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Most Voters are Ignorant, Irrational, and Incompetent

  Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. ~ H. L. Mencken We have entered into the 2024 political season, and to be perfectly frank, I have no hope that it will be anything other than a disaster. This season will not end well. Polarization and extremism, tempered by madness, in all likelihood, will continue to lead us toward the demise of this great American experiment called representative democracy. I am persuaded, now, that one of the fountainheads of what is to come is the ineptitude of American voters. If you find the title above to be somewhat offensive, then I want you to know that I take your offense as a good thing. It’s an indication that this type of voter is off-putting to you, so I have no reason to apologize for your offense. Indeed, you should be offended that there are such voters, in great numbers. Not only should you be offended, but you should also be alarmed, and if it turns out that you are not one among thi

Should Democracy Reform Christianity?

  There is a long rich and shadowed history of the influence of religion in social and political life. It actually precedes the rise of Christianity in the first century of the common era. Before Constantine became the first Christian emperor in the early 4 th century and began that peculiar commingling of religion and politics, the civilizations of the Ancient Near East had already perfected their own; the Mesopotamian, Persian, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, Jewish, Greek and Roman empires were all seamless amalgamations of religious worldviews and civic communal order and structure. In the cultures of antiquity, religion was a way of viewing and assessing the world—the cosmos, the culture, the community, the individual, all bounded by a mysterious and transcendent realm inhabited by the deity or deities who may or may not be supernatural.   Perhaps its most important function was to bring some order and sense to that world and its social microcosm; the observable world and the experi

Christianity and Democracy

Let us imagine, for a moment, that the claims of the Christian Nationalists are true. For the sake of discussion, let us suppose that the United States of America is in fact a Christian nation, both because its colonial founders and the colonies they established were avowedly Christian—indeed, Protestant —seeking the freedom to maintain their beliefs and enact their religion in a social order conducive to its practice, and because the nation’s founders in the late eighteenth century embraced that brand of religion—or sympathized with it—and instituted its morality and values in the new system of government. Following this nationalist line, the idea that the United States emerged historically as a Christian country would mean that its essential qualities were decisively shaped and influenced by Christianity; adherents of Christian Nationalism hold that American social and cultural identity is inseparable from the core belief system and practice of the Christian religion. Consequentl