CONTEMPORARY POLITICS

Germanic Tribesmen Celebrating a Political Victory

When I was in college back in 19[mumbledy-mumble] I read a description of a form of democracy practiced by wild Germanic tribes living outside the Roman Empire. Whenever there was an important decision to be made, the tribe would gather together with the tribesmen favoring one solution on one side and the tribesmen favoring the other solution on the other. They would then begin yelling. The issue was decided by whichever group yelled the loudest. All you had to do was recruit enough allies with loud voices, get them to yelling, and you could carry any issue. I remember thinking “What a stupid way to decide important issues. I’m glad we here in American have a much more enlightened form of democracy.” Which goes to show how naïve I was.

Twenty-first century America is ruled by whoever can yell the loudest, and the news media (especially video and radio) has a profound effect on who can yell the loudest. You can scream at the top of your voice and nobody will hear you if the media ignores you. But if you are shouting something that coheres with the agenda of a particular media outlet, your voice can be magnified above the sonic boom level.

Something I have noticed over the years, is that when I am shouting, I’m not doing my best thinking. I don’t think I’m unique in that respect; I think it is true of all of us. The louder we shout, the less we think. Emotion is the enemy of reason, and emotion has almost completely driven reason from the marketplace of ideas here in America. The moment a thinker voices an idea, others begin to shout the idea down. Much as Socrates was shouted down when he suggested that people should think for themselves, as Galileo was shouted down when he suggested that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and as Reverend Monsignor Georges Lemaître was shouted down when he suggested the Big Bang,* anyone who voices an unpopular idea today is shouted down by those with access to the loudest megaphones.

As Aristotle said over 2,000 years ago: 

It is not right to pervert the judge by moving him to anger or envy or pity-one might as well warp a carpenter's rule before using it. (Rhetoric, Book 1, Part 1)

Unless we get control of our emotions, modulate our shouting, and start addressing our problems with good sense rather than bad sophistry, we might as well go back to wearing animal skins and horned helmets.

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* In case you're wondering why Rev. Lemaitre's proposal got shouted down, it was because it sounded too much like "Let there be light." (Genesis 1:3). Lemaitre was accused of trying to sneak religion into science through the back door. The distinguished astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle labeled Lemaitre's theory the "Big Bang Theory" as a term of ridicule. How, indeed, could such a well-ordered Universe have come from an explosion?

OUR UNDEMOCRATIC ELECTORAL COLLEGE

It’s downright undemocratic for someone to win the Presidency and lose the popular vote! Well, I guess it is, but the American government is not a democracy. The heart and soul of democracy is majority rule. Whatever the majority of the people want, that’s what the government is going to do. Athens was a democracy. Whatever the voters wanted, that’s what they got, and eventually the voters voted their country into ruin with the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, which led to catastrophic defeat in the Peloponnesian War.

America's government, on the other hand, was designed to see to it that in certain situations the majority’s will could be ignored. America started out as a group of thirteen independent states, just as Greece was a group of many independent city-states. The Greeks experimented with confederations of city-states known as the Delian League and the Peloponnesian League. It didn’t work out, and Greek unity was achieved only with the swords of Philip of Macedon and his more famous son, Alexander the Great.

The thirteen independent states in American also entered into a confederation that didn’t work. When the Articles of Confederation proved inadequate, the thirteen independent states achieved unity by the pen rather than the sword. Under the Constitution, each state surrendered some, but not all, of its sovereignty to a central Federal government which was modeled, not after the Athenian democracy, but after the Roman Republic. There was a certain amount of democracy under the Roman Republic, but it was set up so that the majority didn’t always prevail. There is a certain amount of democracy in the American Republic, but it was set up so that the majority didn’t always prevail. That’s why Wyoming (with a population of 582,658) has just as many Senators as California (with a population of 39,144,818).

Under America's republican form of government, the Senators of the 24 most populous states could vote unanimously for a bill, expressing the will of their 264,053,680 constituents, and be defeated by the unanimous vote of the Senators from the 26 least populous states, expressing the will of only 56,692,912 constituents. That’s downright undemocratic, isn’t it? It sure is, but that’s the way our government works. Each state still has a modicum of its sovereignty, and that sovereignty counts for something. It protects the citizens of the smaller states from being bullied by the larger states. Where that modicum of sovereignty is most readily apparent is in the Electoral College where we pick our presidents.

One way of looking at the election is that, as of today’s tally, Clinton is winning by 59,755,284 votes to Trump’s 59,535,522 votes, a difference of 219,762. That’s 0.18% of the vote cast—less than two-tenths of one percent. That's a difference which pollsters would say lacks statistical significance. That’s also a difference which would mandate an automatic recount in most states which require automatic recounts (most states which require an automatic recount mandate a difference of less than 0.5%, one-half of one percent). If we abolished the Electoral College, would we really want a nationwide reprise of the travesty of the Florida recount of 2000? Do you know what a popular vote margin that narrow would mean if we abolished the Electoral College? It would mean that nobody’s vote would count because nine septuagenarians wearing black dresses would decide who became President. I’d rather not have the  Supreme Court decide who was going to be President. I’ll take my chances with the Electoral College, thank you.

