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Good Morning,

When you live in a democracy you have the privilege of complaining about it, participating in improving it or doing nothing, as is your right. It’s quite easy to take your freedom to do these things for granted. Until perhaps you hear of a country where just to protest, or want to improve things leads to jail, torture or death.

Of all countries in this world, a third live under authoritarian rule, according to the Economist’s Democracy Index. Only 6% meet criteria of ‘full democracy,’ as assessed by their measure of pluralism, rule of law and civil liberties. Most countries are called ‘flawed democracies’, of which the United States is now considered one.

But the democracy that gave us ‘Government of the people, by the people and for the people’ is not the only one under strain. Unhappy populations in usually stable democracies are blaming the system for their woes. The dissatisfaction has seen a surge in populism, racism, and nationalism.

No-one pretends democracy is perfect. As Churchill once said, ‘Many forms of Government will be tried in this world of sin and woe. Indeed, it has been said democracy is the worst form of Government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’

Alternatives are available to us – theocracy, monarchy, even self-perpetuating autocracy - but before we swap one for the other let’s be clear about what we could be giving up. Democracy is flawed, but better to retain Churchill’s pragmatic hope that it’s the best we’ve got. For all its defects, they are defects we are free to change.

In the Bible, God watches the people have a go at tribal governance, theocracy and monarchy with little obvious sign of progress. Along the way, they fall prey to dictatorship, racial discrimination and deifying the nation. All of which are condemned by the prophets who heroically keep calling the people back to a better way.

Jesus lived under imperial occupation, caught between a theocratic people and an autocratic king. But rather than suggest a new, improved version of government, he described a world where the marginalised have a voice, we care for people beyond our own boundaries, and leaders serve rather than dominate.

I’d argue these values still imbue and can influence our own systems of government. In the recent US mid-term elections, described as ‘a battle for the soul of the nation’, the first black senator for Georgia, Raphael Warnock, likened voting to being ‘a prayer for the world we desire’.

Everyone having a vote that counts would be something. In this ‘world of sin and woe’ it’s still possible to see democracy as the political enactment of a spiritual idea that everyone has an essential worth. An idea found in the God who gives away power to the people, for the people.

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