The Embarkation of the Pilgrims (1857) by American painter Robert Walter Weir at the United States Capitol in Washington, DC and Declaration of Independence, a painting by John Trumbull depicting the Committee of Five presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Congress on June 28, 1776.
Historians tell us that America is the only country in the modern world founded by believers in Jesus Christ who made a covenant with God by dedicating this nation to Jesus Christ. These Puritans and Pilgrims as they are famously known intended to create a nation governed by God’s laws. They were theologically minded and prefered to apply their biblical worldview to every sphere of society.
So the whole concept of government that would later be proclaimed by John Locke and others, which placed the sovereignty in the hands of the people and which found the origin of government in a human compact, was utterly unknown to the Pilgrims.
They did not believe in a government by the people; they sensed that in the democratic philosophy, with its emphasis upon the sovereignty of the people, lay a fundamental contradiction to the biblical doctrine of the sovereignty of God. They clearly perceived that democracy was the fruit of humanism and not the reformation concept.
And when the constitutional framers gave America a republic they thought a republic was designed to be a lasting and permanent form of government.
The Founders envisioned America as a system in which the supreme power would reside in a body of citizens entitled to vote representatives responsible and governing them according to the law.
For example, in 1787, when Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, he was asked by a woman named Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia, “Sir, What have you given us?” His immediate response was, “A republic, Mum, if you can keep it.” He said this because certain inalienable rights granted by the Creator (life, liberty, and property) would be protected by law; therefore, government was simply man’s agent for the protection of God’s good gifts.
A good number of these early statesmen knew that a democracy was only a temporary and transitional form of government that was on the way to a total government or totalitarianism. They developed democratic principles but not a majority-rule kind of democracy.
John Winthrop (1588–1649), the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, declared democracy to be the meanest and worst of all forms of government. John Cotton (1584–1652), an English clergyman and colonist, wrote in 1636, “Democracy, I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed?”
John Adams, the second president of the United States, is reported to have reminded Virginia legislator John Taylor, “Remember, a democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” He is also quoted to have said, “The voice of the people is sometimes the voice of Mahomet, of Caesar, of Catiline, the Pope, and the devil.”
And according to Thomas Jefferson, “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” James Madison also wrote much the same thing: “Democracies are spectacles of turbulence and contention. Pure democracies are incompatible with personal security or the rights of property…. In general they have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
Britain’s first labour prime minister and three-time prime minister of England, J. Ramsay McDonald, was a Christian who was a product of the evangelical revival whom God had raised up to a position of leadership.
He found the materialistic, economic determinism, class hatred, and atheism of Karl Marx’s doctrine to be quite repulsive, and he strongly advocated for Christian principles in Parliament. It has been reported that when he was prime minister he went so far as to say that he believed that democracy itself—true democracy—had its source in the eighteenth-century revival; that vital Christianity was indeed its very foundation; and that without Christianity, democracy is doomed to perish.
Yes, we should democratically vote and participate in civil affairs but our ultimate hope and trust should be in the Lord Jesus Christ Who is Lord of every sphere of life Who charges all people everywhere to repent (to change their minds for the better and heartily to amend their ways, with abhorrence of their past sins), Because He has fixed a day when He will judge the world righteously (justly) by a Man Jesus Christ Whom He has destined and appointed for that task, and He has made this credible and given conviction and assurance and evidence to everyone by raising Him from the dead. (See Acts 17:26-31)
Dutch Prime Minister 1901-1905, Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), famously said,
Oh, no single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: This is Mine! God continually recreates the universe through acts of grace. God’s acts are necessary to ensure the continued existence of creation. Without His direct activity creation would self-destruct.
Although many of the arguments of the constitutional framers rested on the power of a constitutional republic, it was not a Christian government and could not work because it was fashioned according to Roman civil law and relied on the integrity of one person whose deciding vote has often been in contempt of God’s morality. Even the much more admired republic was shoved aside and Americans have almost given up these principles completely. America is now considered a socialist democracy.
Democracy without the lordship of Christ will never sustain a civilization. It is simply another form of tyranny, where the majority frequently deprive the minority through the institution of unjust laws. We’ve now declared that the only legitimate form of government is a democracy—which means man is a god and we cannot have the God Who created us to rule over us.
We can do whatever we want and everything is permitted under a democracy. If you think this is an extreme statement, just remember Hitler came to power democratically. Abortion, gay marriage, eugenics, and other deplorable things in the West have happened under democratic means as well.