Another way of looking at the election is that if Trump carries Michigan, Alaska, and Arizona (in all of which he is currently leading), the electorate of 30 sovereign states will have voted for Trump, but the electorate of only 20 sovereign states voted for Clinton. If he loses all three, then the vote will be 27 sovereign states for Trump and 23 for Clinton.

We don’t elect Presidents by popular vote or by the vote of individual sovereign states. We use they hybrid system of the Electoral College. Under our Constitution, Trump won by 270+ electoral votes. End of story. 

State sovereignty has been gradually eroded since 1776 until it is a mere shadow of what it once was. We need to cling to what little state sovereignty we have remaining, and the Electoral College is one vestige of state sovereignty that should remain.

Majority rule isn’t always a good thing. It frequently slips into majority tyranny. The urban majority can and often does run roughshod over the needs and wishes of the rural minority. The Electoral College is one way of preventing the urban majority from trampling the rights of the rural minority. Look at the USA Today county-by-county map of how the vote went. Those blue states almost disappear when you color in the red counties outside the major metropolitan areas.

If we abolish the Electoral College, we abolish one of the last vestiges of state sovereignty, and we might as well change our name to the United Provinces of America.

CONVERSIONARY PROTESTANTS, CHRISTIAN MISSIONS, AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

According to postmodern politically correct wisdom, Christian missionaries to third world countries were [and are] mere instruments of oppressive colonial rule and helping to despoil the native peoples and keep them in poverty and bondage. I vividly recall one politically correct soul who hated Mother Teresa with a passion because of the terrible damage she did to the Indian poor to whom she ministered. Nothing you could say to him would change his mind.

 

Robert D. Woodberry, a tenure track professor at a western university decided to measure the effects of missionary work on the colonial victims of the third world. He gathered his data, crunched his numbers, and was astounded by his results. He reworked his data, had it vetted by others, and still the results were the same. When he wrote his research paper and submitted it for publication, he did so with a degree of trepidation. In his paper he even apologized at the outset for his results, but he stood by their accuracy.  He wrote

 

[T]hese claims may sound overstated and offensive. Yet the historical and statistical evidence of CPs’ influence is strong, and the cost of ignoring CPs in our models is demonstrably high.

 

What were the results? What horrible effects did Christian missionaries have on the third world? Instead of paraphrasing, I’ll let him describe them:

 

[C]onversionary Protestants (CPs) were a crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty,  mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, most major colonial reforms, and the codification of legal protections for nonwhites in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These innovations fostered conditions that made stable representative democracy more likely—regardless of whether many people converted to Protestantism.

 

Woodberry goes on in the article to describe additional pernicious effects of Christian missionaries: Better health, longer lifespans, and greater personal freedom. Almost every democracy in the third world had a history of vigorous Conversionary Protestant missions. Almost every totalitarian state had no history of Conversionary Protestant missions.

 

He also found that Christian missionaries who were not Conversionary Protestant had little or no effect on the well-being of the countries in which they worked. Just what the blazes is a Conversionary Protestant? And how did they contribute to such miraculous changes in the mission fields where they worked? Woodberry doesn’t define the term Conversionary Protestant, he merely describes how Conversionary Protestants behave. According to Woodberry they:

 

(1) actively attempt to persuade others of their beliefs, (2) emphasize lay vernacular Bible reading, and (3) believe that grace/faith/choice saves people, not group membership or sacraments.

 

I can understand why Woodberry chose to coin the term Conversionary Protestant. If he had used the name that Conversionary Protestants commonly go by, he would have exposed himself to a firestorm of criticism for saying something nice about those ignorant Bible-thumping troglodytes, evangelical Christians. I immediately recognized who Woodberry was talking about because for most of my life I have been (and continue to be) a member of an evangelical Christian denomination.  And for most of my life in my particular denomination I have been urged to contribute to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Foreign Missions. I can remember wondering at times why we didn’t just leave those people alone and let them sort things out for themselves rather than trying to impose our beliefs upon them. I guess you could say I was not a very good Conversionary Protestant.

 

Now that we’ve figured out what a Conversionary Protestant is, we can address just how it was they helped to establish democracy. In a nutshell, they did it by being busybodies. They tried to educate the masses, to spread Christian standards of behavior, and to make the colonial authorities treat the native populations more humanely. You can read a full description of all the things they did to foster democracy in Woodberry’s article, The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy. It’s somewhat hard to read, but it is worth the effort.

 

It does seem, however, that Conversionary Protestants are still being busybodies right here in the USA, lobbying for behavior consistent with their understanding of Christian values such as supporting school prayer and opposing abortion. Might it be possible that their domestic activities are actually good for America? Perhaps in another hundred years another academic will do a statistical study and make a definitive determination of whether evangelical Christians, I mean Conversionary Protestants, were good or bad for twenty first century America.

 

Postscript: The watchword in academia is “publish or perish.” If you don’t get published you don’t get tenure and you have to start looking for another job. Woodberry’s experience was somewhat different. He got published but he did not get tenure. You can find his article online on a number of websites, and you can find him on the faculty of the University of Singapore. Postmodernism loves iconoclasm, but only of a certain type. If you are casting down the icons of traditional values, they applaud. But do not question the sacred cows of political correctness.