the sorts of people running organized Christianity. They want to be in good standing with the rulers, an irony that never gets mentioned. The thing they claim to profess evolved in opposition to secular rule.

Putting that aside, the issue of whether democracy, as in the consent of the governed through direct participation in governance by the governed, is compatible with Christianity is an important one. It is clear that as the West has become more democratic, it has become less Christian. Open hostility to Christianity is a feature of the class of people who talk about democracy the most. It certainly seems like the fans of democracy are not fans of Christianity.

Most people today who call themselves Christian or one of the sects of what we think of as Christianity are well aware of the hostility, but they blame secularism or various names for radicalism, rather than democracy. Christians embrace democracy as much as the opponents of Christianity, even if their particular brand of Christianity has no democratic elements. Catholicism, for example, is anti-democratic in structure, but American Catholics love democracy.

There are, however, Christian sects that do embrace democracy. Baptists churches, for example, hire their pastors. If the pastor finds a bigger church willing to hire him and pay him more money, he is free to leave the old church and join the new one. On the other hand, if the church congregation or the deacons decide the pastor is not to the liking they can fire him. Here is a video from a Baptist minister giving the background on why he was recently fired by his church.

The short version of the video is the pastor gave a sermon on marriage and the role of women that was based in a traditional interpretation of Scripture. The wife of the youth pastor, a more modern woman, was offended by the sermon. She and her husband organized a campaign within the church against the pastor in the video and eventually got him fired from his post. In the end, they got a majority of the congregation to agree that either he goes, or they go.

This is a very democratic result. After all, the starting point for democracy is the assertion that the majority must prevail. While there is nothing in Scripture that says this is how things must be, most Christians accept this assertion. In fact, one could argue that the most important victim of majority rule was Christ. If instead of demanding Barabbas they demanded Jesus, the world would be quite different. The point is this congregation and others like it are not organized according to Scripture.

More important, the way they are organized contradicts a basic assumption of all religions, not just Christianity. That basic assumption is that there are some things too important to be left to man. These are things that are true because the gods or God have declared them to be true. Scripture does not say adultery, for example, has to be sorted through a show of hands. For Christians, adultery is a sin, and it is not up for debate

Without knowing the content of the sermon that the pastor in the video says was the source of the conflict, it cannot be judged dogmatically. What matters is the pastor preached in a way that offended the congregation, or at least a majority of them, so the rest went along with firing him. If his sermon was theologically and scripturally correct, then it means the congregation decided they did not like that part of the Bible, so they avoid it and those who preach it.

The point here is that for Christianity to work, or any religion for that matter, the main body of its beliefs must be beyond the collective judgement of man. The collection of oughts and ought nots that make up every religion are rooted in an authority beyond the ability of man to question. Otherwise, the oughts and ought nots are rooted in the collective will of the people. The word we have for this is democracy. In other words, democracy replaces God or the gods as the moral authority.

This is why the radicals of the French Revolution firts set their eyers on the Catholic Church when they gained power. Popular consent could not coexist with an alternative moral authority or its representative on earth, so it had to go. The same logic was at work when they eradicated the aristocracy. Hierarchy is an alternative moral authority to popular sovereignty, so it cannot coexist with it. The thrown and the altar have always been the enemy of popular consent.

You see that in the story of the video pastor. The people who engineered his termination feel justified not because they find support in Scripture, but because they think they have the support of the majority. The God they truly worship is not on the Bible but in the show of hands and their sense of being in the majority. It is not hard to see how this can lead to what you see with the Episcopal Church. It is rainbows and sodomites because the god they worship is the god of democracy.

What the evidence leads to is that the enemy of Christianity is not liberalism or even secularism, but the concept of democracy. Once people of any faith embrace the idea that truth is the result of consent, there is no room for God. Any religion that tries to exist in a society that embraces democracy, will come under pressure to replace its God with the god of the people. As a matter of survival, Christians should see democracy as their primary enemy, externally and internally.

This raises an important question. Can Christianity survive in a democracy. Even if the Church rejects democracy and all its works, can it survive in a society which is governed by the principles of democracy? Is there some limit on the democratic impulse that must be in place and be viewed as unassailable in order for Christian to live in democratic society. If not, then are Christians obligated to fight democracy or simply acquiesce to their own destruction?

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