Democracy: Redemption Politicized

Before going anywhere, its important to stipulate the ideas here reach beyond the current political climate and characters. While many things discussed in this article are relevant in the present, they've been timeless traditions and flaws of American democracy and its participants.

Even if a political figure is intelligent and inspiring, the aware citizen has the compass to perceive it is the process, not the person, that powers the gears of democracy's clock. Anyone can see the propensity of our society these days to demonize and canonize public figures; and politicians seem to polarize most dramatically. Some create a Satan vs. God complex of duality, worshiping one person with complete disregard of the more complex truth that each is human and therefore given to triumph and failure. Many of us watch with fantasy, and fascination, and daydreams of the potential power harnessed by our deity, if they one day become victorious.

The hilarity is the irony of democracy's design. Worshiping a politician is so often done by educated people and its one of the most naive choices a democratic citizen can make. The beauty of democracy is it's design is completely entangled with recognition of sin and grace. Often democracy is an exaggerated illustration, more definable than how sin and grace show up in everyday life even, to understand how humanity functions without failing completely.

Democracy is a great theater to act out the idea of the body of Christ, but not at all in the context many Christian political leaders have defined it in the past. Those like the Moral Majority, who seek a sort of American Christendom of dimensions that would shame Constantine's efforts, are onto the fundamental basis that democracy is deeply rooted in some of God's designs for humanity and community, but miss the inherent nature that democracy's keystone is recognition of the individual's need for communal accountability. You cannot argue man is completely benevolent and working for the benefit of all mankind and equally recognize the democratic system, unless you are foolish enough to believe your like-minded peers are the only participants above reproach.

Thats why democracy itself, unlike its moving pieces (politicians and participants themselves) is completely protected from being worshiped, because only a fool would worship a system whose foundation is for communal processing to minimize sin's hold on our daily decisions. This fact proves it is not God's exclusive, choice political system, because in the Garden of Eden, check and balances were not necessary. It also retards the idealist's argument that Jesus was a communist or socialist, because those theories can only operate in a vacuum devoid of sin.

So we pray "God bless America". Not because our system is superior, but because our system is rooted in the recognition of our failings and subsequent need for something bigger than the ourselves...both God and community, to save us from fading into selfish chaos.