About two months ago, my mom alerted me to an editorial contest at The Catholic Spirit, the weekly publication of the Arch-Diocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. I think. I rarely read it, but since I write essays for fun, I decided to send one in. I wasn't sure of what to write about, and eventually decided to argue that democracy is not intrinsically good, at least for the Catholic. I wasn't certain I had a shot at winning, for two reasons. First, I wasn't all that satisfied with the result—this is a reoccurring theme—and second, attacking democracy wasn't the best subject for a paper that is notoriously soft on, well, everything.
Well, I didn't win. I'll let the reader decide for himself whether or not I deserve the cruel crown of defeat or whether I was snubbed. I wouldn't have minded if the other editorials were interesting, but they weren't. The contest was divided into two categories: high school and college. The high schooler wrote a delusional, if we only spent more money to help poor people life would be fine, piece, the type adored by liberal Catholics. Poverty is a distribution problem and it always will be; it does no good to give more federal aid when the leaders of these corrupt countries keep the money or squander it in tangles of bureaucracy. But I'm not in high school, so I digress.
The college fellow wrote a piece attacking racism. How brave. Of course, using the Arch-Bishop as a reference helps. I don't know why we even talk about racism any more. Racism is bad; I think I've got it. Let's move on.
The genuinely annoying thing, however, was not losing to someone who defeated the defenseless enemy of racism. The thing that irks me is that no second and third places were awarded for the college level. Evidently my editorial was too poorly written to be published. The alternative explanation is that I stepped on some toes. The way I see it, an editorial should be incendiary. As a commentator, nothing bothers me more than reading an "opinion"piece that doesn't produce any effect upon me. What's the point of writing about something everyone agrees on?
Okay, enough babble. I'll let the reader judge for himself.
“Far from being a hopeless dream, the advance of freedom is the great story of our time. In 1945, there were about two dozen lonely democracies on Earth. Today, there are 122,” noted President George W. Bush. It may seem strange to say, but Bush is actually a Democrat; not in the sense that he belongs to that particular party, but in an altogether older and more genuine sense of the word. He firmly believes in the good of democracy. Churchill famously intoned that “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have thus been tried.” Bush's stance is much stronger: the march of democracy brings freedom.
Yet freedom, in modern parlance, means the ability to do whatever one wishes. Without getting hung up on semantical considerations, the freedom to commit sin is not to be sought; the only freedom which should concern the Christian is that which leads one closer to Christ including the freedom to worship him and follow his law. In light of recent events in the democratic world—from the election of Hamas in Palestine, to the fretful state of affairs for Christians in Iraq and Afghanistan—it is good to examine the purported link between democracy and the Christian conception of freedom.
As G.K. Chesterton notes, “Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.” Stepping back to the Enlightenment, we immediately find evidence of a crowd which cherished democracy. An enlightened fellow named Thomas Paine was a more sincere Democrat—in the classic sense—than even President Bush. Despite his slighting in the history books, his writings provided much of the inspiration for the American Revolution.
In Common Sense, Paine speaks none to kindly of kings: “It is the pride of kings which throw mankind into confusion.” Paine observed that kings were corrupt, which was assuredly true. He then postulated that since a kings were corrupt, it would be much better if the people were given a share in the rule. This is again true, in the sense that if a king was truly corrupt, it would be very surprising if the people could not manage to do a better job than the dethroned monarch.
But only for a time. History has shown that just as a king may behave beastly, so too may the people or their respected representatives. There is a tendency for leaders to corrupt, but it is irrelevant whether they are kingly or simply human. Adam and Eve had no political affiliation of which I am aware, and yet they still managed to get expelled from the garden. This is all nothing more than an application the Church's doctrine of original sin.
A simple sampling of history will show a surprising tendency among democratic regimes to collapse. Surprising, perhaps, to the devout Democrat, but certainly not to the convicted Catholic. This all seems to bode very poorly for democracy, but my final and most important point is this: no system of government will always protect liberty. A particular system of government must be weighed according to its manifestations, and whether or not they conform to Catholic teaching; as Christ put it, “By their fruits you shall know them.”
It is difficult then, to see why a Christian must be a sincere believer in democracy. Recently, a converted Christian named Abdul Rahman narrowly escaped martyrdom in democratic Afghanistan. One wonders why we should focus on spreading the light of democracy when it is a different Light which makes man free.
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