Episode 152 - Why Democracy Feels Like A Spiritual Burden

Elections can feel like a moral exam you never revised for, with the stakes dialled up to “the most important vote of your lifetime” every single cycle. We start a new series by saying the quiet part out loud: we do not think democracy is compatible with the Bible, and we think the modern church has too often baptised the pressure by calling it discipleship. If you have felt anxious, tired, or oddly trapped by constant political urgency, you are not alone, and you are not weak for feeling it.

We walk through the heart of the problem: modern democracy claims political power rises from below, from citizens whose votes create legitimacy. That story turns each of us into a mini sovereign, responsible for national outcomes we cannot trace, influence, or even properly understand. And yet we are simultaneously told that experts, bureaucracies, markets, and global forces will steer the ship anyway. That double bind produces civic burnout, cynicism, and despair, while the act of voting takes on a near sacred aura that cannot carry the weight we pile on it.

From there, we lift our eyes to a very different Christian political theology: authority that descends from above, rooted in the triune life of God, and centred on the reign of King Jesus. We preview a path through Scripture and history, touching on 1 Samuel 8, the Davidic line to Bethlehem, and Romans 13 under Nero, before landing on a pastoral word of release: you were not asked to fix the country. The Christian tradition’s concern for right scale, moderatio, helps explain why endless political worry deforms the soul, and why Jesus’s “do not worry” is not naive but deeply realistic.

If you are wrestling with Christianity and politics, democracy and the Bible, activism, civic responsibility, and what faithful presence really looks like, press play. Subscribe, share this with a friend who is politically exhausted, and leave us a review. What part of this argument do you most agree or disagree with?

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

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Welcome to the Christ-centered cosmic civilization. As we are going to start on a new series that uh will run for a few weeks as we're looking at whether democracy is compatible with the Bible. And I don't think it is. And I think it's a very strange thing that quite a lot of modern Western Christianity

Why Democracy And Scripture Clash

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not only defends or democracy, but even I think even see it as a as a fruit of Christian thought when historically it's obviously produced really as a political system from pagan Greek philosophy and culture before before the New Testament, anyway. So I've written a book, which is I have not published it yet, but I've shared it with a few people, and my working title is The Divine Emperor: Why Democracy Fails, and the Reign of King Jesus sets us free. So let's see how it goes. I'm just gonna kind of read from the book, and I'll start with the introduction and then off we go and we'll see how this works. So the introduction is called Crown We Were Never Meant to Wear. There's a feeling many of us know it rises before an election and doesn't entirely leave between them. It's not anger, exactly, and it's not despair. It's closer to a kind of tiredness. The tiredness of being told again and again that the

A Crown We Were Never Meant

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future of the country rests on us and knowing in our bones that it doesn't and that we don't know how to make it. We're told that this is the most important election of our lifetime. We were told that last time, we will be told the same next time. The candidates are presented as saviours and as monsters. The manifestos are studied and sloganized. The arguments are had with neighbours and family, social media is awash with it, everyone feeling that their opinion about this is not only to be heard, but Christians have a tendency to see this as part of their discipleship to be doing this. And then the votes are counted, and the new government takes office, and the machine hums on, more or less exactly as it did before. I'm not writing this book as someone who has been disengaged from politics. I have, by the standards of most thoughtful Christians, been quite engaged throughout my life. I've read the manifestos, I've argued the cases, I've voted in most elections of my adult life, I've prayed for prime ministers I voted for, and I've prayed for prime ministers I voted against, and ones that at the time I thought were terrible, even evil. I've taught my children to think carefully about civic responsibility. I'm not writing this book from the outside or from someone who doesn't care. But the older I have grown and the more I've read of scripture and of history, especially church history, the more I've become persuaded of something that in the modern English speaking world, it's a kind of heresy. I do not think the question of who should run the country is settled at the ballot box. I don't think it's supposed to be. I think the king who actually runs the country is on a throne and he's not there because we put him there. He is there because his father did. I'm writing this book for those who suspect, as I do, that some of our ancestors were onto something. I'm not writing it to start a revolution. I'm writing it to suggest that the revolution we've all been chasing, the political one, the electoral one, that's the wrong one. That's not the revolution we should be having, and that the real revolution is older, quieter, and infinitely more glorious. And it happens in church. It comes down from heaven. And its king is reigning. Today, this very moment, whether the poles have closed or not. Let me sketch in five short movements where this book will go. The first movement is the diagnosis. We'll look honestly at the feeling I've named the exhaustion of the modern citizen. The crushing weight of being told you are a mini sovereign in a country you do not know how to run. And I want to just on that, I rem I read an article

