Faith & Democracy #5: Democracy MUST Go!
Why structuring society so that it only works for some of us ultimately results in one that works for none of us.
Imagine that you were part of a societal system that granted your group prosperity, power and social worth by depriving others of those same things.
Many call that system “democracy”, though that’s not really accurate. What it really is, is “majoritocracy” — a system where whoever is the majority is free to do whatever they want to the minority and without regard for what those decisions mean for society itself.
But, before we go further, we need to recognize the difference between form, how a thing appears, and substance, what it actually is. Two sealed containers, one filled with water and the other, gasoline, might, in the right circumstance, be confused with each other. But throw one on a fire and it douses it whereas the other makes it burn brighter. In terms of form, majoritocracies and democracies look similar. In both cases, decisions are made by voting. But with respect to substance, they couldn’t be more different.
Part of the confusion is with the definition itself. We often think “democracy” means “majority rules”, but it doesn’t. It actually means “the people”, and in our case, “We, the people of the United States of America” rule. The word itself is derived from dēmokratia; demos (“the people”) + kratos (“rule”); “rule of the people”. And “the people” is collective and exhaustive, not a subset or faction thereof. It’s not “We, [some of] the people of the United States of America…”
We each hold a portion of ruling power, and our responsibility is to use that power to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility…” and a host of other critical societal functions. That means making every decision with the totality of the nation, not just the majority, not just our faction, our generation, or just those who agree with us or believe like us in mind. It’s deciding with everyone’s well-being front and center. Anything less than that is just bullying. The power of the vote and the responsibility for the entire republic go hand in hand.
This is the same lesson a young Peter Parker, aka, Spiderman, had to learn; that with great power comes great responsibility. Peter, fresh off of the use of his new Spidey powers to make a buck, couldn’t be bothered to stop a crook because he didn’t see what stopping him had to do with him. That same crook would end up fatally shooting the uncle that raised him; yet another example of how our fates are intertwined, or, as Martin described it, how we’re all caught up in a single garment of destiny. In a majoritocracy, we tend to tell ourselves that some lives matter and others don’t, or that some matter less, and others, more. But democracy recognizes the truth of things; that if any of us don’t matter, then none of us do.
Meet the New Boss…
Still, for argument’s sake, let’s say that, for over a century, this is the path to which our group has been committed — dressing ourselves up as a democracy while behaving like a majoritocracy. Because that path has benefitted our faction for so long, we’re blinded to how it’s never been and never will be sustainable; that the fall we’re headed for will make Humpty Dumpty’s seem trivial. But then, before we know it, the inevitable diversification we’ve been denying and futilely resisting makes landfall. Evidence of our shifting demography is everywhere, and we begin to realize that soon, we’ll no longer be the ruling majority.
That, by extension, also means that, in a democracy, if we’re not the powerful majority, someone else is. And in a majoritocracy, they now have every right to do to us, the new minority, what we did to those before us — growing our prosperity, power and social worth at the minority’s expense. The new ruling faction (“Meet the new boss,” The Who sang, “same as the old boss”) might call it “democracy”, but that’s no truer for them than it was for us. We see that clearly when they’re in charge, but we were blind to it when we were.
But chances are, we’re also not going down without a fight. Perhaps we’ve always thought we believed in democracy. But that was before when our group was the majority. But now, after lifetimes of being the hammer, we discover that our group is in danger of becoming the nail, the cattle, when all this time, we got to be the butcher. But like Daryl Hall and John Oats, we find ourselves singing, “I can’t go for that, oh no — no can do.”
Since the demographic shift is something we have no chance whatsoever of stopping, our only option for retaining ruling power is by dismantling democracy itself. If we remove the societal system that awards rulership to the majority and replace it with one that awards it to the wealthy, or people with “royal blood”, to nobles, or adherents to a particular authoritative faith, to people whose great-great-grandparents are from the same town as ours, etc., we can extend our reign. In that unfortunate position and with those inevitable circumstances, we realize that remaining in power means one thing — democracy must go.
