On the Death of American Democracy

Leave a Comment / By /

For many years now, I have been saying that even the American democratic system will ultimately fail, that it will never become The Kingdom of God, that democracy itself must be shown to be inferior to whatever God’s government ultimately will look like.

Is that defeatist?

At the time, I was saying that as a conservative evangelical Christian, and it came with a lot of assumptions. For example, at the time I believed that the only truly righteous form of government would be a patriarchal family – that it was necessary to see a structure where righteous men ruled righteously over their subordinates, and that the rule flowed down from God through the patriarchs to their clans and tribes and families – essentially a giant pyramid of authority, with all the rankings that it implies.

These days, I see things rather differently: that power over others, even authority over others, isn’t the goal; it’s every individual so perfectly ruled by the Spirit – so individually precisely like God themselves – that nobody needs to have control or authority over another – or better stated perhaps, that nobody needs someone else to have control over them to see righteousness flourish in everyone.

Yes, current systems definitely involve structures that encode power-over and authority-over. Yes, the Bible definitely describes power structures. And yes, a truly flat system is almost infinitely distant from where we are today. But when you extrapolate the Bible’s teachings, I believe a flat system where nobody is controlling anyone else is the most likely answer to how things SHOULD be. It’s beyond our capability now – but perhaps not beyond what a truly righteous people can do.

So I cannot see how any variation or derivation of America’s system of humans leading and directing and controlling and holding authority over other humans can be truly Biblical.

As such, despite the very significant change in my theology, my sense that America’s systems cannot last forever hasn’t changed. It’s just for different reasons. On the one hand, capitalism isn’t the right answer, but on the other, patriarchy and its power structures don’t seem to be the right answer either.

But it’s what we have now, and as many politicians have observed over the years, “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all others that have been tried.”

https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-it-has-been-said-that-democracy-is-the-worst-form-of-government-except-all-the-others-winston-churchill-5-63-35.jpg

Until the Kingdom of God is more visible here on earth, my preference is certainly for democracy over pure socialism or communism or fascism. What we Americans have mostly enjoyed up until this time is actually a “liberal democracy,” not “liberal” in the sense of not-conservative, but “liberal” in the sense of limited government that is subject to the will of its citizens, as discussed in https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberal-democracy.

However, I’m being intensely challenged these days by what I’m watching happen, because I never imagined that in just a few short years, we’d see the wholesale abandonment of the essential principles of liberal democracy by the very people that taught me to honor and value democracy above all else: the Republican Party and conservative Christians, who for decades howled in anger at everything they perceived as even slightly socialist or communist or anti-democratic. We fought entire world wars against anything else, and hundreds of thousands of Americans died to bring the blessings of democracy and liberty to our neighbors on this planet.

Somehow, in just a few years, those supporters of Republicanism swung radically, en masse, towards an authoritarian ideal, and to all appearances are utterly infatuated with anyone who proposes to give them power over others, so that their preferred social and religious agenda may take control.

I sense that what has changed is that those conservatives finally realized that a democratic form of government absolutely requires compromise. You cannot have your way with the world if you’re willing to share power with people who disagree with you.

As long as they held the majority position, and could fairly regularly have control of two or even all three branches of our governmental systems, they could console themselves that any setbacks were just speed bumps on the way to a conservative utopia.

But when faced with a declining share of the racial mix in America, and a growing presence of people who didn’t think like them, and a decline in religious control, something suddenly snapped, and they abruptly decided as a group, in just a few short years, that democracy be damned if it means that they were not going to be in charge.

In other words, democracy really only mattered if they were winning with it.

Version 1.0.0

Now, plenty of very scholarly books point out that this trend is not as new or as sudden as it has seemed to be. For example, in “Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism – and What Comes Next” Bradley Onishi argues convincingly that this move towards authoritarianism and nationalism has been very deliberately pursued since the 1960s. I’ve read plenty of American and evangelical history lately, and I must now acknowledge that this push towards social and religious control is NOT new.

However, for those of us who have not been peering behind the curtain, it FEELS new. It feels like suddenly the rug has been yanked out from underneath those democratic ideals explicitly by evangelicals.

And it’s deeply disconcerting.

One reason it’s disconcerting is that I’ve also read the history of Germany. I know well how fast a nation can swing from liberal democracy to absolute dictatorship and complete fascism. I know well how fast a people can completely lose their freedoms. And 2020s America is following 1930s Germany’s history nearly perfectly.

It took Hitler 10 years to come back from a failed coup, but once he was back on the scene, and elected (in democratic elections!) as Chancellor, it took him less than one year to completely seize control, and another year to eliminate all rivals and declare himself ruler and dictator.

These things happen FAST once they begin. And unless we’re hypervigilant, I believe it’s quite likely that America could suffer the same fate, just as quickly.

Already, the new president is taking steps that should utterly frighten students of history.

This list is hardly exclusive or complete. And it’s not just the president; many of these actions have been taken by his supporters, and proclaimed as right and appropriate by his numerous sycophants.

Much more could be said about specific actions that have been taken in just one month, but to be frank, I’m quite uninterested in documenting them further, because it’s almost depressing.

All of these actions, from my point of view, strike at the heart of a democratic process, where a President recognizes his legal limitations within the American system, and willingly submits to accountable oversight. It completely ignores the idea that the President is a servant of the people, a leader under their authority.

Such things have happened around the world many times through history, unfortunately, and it never ends well for the populace. Even those who facilitated the rise of the strongman ultimately suffer – except, initially, those ultra-rich who fund the strongman and receive kickbacks as a result. But for all the lowly regular folk, it always ends in pain. And for those supporters who assumed their interests would be honored, the pain is especially intense when they realize they have been betrayed.

So what’s the point in sharing all this?

I will say straight up that I think it’s too late to turn this ship around. For one thing, too many changes have already been made – and not successfully challenged by his opponents – to trust that we will have fair elections at a national level in 2026 or 2028. But more importantly, there are simply too many people in America today who give their full-throated endorsement of these changes. Echoing my earlier point, there are a lot of religious people who are quite happy (right now, at least) to sacrifice democracy for their ideas about how America should be operated to facilitate their structuring of power and control over those they perceive as unbelievers and heretics. And by the time they realize their mistake, just like late 1930s Germany, or the advent of any other popularist-created dictatorship in history, it will be entirely too late to walk back the changes. Honestly, it’s probably already too late.

So if we can’t realistically fix this, why am I recounting these things in such detail?

In a word: awareness.

Maybe also a second word: preparation.

We followers of The Way of Jesus – and I’m explicitly avoiding the term “Christian” here because at present it’s too polluted a concept, too tainted by those who support this new regime – we followers of The Way of Jesus need to go back and look at Jesus’ and the Epistles’ words about their relationship with government. Every single author of the New Testament – and most of the authors of the Hebrew Bible too – were writing from the perspective of people under oppression, subjugated by tyrannical foreigners and whose local leaders were often deeply corrupted puppets of those rulers.

Also, we might do well to read some Black history – after all, I write this during Black History Month in 2025 – because Black people in America have a lot to teach us about living under oppression, and how to stay faithful to The Way while resisting evil done against them.

And perhaps the biggest change we will need to make – especially for we American middle-class and upper-class White people who are used to having the government on our side and enforcing our superiority – is to completely surrender our very privileged sense of trusting the government for our welfare and our security. I think the Bible is pretty clear that our trust needs to be directly in God, even when – especially when – all of our other support structures fail. It’s going to be a hard lesson for most of us – myself included, I fear – but it’s going to be necessary to survive. And doing a little study of those living under oppression may benefit us: not just the Bible, but of those in more recent history who have needed to rethink their relationship with their own nation, and learn anew how to trust God when all hope was lost.

None of this is fun. As J.R.R. Tolkien wrote many years ago, but which seems quite relevant today:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

Yes, this truly isn’t an easy time, and it would be much less stressful to turn away from these thoughts than to engage them and determine how we’re going to live. So if you made it this far through this episode, I’m deeply grateful for your attention. If you found it useful, please like and share so that others can find it more easily. And I’d love to hear your own thoughts. Drop a comment here, and I’ll respond.

Be blessed, and we’ll talk again soon.

If you liked this article, then please follow us on Twitter logo and or join our email notification list.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Scroll to Top