Five Movements Of The Argument

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in a Christian magazine in the past month, and in it, one of the writers said that it is we are called as Christians to be engaged in the politics of running the country. And it so shocked me that this person wrote that and that they felt they could say such a thing in what was an evangelical magazine. That it it kind of's been eating at me, and that's why I thought I'll share this book. It's the most ridiculous thing. There's nowhere in the Bible where we are called to run countries or be it or be involved in anything like it. Anyway, well, that's what the book's about. So look, the the violent record of the 20th century, which is the most democratic century in history, it's the most blood soaked century. The growing sense, even among Christians who have voted faithfully their whole lives, is that something's not quite right. The second movement is to lift our eyes. We'll look at the throne of the Lord Jesus, the divine emperor, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. We will look at how power in the Bible descends from above rather than ascends from below. We will look at the deep trinitarian source of all order in the eternal life of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. We will see the Bible's massive, almost embarrassing focus on monarchs, and we will hear the Lord Jesus quietly explain to a Roman politician where political authority actually comes from. The third movement is to walk patiently through the Bible's actual teaching on rulers and kingdoms. We'll look at the pattern of divine appointment that runs, well, kind of with Melchit from Melchizedek to Cyrus, to Christ, and then Caesar. We'll read 1 Samuel 8 carefully and discover, perhaps to our surprise, that it's not what we have been told it is. We will trace the Davidic monarchy through to the manger at Bethlehem. We'll sit with Romans 13 under the reign of Nero, and we'll discover what it means that even a tyrant is the Lord's servant, Diaconos. And then in the fourth section, that's when we get constructive. We'll look at what the ch what the Christian world built when it took these convictions seriously. We'll spend time with Eusebius, the architect of Christian political theology, with Ambrose, the engineer who calculated the load-bearing limits of this political theology. And we will consider the diarchy of altar and palace or church and government. Church and state will look at that, that diarchy. And we'll look at the medieval guilds. The guilds, the three towers of the Christian town, and the patient apprenticeship by which mastery was formed. And that that is something that I've I've actually written much more on that since this book was completed. And then the fifth and final movement is the I suppose it's like the pastoral release. We'll discover that the running of the world has not been laid on our shoulders. As Christians, we are not called to run the country or to have any view at all on how to run a country. It has been laid on Christ's shoulders to do this. We will discover that church is the ark, the embassy of heaven, the place where the or the or the mode of life where the world is actually changed by the slow accumulation of good done in the name of the Lord Jesus, the transformation that actually changes people's hearts and minds. We will discover the peace of order, the tranquility that descends when every part of our life is rightly oriented to its proper end, and we will discover finally that the deepest political act available to a Christian is not what is now called activism, which is one of those is perhaps my least favourite word in the modern world. An activist is a person who doesn't do anything. What they do is talk about lots of things or write about lots of things, sign petitions, hold up placards. They don't do anything. But that the the most, the deepest political act available to a Christian is not any of that sort of thing. It is prayer. Prayer is crazy powerful politically. And it's especially prayer for the rulers we didn't cho we did not choose in the confidence that the king who hears us is on his throne and he does choose. So I don't want this book to be an argument, even though it even now, as I'm delivering it, I get a little bit argumentative, but I don't want it to be an argument. It's rather it's an invitation. I'm inviting you as all to kind of lift our eyes to some something much, much bigger than this squabbling over social and political opinions. Now I'm writing as a member of what we really I'd say as a minority report. That's what I am, a minority report. I know that. I don't pretend that the views here are mainstream Christian view of our day. They're not. The mainstream Christian view of our day is some version of the bargain that secular modernity has offered church, which is keep your faith essentially private, vote in good conscience, and otherwise, that's it. That's what you must do. You you keep out of politics in any serious sense. You you must just participate as we've set up this system of political life, you inv you get involved just like everybody else, your impact is the same as everybody else's. That's it. Vote. Be engaged in that way. Now I've come to believe that this bargain, this system that the modern church has accepted, has failed, and that it has cost us our political imagination, and that we will not recover until we recover the older Christian vision of life under King Jesus. And I'm writing as a brother to many who disagree. Nearly everybody I talk to about this strongly disagrees with me. They feel that this modern democratic agreement and church is allowed to take its place as a voting, well, not as a block, really, because Christians extremely divided over politics. But nearly everyone I talk to totally disagrees with me, and they think democracy is in some ways. It's hard for them to say it's exactly biblical, but they feel it's compatible with the Bible. And I've argued these matters with godly Christians who vote enthusiastically, and with thoughtful Christians who are theologically committed to liberal democracy, sincere Christians who believe that voting is a Christian duty, and they they honestly mean that. They honestly think that God calls them to vote. Now, I'm not right, I'm not writing to kind of defeat them or undermine them, but to kind of invite them and you to consider whether some of our ancestors who didn't think our ancestors didn't think like that at all for the vast majority of Christian history all over the world, that the way we think about politics today would have been uninconceivable to them. And maybe they were right. That's all I'm trying to say. So that's how we're gonna do it. And I'm gonna see if we can lay that down, this burden of the modern political situation, and see if we can get a sight of Jesus. So part one the weight we were never meant to carry. Before any constructive vision can land, we have to be honest about why a constructive vision is needed. The feeling I named in the introduction is real, it's widespread, it is, I believe, a structural feature of life under modern democracy rather than an accidental side effect. This feeling

The Weight We Cannot Carry

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that the burden is placed on us, but the actual ability to change, to change the world is not really on us, certainly not as a Christian vision. What we're invited to do is to say we're offered something that isn't a Christian vision, a strictly Christian vision. What we're invited to do is to say, here is a political vision. We will appeal to you by saying, here are a few elements of it that you may feel echo things that are in the vision of church, and on that basis legitimise us by voting for us. That's what a field goes on. And I think it's this this weight that is placed on us that we're told it is your responsibility to be to select competent leaders for the country, even though you don't know how to run a country, that is doing serious damage to the souls of Christians who've spent their lives trying to be faithful citizens in a system that was never built to hold them. And so this first part, I've got sort of four chapters to this first part as we try to diagnose that. And we're not going to offer any cure, we're just gonna kind of name this problem, diagnose it as honestly as I can, what's wrong, and then you know, see if you as a thoughtful Christian are sympathetic to that or recognize what I'm saying. So, chapter one the crushing weight of the citizen. I want to begin this chapter with a question, and I want you to answer it honestly. When the next election comes, how do you feel? Not what do you think, because that's just a whirlpool of ideas and posturing and positions, and we're

Election Anxiety As A Spiritual Symptom

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all pointing out how people who think different than us are either corrupt or stupid or misled or indoctrinated or whatever it is, that's what goes on. No, forget all that think stuff. I just mean you personally. How do you feel? And if you're anything like the Christians I've pastored over 30 years, the answer is often some version of anxious anxious. You're anxious about who might win. You're anxious about how much of the campaign coverage you've managed to follow. You're anxious about whether you are well informed enough to make a wise choice. You're anxious because you think other people are not well informed enough to make a wise choice. You're anxious about the arguments you might have with relatives at Christmas if the wrong people win. Or you're anxious about the future of the country, the future of the church under that future, the future of your children growing up in that future. The election, when you actually examine your inner life around it, is not an exciting opportunity to participate in democracy. It's a low grade emotional ordeal that many people would rather not have to go through, but which you feel obligated to engage with because you've been told all your life that this is what good citizens do, and there's also this kind of strange thing that I pointed to earlier that even this is what good Christians do. If this is your experience, you're not alone. This feeling of anxiety, I may not have described your anxiety exactly, but you may have what what you will have some level of this anxiety, I imagine. The only people who don't have it are people who are so zealously sort of indoctrinated with a single political idea, you know, that that is the god, this single political ideal, and that they they genuinely are excited because for them, this is, you know, the the political they believe political power is in the grasp of something. That sort of person. I get I'm very anxious about them. But that look, but if this this feeling of anxiety, if that's your experience, you're not alone. It's the experience of most thoughtful Christians I know, it's the experience of most thoughtful people I know, Christian or otherwise. The modern democratic citizen is at the level of their actual emotional life, a permanently low grade anxious creature. And they have been trained to interpret this anxiety as a sign of civic engagement, of caring about. The the nation rather than as a symptom of a deeper structural problem. The structural problem is that you have been asked to carry a weight that no human being was ever designed to carry. Let me explain what I mean. The democratic system in its mature modern form is built on a single foundational claim. The claim is that political power flows up from the people. The citizens, by their votes, generate the legitimacy of their representatives. I've even heard someone say this, that political power belongs to the citizens, and by their vote they give that

Power From Below And Its Cost

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power. So the power, it's literally a the power is generated by the people, political power, and it is flow is it it is lent upwards to these representatives. And then the the idea then is that the government rules because the people have, in some sense, chosen them to be ru chosen this government to rule them. And this claim is so familiar that we have we hardly recognise it as a claim. It feels like noticing the weather. Of course power comes from the people. Where else would it come from? The entire modern mindset is that there is no other source of political power other than the people. So there's just people. People vote. People people have s each person has this bit of political power and they yield it upwards too. And the person who gets the most, or the party that gets the most of this power from the people gets to rule. But let's just notice what this claim implies for you, the citizen. If power comes from you, then the wisdom of the country's choices is in some sense your wisdom. The folly of the country's choices is in some sense your folly. The success of the government is in some sense your success. The failure of the government is in some sense your failure. You are the foundational logic of the system, partly responsible for the running of the country. Your vote is your share, your voice is your contribution, your engagement is your obligation. Now, this would not be such a heavy weight if the country in question were a small village, you know, if the if what we were talking about as giving giving like this kind of vote voting to give power to run something, if we were talking about, say, a small village of let's say 300 people who all kind of know each other, all speak the same language, all worship at the same altar, all face the same simple set of practical questions about how to manage their shared life in the village. In a community of that scale, ordinary human beings really might be able to bear a fair share of responsibility for shared decisions. But this isn't the situation in which the modern democratic citizen is asked to be a mini sovereign. The situation is one in which a single citizen of, say, the United Kingdom is asked to share responsibility for a country of at least seventy million people with a global economy, a nuclear deterrent, a very complex healthcare system, an aging population, an immigration policy, an education system, a foreign policy, a regulatory state, and a thousand other technical questions on which the citizen has, by definition, no expert qualification and mostly has absolutely no knowledge of whatsoever. The citizen in this situation is being asked to carry the weight of governing a country whose problems they could not begin to solve, if even if they were given full executive authority over them. The citizen is being asked to bear moral responsibility for outcomes whose causal chain they we cannot trace. We are being asked to be wise about matters where wisdom would require decades of dedicated study. And the system the system tells us year after year that we have not done enough. We have not informed ourselves enough. We have not protested enough. We have not voted carefully enough. We have not been engaged enough. This the democratic state is in is is tyrannically greedy for attention. No level of attention is ever enough for it. So no wonder the modern democratic citizen is exhausted. And notice too the strange double bind that the modern democratic citizen has been placed in. We are told, on the one hand, that the country is governed by our consent, our vote. But we are told also told, we are told, on the other hand, that the actual decisions are made by experts and bureaucrats over whom we have very little control. And we also are kind of told that there are powerful

The Double Bind Of Modern Politics

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multinational companies and organizations that have enormous power, and we know that even in the democratic system we have nothing, we have no power over them. But we are told, on the one hand, that our vote matters enormously, that this is the most important election of our lifetime, that everything depends on this civic participation. And in a recent election, when I went along to the voting booth in the local library, there was almost a reverent, worshipful aura around it. It's strange, like how people approach the process because they've been so indoctrinated with this system and this kind of yeah, it's almost like a like a sacred thing. And so the the like there are very intricate ritual rules for as you go in and you must be reg, you know, check on this register, and then you know how you use your bit of paper, and you must go to this booth, and that it's sacrosanct that no one can be with you or influence you, and the the the sacredness around it. So we're told all these things about how how sacred and important this act of democracy is, but we're told on the other hand that the broad direction of national policy will continue more or less unchanged, regardless of which party wins, because the underlying technical, economic, and demographic forces are stronger than any electoral mandate. So, in effect, we are asked to feel the weight of an authority that we do not actually possess. We are asked to feel responsible for outcomes we cannot really influence. And the double bind produces in the thoughtful citizen who is paying attention a particular kind of despairing exhaustion that we have learned to call by various other names cynicism, depression, civic burnout, political fatigue. But the underlying condition is the same. We have been asked to bear a sovereignty we do not have. So I remember someone saying it was a woman in her sixties who this I spoke to this woman in a sixty, a Christian, a faithful Christian who'd voted in every election since she was an adult, and she'd read the manifestos and watched the debates and discussed it. And at after her last vote on the way home

