A vote for God elects a leader who is neither democratic nor a dictator

Of the three Abramic faiths, only Islam has democracy "baked in", writes George Pitcher. But servant ministry unleashes a different kind of power

This week is a veritable festival of democracy in Britain. How much that will be a cause for celebration will depend on whether the SNP’s performance in Scotland looks like breaking up the British union.

But from the Scottish parliament to local council elections throughout England and Wales, to a crucial by-election for a new MP in Hartlepool, to English mayors and Police and Crime Commissioners, it’s the greatest UK feast of democracy outside of a general election since… well, ever.

We’re regularly charged by the more pious of parliament for taking our democracy for granted. That’s not true – state rituals, such as the opening of parliament, celebrate it, the Church of England prays for it and wherever it looks threatened in the world, most recently at the January election of a new president in the United States, we cherish and defend it in our public prints.

So the idea that our people are governed by themselves through elected representatives – however dodgy and unrepresentative that system may at times seem – is held as a system that is as established in law as much as is the Church of England. It is part of our culture and religion (in the sense of what makes us who and what we are) and, as such, is held sacred, even holy.

One wonders, therefore, if democracy is sacramental, as in God-given. There is precious little evidence of that in our scriptures. The Hebrew Bible venerates a god that is entirely dictatorial. The Law, in books such as Deuteronomy, is prescribed entirely by the Almighty (not, note, “our leader”).

The 10 Commandments are not reached through a referendum. The promised land of Israel isn’t established by plebiscite, but by the smiting and mass-murder of its indigenous population by divine will.

The Christian scriptures of the New Testament are no more democratic, which may come as a jolt to those who assume that the Church of England is part of the fabric of our democratic freedoms (with 26 unelected bishops in the House of Lords this is always a tricky claim to make).

Gospel commandments still emanate from a centralised authority called the Kingdom of Heaven – albeit one concerned with a people of God who “should love one another”. Meanwhile, such stabs at electoral democracy as there are come only from the earthly realm. Pontius Pilate, himself a representative of an oppressive autocracy, goes to the demos to ask whether he should free Jesus of Nazareth or the insurrectionist Barabbas.

The Servant Girl at Emmaus by Diego Velazquez

And the apostles elect a new member of their number to replace the dead betrayer Judas Iscariot. In the book of Acts, the first disciples “shared everything in common” and, as a consequence, there “was not a needy person among them” - which hardly amounts to a single transferable vote but is at least not rule by a command-and-control elite.

Incidentally and perhaps surprisingly in the more smug pews of the CofE, the third Abramic faith actually has democracy baked into it. Ali A. Allawi’s excellent book The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation shows that foreign interventions and meddling and the First Word War put an end to democratic experiments in the Islamic nations of the middle-east, but that “typecasting of Islamic rule as entirely autocratic… is certainly not sanctioned either by the Quran or by the Prophet’s sayings.” He continues:

The Islamic basis for representative government derives from a short but decisive Quranic verse demanding that consultation should be the basis of any system of authority [:] “Their [Muslims’] communal business is to be transacted in consultation among themselves.”

Nor should those who are paid by American alt-right organisations to inflame anti-Muslim rhetoric play their custom-and-practice card for Islamic politics before inspecting the Christian Churches’ historical intimacies with fascism. And one doesn’t need to go back to the medieval Inquisition to locate Chistian-complicit brutal subjugation of our peoples.

Distaste for democracies

A cursory inspection of the Catholic Church’s tacit or more explicit support for the regimes of Mussolini in Italy (largely to protect papal dispensation from the political order), Franco in Spain and Pinochet in Chile will demonstrate Christian organised religion’s distaste for democracies, which are somehow beneath it in their vulgarities.

And nor should the Protestant and Anglican traditions exculpate themselves. The American Lutheran Frank Buchman had hailed Adolf Hitler as “a front line of defence against the anti-Christ of Communism” in 1936 and, as Adrian Hastings writes in A History of English Christianity 1920-2000, fear of Communism, liberally (in the non-political sense) seasoned on occasion by anti-Semitism, produced sympathy for fascism:

Such sympathy… developed almost equally naturally from a right-wing English Christian tradition, both Anglican and Roman Catholic, which had long been a little contemptuous of democracy: Wilfred Ward, Hugh Cecil, Hilaire Belloc, T. S. Eliot, all in their different ways belonged to it. It might despise democracy, pride itself upon being “reactionary” and yet not be averse to a populist appeal.

That final phrase, after the word “democracy”, stands as a warning from recent history for our polity today. Too many of our political class and its commentarian hangers-on take pride in their reactionary status and are far from averse to the populist appeal it generates. Think recently elected leaders on both sides of the Atlantic.

It also stands as a warning to our Church, whose doctrines have too regularly elided with those of the anti-democrat and the fascist, against repeating historical mistakes.

So, again, is God a democrat or a dictator? Some at this stage will offer the image of a loving, benign dictator – though the road to hell is littered with the bleached bones of those who have claimed they followed benign dictators. And, anyway, If the scriptural record tends towards a not-so benign dictatorship, then the contemporary historical record of the Church suggests adherence to a deity that’s not benign at all.

Maybe the Christian God is a kind of hands-off, post-Enlightenment deity, with an omnipotence to crush which he chooses not to deploy, who grants his created order the gift of free will, in the J. S. Mill mould, from which emerge the human horrors of anti-democratic abuse.

Death and taxes

Or, as Benjamin Franklin wrote, quoting Daniel Defoe, if the only human certainties are “death and taxes”, then perhaps God is a kind of Gladstonian liberal, ameliorating the former and working to abolish the latter.

But that doesn’t provide an answer for divine democracy. When the question was asked of the late conservative political philosopher Roger Scruton by the Guardian some 15 years ago, he replied:

The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that God exists in three persons, three equal partners, and that God was prepared, in the person of Christ, to suffer the worst that human beings can inflict on one another, in order to rescue us from our own self-centred ways. If by democracy we mean a sense of the equal value of all people, so that all are worthy to be saved, I would count this as a clear proof of God's democratic credentials, or at least of his recognition that humility is a supreme virtue, more important than any ostentatious obedience to the law.

Pretty neat. So perhaps a more useful way of asking the question is not whether God is a democrat, but rather whether democracy is divine. And the answer to that must be that it is so only if it emulates the servant ministry that is the requirement at the heart of the Christian faith.

That then means not only that elected leaders are meant to serve those who elect them, but that we’re meant to vote in a manner that serves their fellow citizens. That’s the example set for Christians by God in the Christ, who stands before earthly power in the form of Pilate and states: “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.”(John 19: 11)

Will those elected to positions of power in our democracy over the next few days recognise its source above and beyond the ballot box? Don’t bet on it. But, if you ever get the chance, vote for it.

George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest