Episode 153 - If Democracy Means Peace Why So Much Killing

Democracy gets praised as the political engine of peace, rights, and human flourishing. So we ask a blunt question that rarely gets aired: if that’s true, why does the most democratic century in human history also look like the most violent? We walk through the twentieth century’s ledger of death, from world wars and genocides to the machinery of ideological states, and we refuse to let comforting myths do the thinking for us.

Then the conversation turns to the category modern democracies often treat as background noise rather than a historic catastrophe: abortion. We talk about what it means for elected legislatures, courts, and publics to legalise the deliberate ending of unborn life at industrial scale, and how that sits beside our moral outrage at ancient child sacrifice. Whatever your politics, the ethical and theological stakes are unavoidable: if rights depend on majority will, they can be granted, narrowed, or revoked whenever the numbers shift.

We also push back on the idea that the only alternatives are the twentieth century’s worst options. Small European monarchies get a serious look as functioning, peaceful societies, alongside the claim that a polity under God relates differently to innocent life than a polity that sees itself as the source of its own authority. The deeper foundation is Christian political theology: the throne is in heaven, and Jesus Christ is king.

If you want sharper thinking about democracy, authority, and the moral cost of modern politics, listen now. Subscribe, share with a friend who will disagree, and leave a review with your answer: where does real political authority come from?

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

Transcript

Welcome And Big Claim

Rev Dr PRB 0:30

Well, welcome to the Christ-centered cosmic civilization as we continue with this look at the divine emperor Jesus, how he is the source of all political power. We're in chapter two of the book that I wrote, and let's get into it. And I called it the bloody twentieth century: a failed experiment. Democracy was sold to the world in the twentieth century as the cure for tyranny. The Western powers, in particular, presented democracy as the political form

The Bloody Twentieth Century Thesis

Rev Dr PRB 1:15

most consonant with peace, justice, and human flourishing. The two world wars, we were told, had been fought to make the world safe for democracy. The Cold War was a long struggle between democratic civilization and totalitarian darkness. The end of the twentieth century, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, was hailed by some as the end of history itself, the final triumph of the democratic ideal. I want to suggest that the 20th century is a strange exhibit on which to rest the case for democracy. Because the 20th century, the century in which democracy reached its highest point and spread to more countries than ever before in human history, it was also, by some considerable distance, the most blood-soaked, cruel, tyrannical century the human race has ever endured. Just consider the body count. The First World War killed around 20 million people. The Second World War killed at least 60 million, and by some estimates, closer to 80 million. The gulags of the Soviet Union killed at least 10 million, possibly 20. Holocaust killed 6 million Jews, several million other people. Mao's various campaigns in China killed somewhere between 40 and 60 million. The killing fields

War And Genocide Body Count

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of Cambodia killed 2 million. The Rwandan genocide killed, let's say, 800,000 in a hundred days. The wars of let's call them decolonization killed millions more across Africa and Asia. Korean War, Vietnam War, Iranak War, Yugoslav Wars, the long agony of Central and West Africa and East Africa. By the end of the century, the total death toll from war, genocide, and political slaughter was at minimum 200 million and maybe 300, 400 million human beings. And then, of course, there's the largest category of all, the one that the modern conscience has somehow learned not to count, since the legalization of abortion in the democracies, the democratic Western nations from the sixties and seventies onwards. Hundreds of millions of unborn children have been killed. Over