Pastoral Stories Of Political Harm

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from the polling station, she sat in the car and cried about it, and I asked her why she cried, and she said, I don't know anymore. I don't know what good it does. I've been doing this for 40 years. The country's worse now than it was when I started. I don't feel my vote has helped anything. I just feel old and tired, and I've spent 40 years trying to fix something I was never able to fix. And I've thought about her words because she had been faithful, she'd done what she was told to do, and the system had crushed her over 40 years by asking her to bear a weight that was never hers to bear in the first place. And it's as if people always it's a bit like sometimes when people believe in communism, and they often say, because when you point out how communism hasn't actually worked or produced this wonderfully perfect society, they say, Oh no, but we haven't tried it enough. We need to persevere with it, and so and then if we just put if we persevered, if we tried harder with it, we get to the promised land of perfect communism. And I find it people who believe in democracy are exactly the same. They're like, we need more democracy, and and they but you say, Oh, but look, it's produced terrible, terrible outcomes. No, no, but that's just because it hasn't been done enough. But that lady, I've heard versions of her story many times in my pastoral work. And, you know, the young Christian professional in his 20s who's just started reading the news seriously and can't sleep because he's taking it so seriously. Or the middle-aged Christian mother who's anxious about the political direction of the country and she suffers panic attacks, the retired Christian school teacher who's stopped going to family gatherings because political arguments with his adult children have become unbearable. Or a Christian university student who has come to the chaplain, the university chaplain in tears, because she started to believe on the basis of her social media feed that the country's on the brink of collapse, that it's either fascists are about to take over or some, you know, hard left communist conspiracy or whatever. But these are real Christians with real stories suffering real spiritual harm because they've accepted the modern democratic claim that they are personally responsible for outcomes they can't influence and they don't even understand. Now the Christian gospel has, I believe, an extraordinary pastoral word for us all in this story, and the word is simple. You were not asked to fix the country. You were never going to be able to fix the country. The country was never yours to fix in the first place. And that's not a council of despair, it's the opposite. It's a council of liberation. There is someone whose job it actually is to run the country, and that someone is not you. This the someone who is responsible for the country is competent at the work, and he has all the wisdom and all the power that running a country actually requires. He has been doing it the whole time. You've been worrying about it, and he'll continue to do it long after you've laid down your worries and gone to your rest. Look, I'm getting ahead of myself. The cure is for later parts of this book. For now, I just want us to feel the weight we've been carrying and to recognise the anxiety we've been calling civic engagement, and that it's in fact it's the cost of trying to do something we weren't designed to do. And I want you to consider for a moment that the burden may not be a sign of your virtue. See, sometimes people who are very burdened about politics believe it's because they curse so deeply and that everyone should be burdened as they are burdened. So they see it as it's a sign of their virtue, and then they take pride in it and can almost be self-righteous that they are burdened and anxious about the state of the country. But I don't think it's a sign of virtue at all. I think it's a sign that the system is asking the wrong things of you and me, and that the anxiety and the burden is a delusion, like a not a delusion, it's a real thing, but it's something, it's a sign that we are being abused. And there's a deep theological point underneath all this, and I want to flag it just before we move on. The Christian tradition has always understood that human beings have a particular shape, a created form with particular capacities and particular limits. The Lord Jesus said, Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to his life? Matthew 6 27. Jesus, the one who formed us from clay at the beginning, understood that human beings are scaled to a certain size of

Right Scale Moderatio And Not Worrying

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life, and that the attempt to expand beyond that size produces only anxiety. The medieval Christian tradition called this the doctrine of moderatio, the doctrine of right scale, of staying within the proper measure of one's life. The modern democratic claim that every citizen is a mini sovereign violates this doctrine fundamentally. It tries to inflate the citizen to a size that our actual nature cannot bear. The result, as Jesus would have predicted, is exactly the anxiety we've been describing and which he warned us against. The cure for this anxiety is the same cure Jesus offered his disciples on the hillside above Galilee. Do not worry. Look at the birds of the air. Consider the lilies of the field. Your heavenly Father knows what you need. So I'm hoping that by the time we get to the end of this book, if we can keep going with it, we might be able to lay down this burden in good conscience, and that we'll discover that the laying down of this weight is not a refusal of real responsibilities, but the acceptance of our actual responsibilities, which are smaller, more local, more concrete, more achievable than we have been led to believe. And we'll discover that the political programme of the gospel is not the casting of a vote every four years, but daily faithfulness in our actual lives. We will discover that the king is on his throne, that the king hears prayer, your prayer, my prayer hears that, and that the Christian's fruitful service in and through church is the way the world is actually changed for good. That's the cure. But we're still in the diagnosis. The weight we've been feeling it's real, it has a name, it's the weight of being told you are a mini sovereign in a country you cannot run. And that's enough for this week. And next time we'll push on with the argument.