Hacking Democracy
So, how would you do it? Let’s say you’ve accepted that soon, you’ll be a minority in a system where the majority does what it will, makes whatever laws it wants, can declare whomever it wants to be enemies of the state, deny them citizenship, bar their families from immigrating, consign them to poverty, make them drink from separate fountains, drive them from their land, lynch them, scapegoat them, silence them or mobilize law enforcement, government agencies and federal troops against them if they resist in any way — peacefully or otherwise. Granted, none of this might happen. But, then again, it already has. The point is, in that context, losing one’s majority is tantamount to losing everything.
Due to the unyielding power of diversification, fractional frameworks, even ones that award power to 9 out of 10 people, will inevitably fail. That’s because if anyone is excluded, if anything less than democracy for all is enacted, then it’s only a matter of time before the excluded outnumber the included. The same walls that formed our fortress when we held ruling power will become our prison once we lose it. In that situation, in the face of a tsunami of diversity and dynamism, we’re left with two core choices. The first is to finally enact democracy. Langston Hughes said it this way:
O, let America be America again, the land that never has been yet, and yet must be — The land where every man is free. I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek — and finding only the same old stupid plan, of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
The land that’s mine — the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME — who made America, whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, must bring back our mighty dream again. O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, and yet I swear this oath — America will be!
Or, we can go the other direction, doubling down on the same shortsightedness that led us to embrace majoritocracy, only now, we must go further; actively short-circuiting the democratic process, gaming it, so that we end up with a de facto majority and with perpetual rulership over society. If we were in the world of The Hunger Games, we’d create a complex caste system with a rigged competition that gave things a semblance of fairness, or, in the world of The Matrix, we’d turn people into resources to power our machines.
In our world, perhaps we start out not wanting to end democracy outright, but to hack it, make it work for us. This essentially means dividing us into “us” and “them”, then coming up with ways of reducing their numbers at the voting booth while increasing our own. The passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act made the former tougher, but not impossible.
Instead of executing people who dared vote, like they did 63-year-old farmer and WWI veteran Lamar Smith, who, in 1955, the same year Rosa took her courageous stand, was shot at close range, right on the lawn of the Lincoln County courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi, it meant finding creative ways of disqualifying them.
As for the latter, increasing our numbers meant creating a new narrative, one that could shift us from being the villains of segregation — people who burned crosses and bombed churches, who beat women and children for marching, who killed civil rights workers and buried them in mounds, who shouted Sieg Heil as 500 people chased the bus the Freedom Riders were on, who stated that what Alabama needed was a “few first-class funerals” to quell the rise of integration — to being the saviors of America. They were no longer against integration. They were for making America great again.
“For God”
They took this new gospel to America’s churches, declaring that the only way to do God’s will was to “take the nation for God”, language appropriated directly from the Christian Old Testament, which had already been appropriated from the Torah.
They took the rolls of many of the largest Christian organizations and televangelist rosters along with Southern Baptist church members, the largest protestant denomination in the United States and, in 1979, formed the strategically named “Moral Majority.” The move retroactively added members to their cause and gave their image a miraculous makeover. But just as importantly, they’d created the righteous army they’d need if they really were going to take this land for God.
For God. It became a phrase that could be added to any action, like adding “in bed” to a fortune cookie saying. (“You will be very successful — in bed.”) Only this phrase could sanctify any action, including most of what had occurred under the segregationist banner. “Rule the world for God,” said Pat Robertson in a March 1986 memo distributed to the Iowa Republican County Caucus, regarding how to participate in a political party. The memo continued:
Give the impression [emphasis added] that you are there to work for the party, not push an ideology. Hide your strength. Don’t flaunt your Christianity. Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians have a majority of leadership positions whenever possible, God willing.
But, in the face of inevitable diversification, this tactic has severe limitations. Our shifting demography, bolstered by massive defections of everyone from spiritually conscious people of faith to those who no longer find that ideology palatable, from racial and gender justice advocates to believers in LGBTQ+ equality, from those who were against our war on Iraq to those against police brutality makes rulership by majoritocracy no longer viable.
And that invariably makes ending democracy the only real card left to play. If we’re to retain dominion over this land that God himself bequeathed to us, democracy must go. So, we gird up our loins, doing things like proof-texting Jesus’ statement in the Gospel of Matthew:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household.”
We stock up on guns and ammo as we declare, “He will deliver our enemies into our hands,” and quote the Gospel of Matthew’s “He who is not [explicitly] with me is against me” vs. the Gospel of Mark’s “Who is not [explicitly] against us is for us.” The difference between the two is huge.
