3 Comments

I enjoyed Brian's takedown of Wolfe's shallow nationalism. It bothers me that we are a shallow people and that we are prone to put our trust in princes, like all the other nations.

But I have a conundrum. As grateful as I am for our nation's hybrid system of republicanism and democracy, and as wholeheartedly as a recognize and applaud its seeming relative superiority to many alternatives, and as fervently as I thank God I don't live in a totalitarian state, I simply don't see a biblical warrant for this system as "the end of history".

Our wonderfully designed system has also perpetrated military imperialism, mercantilism, abortion on demand, anti-immigrationism, and a host of other ills which we the people have voted for and clamored for.

The founder's solution was wise and prudent, and it's impossible to imagine how a better compromise could have been made at the time. But, it was a technocratic solution. Like all engineering barriers, it is easily defeated by maloperation. They knew it at the time, and knew if the people didn't retain Christian morality en masse, the nation would be doomed.

Therefore, I don't think it's enough for defenders of liberal democracy to say "it's good enough". Because that's not what the founders said. Not at all.

If you defenders aren't ardently insisting on national Christian revival... and everything that entails WITHIN THE HALLS OF POWER... you're not really fending off the much-feared imposition of a strongman. You're just ensuring that the eventual strongman we get, without a revival, will be as bad as you predict.

Expand full comment