Abortion And The Uncounted Dead

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a quarter of Generation Z were aborted. It's the most common cause of death abortion for this generation. More than cancer, more than anything else. Single cause. The industrial slaughter of the unborn by the most democratic societies that have ever existed is the largest mass killing in human history. And it's happening now, it's not stopping. And I wanted to dwell on that for a moment because I think it's the great unspeakable fact of modern democratic civilization. And we've learned not we've learned not to speak it. Just the fact of it. So consider for a moment what has actually happened. The democratic societies of the West, by their elected legislatures, with the consent and active support of the voting populations, have legalized the killing of unborn children at a scale unimaginable to any previous human civilization. And I just flagged that up because in the Bible that people are sometimes shocked that there were these ancient peoples who sacrificed their children to pagan gods. But the quantity of children sacrificed to pagan gods is tiny. What horrified the ancient world and what made the living gods so heartbroken and angry and all the rest. It was such a tiny amount compared to the democratic nations. And these numbers that I quoted are not contested. They're simply not noticed. In the United States alone, since 1973, around 65 million unborn children have been legally killed. So that's more than the total casualties of the Second World War. In the United Kingdom since 1967, around 10 million. These are not deaths from disease or natural disaster. They are deliberate killings ordered by mothers, parents performed by trained physicians, paid for in many cases by the state, with the full legal protection of the democratic regime. Now I don't raise this to score just a kind of political point. And I that what to do about that, to me, you know, as we'll see before I get by the time we get to the end of this book, you know, this there's one sort of section of Christians who feel it just needs to be banned, and there's another section of Christians who say, no, if we were going to reduce that, it requires a much more complex answer. Okay, whatever, we're not getting into any of that. I'm simply raising it because when one is honestly assessing the historical record of democracy, this is one of the largest items on the ledger, and we can't leave that out. That is what democracy has brought about. No medieval Christian monarchy, however cruel, however corrupt, however violent, ever presided over anything remotely close to this scale of mass killing of its own children. In fact, the medieval churches preached against this behaviour. The medieval kings legislated against this sort of behaviour. The medieval communities raised unwanted children that desperate mothers could not raise. So these earlier societies were so much more compassionate so much more compassionate. The Christian sacral monarchies of the past produced on this question an actual record of protection of the unborn and the newly born and the needy and widows and orphans. They the their actual record of protection and compassion and cur is so much better than the democratic regimes of the present can even imagine. So the democratic century has been the worst century in the history of the human race in terms of killing its own people. So any cruelty, remember, and this is the point of this the the any cruelty and murder committed by the regimes before democracy, none of them can compete with modern democracies for killing of its own citizens. Now, I'm not arguing that democracy caused all of these deaths. The connection between political form and human violence is complicated, and I don't wish to oversimplify that, but I want to ask the question that almost no one really is willing to ask. If democracy is, as we have been told, the political

Why Did Democracy Turn Violent

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form most consonant with peace and human flourishing, why has the most democratic century in human history also been the most violent? Why have the most democratic societies on earth presided with the consent of their citizens over the largest killings of their own children and others ever taken place? Now, the standard answer is that democracy is not to blame. That the crimes of the century were committed by the totalitarian regimes that oppose democracy, and that the abortion question is a special case where rights are intention. And I've heard these answers many times, I've thought about them, I'm not on I'm not unsympathetic to these ways of thinking and arguing. But I can't quite shake the feeling that they protest too much. The fact is that the century in which the democratic ideal achieved its highest expression is the century in which human violence achieved its highest scale. The two run together in the historical record. Now, whether the whether or not there's a direct causal link or at least, at the very least, there's no obvious anti-correlation. Democracy did not produce the peace it promised. It did not produce the safety it promised. That much we can assert as a certain that's certain. Now, I know the Churchill line that's always quoted at me at this point. I always get the I get this quoted at me almost more than any other line. Certainly when I'm talking about politics and I raise any question at all about democracy. It's this line, the Churchill line will be quoted at me within, you know, the time the timer starts in my head as soon as we have uh I have a discussion, an open

Churchill’s Quote And False Choices

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discussion on this. And Churchill said this democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried. It's a witty line, it's also, if I if I can suggest this, I think it's an evasion. It assumes that the only options on the table are the political forms tried in the 20th century. So it's kind of saying there's communism, there's fascism, there's liberal democracy. And the Churchill line says, in effect, these are all bad, but given these three, we'll take the third, we'll take liberal democracy, because it's better than communism and fascism. So okay, let's agree, that seems okay. Given those three, you know, I'd take the third two, but these are not the only three options. There are in human history many other political forms that have been tried, and some of them, I want to suggest, have results that are at least comparable to, and in some cases considerably better than the democratic record. Just even today consider the small surviving feudal monarchies of Europe. There's Liechtenstein, Monaco, and Dora. These are all sacral or semi-sacral monarchies, often dismissed by modern political analysts as feudal curiosities. But they're also, by almost