Deal-making
So, if the self-described moral majority is the majority no longer, if they can no longer maintain rulership of society under democracy, then democracy becomes the enemy. It must go. But don’t worry; like Verizon, there’s an app for that. Take the Supreme Court, the only non-elected branch of the federal government.
And that’s by design. If the highest court in the land has one job, it’s to ensure that we’re a democracy, not a majoritocracy; protecting those lacking in power from those wielding it, defending the minority from the tyranny of the majority.
In the 1950s, when civil rights activists were unable to gain traction in Congress (take Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 24-hour filibuster of the 1957 Voting Rights Act) and when presidents couldn’t afford to care too much about these issues, it was the Supreme Court that struck down segregation, the same year that Congress was adding “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.
And that wasn’t all. While Alabama Governor George Wallace was campaigning for president on a segregationist platform, the Supreme Court was striking down anti-miscegenation laws that made Mildred and Richard Lovings’ marriage illegal. And so forth. But, starting with Ronald Reagan, the newly militarized people of God began deal-making — “Promise to give us Supreme Court justices and we’ll give you the presidency.” And given that Supreme Court appointments are for a lifetime, that would turn out to be a great buy.
The result was a new majority of de facto believers in theocracy rather than democracy — much more accurate framing than conservatives vs liberals, or red states against blue — both of which create a sense of false equivalency, as if both are different camps under the banner of democracy, rather than one that’s for it, and the other, against it.
This new Supreme Court, ruling “for God”, would rule in favor of Citizens United in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (thereby increasing the amount of corporate influence in the political process), cut the most critical provisions from the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, and, would in 2000, in a 5–4 divided decision, award Florida’s electoral votes to George W. Bush, making him the first president since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 to lose the popular vote, but win the general election.
“I Stand with Jesus Christ”
But the swaying of the Supreme Court is, by no means, the only takeover tactic in play. Take the claims made by the same faction that from Reconstruction onward, undermined democracy, utilizing everything from grandfather clauses to white primaries. All that time, they insisted that those elections were fair. But not the 2020 election, the one where their loss of majority power became apparent. That one was “stolen”.
Specifically, they asserted that states where President Trump won were legitimate, but ones where he lost were due to voter fraud. And that’s only part of it. It was on January 5, 2021, that Christianity Today magazine published an article titled, “Jericho March Returns to DC to Pray for a Trump Miracle”.
The article went live the day before the ill-fated events that culminated with American citizens invading and ransacking our Capitol building and doing everything from spreading fecal matter on its walls to hoisting the Confederate flag while calling for the lynching of Vice President Pence. Organizers of the march had implored self-described “patriots, people of faith and all those who want to take back America” to travel to Washington in hopes of overturning the 2020 presidential election. This particular March was actually a repeat of the original, held December 14, 2020; one that had similar, though less specific goals in mind.
That first march, bolstered by proclamations that God had spoken and that Trump was destined to remain in the White House, was a precursor of things to come — in it, at least 4 people were stabbed, 23 arrested, and attendees set fire to Black Lives Matter banners they’d gathered from historic African American churches around town. Keep in mind that these were people who truly believed they were doing God’s work. Yet, despite all this, organizers called for a sequel; a bigger, bolder version of the December March; reenacting the biblical Joshua’s march of the Israelites around the fortified city of Jericho, before the walls fell and its inhabitants slaughtered.
Afterward, many of the March’s advocates would admit that things had gone “too far”. But what they miss is that this was a road we should never have started down in the first place. Each of us, as society’s trustees, are as accountable for what we facilitate as what we do, for both our direct actions and those we set in motion. Just because we didn’t anticipate where it would lead doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for what was done. So, when we comment that “someone should do us all a favor and put a bullet in [a particular person’s] brain”, we share culpability when someone tries to do just that.
The power of tactics like these is that they allow us to undermine democracy at the same time we’re claiming to defend it. Because that’s the thing; even if we’ve decided that democracy must go, we know that the only way the people will go along with it is if they have no idea that’s what we’re doing. But that’s also the problem. Societies that work for only some of us, whether empire or majoritocracy, whether based on atheist nationalism or religious nationalism all render society inherently unstable and degenerative. We create our own Game of Thrones and all the deception, betrayal and destruction that come with it.
