Democracy Hypocrisy

The reaction of the Catholic Church to last week’s court decision striking down California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 was swift and to the point. Speaking for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Francis George mourned that “It is tragic that a federal judge would overturn the clear and expressed will of the people in their support for the institution of marriage.” On the Protestant side, Focus on the Family chimed in that “Judge Walker’s ruling raises a shocking notion that a single federal judge can nullify the votes of more than 7 million California voters.”

This sudden Christian solicitude for the will of the people should make anyone familiar with the history of Christianity gag.

Democracy was invented by the Pagan Greeks; there is some reason to believe that Pagan Germanic tribes practiced a rough form of democracy as well. It certainly isn’t found anywhere in the Bible; when 250 “men of renown” complained to Moses that he was being overly autocratic, God obligingly opened a pit in the earth to swallow them up.

After Christianity seized control of the Roman Empire, democracy vanished from Europe altogether; Middle Ages society was founded on Augustine’s iron notion of rule by God, not by man. The Middle Ages Church did all it could (and that was quite a bit) to snuff out any glimmer of democracy before it could take hold. When the Emperor Frederick II published his “Constitution of Melfi” in 1231, it provided among other things for a representative assembly, with each town sending two delegates to inform the Emperor about local needs. A livid Pope Gregory IX excommunicated Frederick and called him the Antichrist. That should not have been surprising, for only a few years earlier Pope Innocent III had declared England’s Magna Carta, the first written expression of the English people’s rights, null and void because it purported to rein in the power of a divinely ordained monarch and vassal of the Pope.

The Protestant Reformation did nothing to advance the cause of democracy; neither Luther nor Calvin had the slightest intention of giving the common people any more power than the Pope had. By the 1640s, when the English Civil War broke out, the rebels were a curious mix of proto-democrats, heavily influenced by John Lilburne, and radical Calvinists, led by Oliver Cromwell. Lilburne’s goal was simple: he wanted all adult males to be able to elect Parliament, rather than just a small handful of the propertied class. Cromwell’s goal was equally simple: rule by the God experts, to impose morality on a sinful island. Cooperation between the two camps was easy when both were simply warring against the status quo, but once the king was defeated the incompatibility of their goals quickly surfaced. Cromwell ordered Lilburne’s arrest for treason, but after a dramatic trial before a jury Lilburne was acquitted. Didn’t matter; Cromwell threw him back in jail anyway, without bothering to file charges. Cromwell proceeded to expel the elected members of Parliament who voted against him – so much for democracy.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Protestants shared Cromwell’s dim view of rule by the people rather than by the God experts. John Cotton, namesake of the famous evangelist Cotton Mather, put it bluntly:

Democracy, I do not conceyve, that ever God did ordeyne as a fitt government eyther for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed? As for monarchy, and aristocracy, they are both of them clearely approoved, and directed in scripture, yet so as referreth the soveraigntie to Himselfe, and setteth up Theocracy in both, as the best forme of government in the commonwealth, as well as in the church.

When war broke out in 1776, John Adams estimated that a third of the colonists supported continued British rule. The leaders of this faction were the Anglican ministers, who called the rebels “hair-brained fanaticks” and who formed a league to “watch and confute all publications that threatened mischief to the Church of England and the British government in America.” The rebels were inspired by the humanist Tom Paine, whose “Common Sense” fired the imagination with its call not only for independence from Britain, but for democratic rule by the people rather than by divine-right kings.

After winning one revolution, Paine went on to France, where the battle lines between humanists who backed the “Rights of Man” and the Christians who backed rule by God’s anointed were even sharper. One of the first acts of the National Assembly had been to adopt a “Civil Constitution of the Clergy,” allowing the people to elect bishops democratically rather than having them imposed by a foreign government in Rome. People could only vote after hearing Mass and taking an oath that in voting they would consider only the interests of religion, and only priests who had served 15 years in a parish were eligible for election. Nothing in the law affected Catholic theology in the slightest, nor did any of the elected bishops attempt to make any such change. Nonetheless, the Church was absolutely horrified by the prospect of such democracy. Everyone who participated in the new democratic regime was automatically excommunicated, and the Church led both violent insurrection throughout France and a diplomatic campaign for invasion of France by Catholic Austria to crush the democratic threat.

After a torrent of blood, the Church’s campaign succeeded. Next it turned to the United States, where a pattern of local parish governance by lay trustees posed a similar threat. Pope Pius VII unleashed his wrath on the idea that mere parishioners should be able to choose their own pastor just because they were paying his salary, calling it an “intolerable transgression” of ecclesiastical and Divine law. No bloodshed was necessary; most American Catholics meekly went along. The idea of parishioner democracy never completely died, though. In Connecticut in 2007, after priests were caught stealing parish funds to support their gay lovers, a group called the Voice of the Faithful lobbied the legislature for a bill to allow parishioners to elect boards to oversee parish finances, with the local bishop an ex officio member of each such board. The Church reacted as though the purpose of the bill was to exterminate Catholicism; it never saw the light of day in the legislature.

Throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the Church bitterly opposed political democracy throughout the world. When the people of central Italy, ruled by the Pope as a dictator, voted in plebiscites that they would rather join a reunited Italy, Popes brought in foreign troops to prop up their secular power. That effort ultimately failed, but a few decades later the Church enthusiastically backed Mussolini’s coup against the democratically elected Italian government; the Church was paid off with billions of dollars of subsidies in return. In 1930s Spain, a democratically elected government ended taxpayer subsidies for the Church as well as the Church’s education monopoly; the Church responded by allying with Hitler and Mussolini to wage a devastating civil war and a deliberate campaign of extermination against Spain’s humanists. The same war against democracy was waged throughout Latin America, notably in 1973 Chile when the democratically elected Allende government was overthrown for trying to introduce secularism into taxpayer-funded schools.

It’s not fair just to pick on the Catholics, though. In South Africa, it was the Protestant Dutch Reformed Church leading the charge for apartheid, denying democratic rights to the 85% of South Africans who were not chosen by God to be white. Here in America, the same spirit drove the Southern Baptists in their massive resistance to black voting rights.

In a delicious irony, on the very same say that Cardinal George was working up tears over the “will of the people” of California, a cardinal on the other side of the world was expressing the opposite view. In Kenya, the Church had vigorously opposed a national referendum on a new constitution, because it permits abortion in a case where a mother’s life is in danger. The constitution was approved overwhelmingly. With good sportsmanship, Cardinal John Njue responded:

We respect the outcome of the referendum, where the larger numbers of Kenyans have voted to accept this proposed constitution. However, truth and right are not about numbers. We therefore, as the shepherds placed to give moral guidance to our people, still reiterate the need to address the flawed moral issues in this proposed constitution.

“Truth and right are not about numbers.” Maybe Cardinal Njue and Cardinal George ought to get together and talk about that.

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5. Colson: Gay Equality Will Destroy Democracy