Modern Monarchies As Real Alternatives

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every available measure, among the most prosperous, peaceful, well educated, and stable countries on earth. Their citizens are not ruled by referendum, but they live, on average, longer than the citizens of the great democratic powers. They commit less crime, they suffer less mental illness, they are unusually free. Liechtenstein in particular is a case worth considering. The reigning prince actually retains substantial executive power. The country has roughly forty thousand citizens. Its army was famously disbanded in eighteen sixty eight after returning from a war with one extra soldier than they'd set out with. It was an enemy soldier who decided to join them because they had better beer. The current monarch, Hans Adam II, has played video games with his subjects on the day of major game releases. There's a whole thing about that. The Royal Army once dressed up as Halo Master Chief to celebrate the launch of Halo 4. Many of you won't know what that is, but if you do look it up, you'll see some like extraordinary pictures of that. Look, if Sacral Monarchy is gonna win the modern world back, maybe this looks quite attractive. It looks fun, free, fit, healthy, peaceful. Okay, I'm being lighthearted in a way, but the underlying point is serious. We've been told that the alternative to democracy is some grim version of communist or fascist tyranny. The actual alternative in the surviving feudal monarchies of Europe is a small, prosperous, free, peaceful society in which a personal sacral monarch governs with the consent and affection of his people, where church is honored, where the state is small enough to be human scaled, and where the citizens, or rather subjects, get on with their lives without the relentless background hum of political anxiety we know so well. I want to add one more observation about the small monarchies that are off that often surprises modern Christians. That these small monarchies, almost without exception, are pro-life. Now, obviously, the Vatican is the most explicitly pro-life state in the world, but Liechtenstein has some of the most protective abortion laws in Europe. Monaco

Authority From God And Protecting Life

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strongly limits it. The small monarchies in the constitutional and legal arrangement tend to protect the unborn and the newly born at levels that the great democratic powers have abandoned. There is a connection here that is not, I think, accidental. A polity that knows it is under the Lord God, and that knows its monarch is anointed by the divine emperor has such a nation has a different relationship to the protection of innocent life than a polity that believes itself to be the source of its own laws and power. The democratic state grants and revokes rights to life and other kinds of rights as the majority sees fit. I'm going to repeat that sentence because it needs to sink in. The democratic state grants and revokes rights to life and other kinds of rights as the majority sees fit. The sacral monarchy, when it's functioning well, recognizes that it does not have the authority to revoke a right to life that the Lord has given. But in this chapter, I'm not making a positive case for sacral monarchy. The positive case, that's for when we get to sections three and four. I'm simply noticing that the 20th century is not the great success story for democracy that we've been told. I'm noticing that the small surviving alternatives are not the dystopias we have been told to fear. And I'm noticing that the question of which political form best serves human flourishing is perhaps a more open question than modern dogma allows. What if, in the long providence of God, the modern democratic experiment turns out to have been a brief and bloody episode in the long history of Christian political life? What if 200 years from now our descendants will look back on the 20th century the way we look back on, say, the wars of religion in the 17th, as a tragic chapter in

The Gospel As Monarchical Politics

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which our ancestors got something fundamentally wrong and from which the slow recovery took several centuries? What if the recovery's already begun in the small remnants of sacral monarchy that are still standing, and in the quiet conversations of Christians who are beginning to suspect that some of our ancestors knew something we've forgotten? Look, these these are heretical questions by the standards of our age. I'm happy to ask them. The twentieth century deserves to be questioned. The Chris the Christian who's been raised on the dogma that democracy is the political vindication of the gospel has, I think, been raised on a half truth at best. The gospel is not democratic. The gospel is monarchical. The throne is in heaven. The king is the Lord Jesus Christ. And the political experiment of the last century, which tried to build a politics around the will of the people rather than the will of the divine king, that has produced exactly the bloody record one might have expected when a civilization forgets where political authority actually comes from. And so we'll turn in the next chapter to a closer look at how the democratic system actually works in practice. Because before we lift our eyes to the throne, we need to be honest about what we've been doing instead.