But, let’s say that you were never under any illusion that this was a democracy — that it was always a marriage of convenience and that your allegiance to such a thing was only because it put your group in charge. In the same way that, whether via the use of immigration quotas or the electoral power of the three-fifths compromise, a faction can game democracy, the faction isn’t particularly committed to majoritocracy. Their allegiance is to themselves and to their enduring dominance “by any means necessary”. That’s essentially the route this faction, people I call Dominionists, opt to take.
Dominionists, as a rule, are for democracy as long as they control it. They shout “majority rules” from the rooftops as long as they’re the majority. But with the inevitable loss of that majority, retaining exclusive power means abandoning that rationale for something that, according to them, trumps both democracy and majoritocracy. “Fuck democracy,” said one proponent of dominionism, “I stand with Jesus Christ.” But even more important is the subtext; he’s also inferring that Jesus Christ stands with him.
Sentries on the Wall
But even with all the noise, what we must remember is that this, the use of faith to overthrow democracy isn’t actually about faith. The Mayflower Compact written by the Pilgrims and the Pennsylvania Charter written by William Penn and the Quakers, which, among other things, guaranteed free and fair trial by jury, freedom of (and from) religion, freedom from unjust imprisonment and, perhaps most importantly, free elections; all of which became foundational components of the United States, were both written by faith groups.
Likewise, both those who did the heavy lifting during Abolition and those who were killed during the Selma march (see Come to Selma: What the Famed March to Montgomery Has to Teach Us about the Intersection of Faith and Democracy) were people of faith. Now, more than ever, we need people of faith, especially members of churches and denominations that are undermining democracy to do what they’ve done at every juncture throughout our history — ensure that religion is not a weapon of war but an instrument of peace.
At the same time, we’re dealing with a toxic ideology that’s survived the end of both slavery and segregation. Even if every person of faith abandoned it, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t also survive the end of theocracy. That’s because of its extraordinary ability, like a virus, to adapt.
Variants of dominionism existed long before Christianity, perhaps as long as there have been societies, back to the first kings to rule nations or the first ancient superpowers to attempt to rule the world. Today, there are even indications of what this new strain will look like — “Patriots” vs. the rest of us. But, because of the ways we’re invariably changing, it’s also a philosophy that has no future.
I thought about this while having a recent conversation with my sister where she described how she’d read an article where the author said, “Change will come to America one coffin at a time.” And they’re not wrong. Change is not just coming, it’s already here. But we get to decide where we’ll position ourselves in relation to it. We can work to cement systems that harm minorities (including the ones that we’re becoming), or to strengthen a society where all can thrive; embrace change or fight against ones that have already occurred.
One of my grandmother’s favorite sayings was, “Leave things better than you found it.” I think this applies not just to individuals but to generations. Those before us, despite our nation’s missteps and fumbles, did that — they left us a better America than the one they inherited. They lived up to the promise to form a more perfect union for themselves and for us, their posterity.
It’s now our watch. We’re the sentries on the wall whose job it is to spot the enemies of democracy skulking through the fields. We’re the wise ones who rightly discern that the Trojan horse left outside our gates isn’t a gift, but a trap. That’s our job, our gift to those who will inherit the society we hand off, and who, god willing, will take us even further. And the only way we do that is by strengthening democracy for future generations, the same way prior generations did for us.
In the end, Dominionists are right about one thing — democracy must go. But what they miss is that where it must go is forward.
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Faith and Democracy is an open series of articles that explore this pivotal point in our nation’s history, the longstanding role that faith and spirituality, both for better and worse, have played in shaping the society we’ve become and are becoming. Democracy Must Go is the fifth article in the series.
RD Moore is an artist, minister, lifelong social activist, emancipationist and founder of the Mary Moore Institute for Diversity, Humanity & Social Justice (MMI). He credits the people who crossed his path starting in his formative years in post-Civil Rights-era Birmingham for the person he’d become and for his unyielding faith in who we can be together. Known for his intimate storytelling and insightful understanding, his work continues to explore that fertile space where diversity, spirituality and humanity all intersect. His blog, Letters from a Birmingham Boy, can be found here.