Contemplating America: Our Threatened Democracy

My brother and sisters in Christ, this is a weekend during which we “celebrate America.”

The liberties that are enshrined in our Constitution give us much to be thankful for: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and most importantly, freedom of religion.

And yet on the other hand, I suggest to you that perhaps this is a time for us to “contemplate America,” rather than “simply celebrate America.” 

We hear much today about threats to our democracy. Interestingly, both the Right and the Left accuse each other of doing this very thing.

President Trump is currently under investigation for fostering the January 6 so-called insurrection. The Biden campaign has been accused of massive election fraud, and President Biden for opening our borders to massive unregulated immigration, in order get these immigrants on the federal dole, making them reliable Democrat voters with the goal of achieving a one-party system.

We’re told alternately that “white supremacy,” “climate change,” Vladimir Putin, and other phenomena are “the greatest threat to our democracy.”

And so the accusations are traded back and forth between the Right and Left.

However, when the Supreme Court returned the question of abortion legislation to the democratic process, we heard the cries and threats of a “summer of rage” to come. 

Why the rage? Is this not a threat to democracy?

Is there a threat to our democracy? What is the greatest threat to our democracy?

To assist in this contemplation of America, as I have in the past, I’m going to quote the Founding Fathers of our nation rather than the Fathers of the Church. 

I want to recall to you some of the fundamental principles of that founding, principles that are forgotten, ignored, or distorted by many today.

Let’s begin with George Washington, the “father of our country”:

Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports . . . reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.

Not only is morality inseparable from religion, but both are essential to our national character. John Adams put it this way:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Constitutional government, then, depends on the sound moral character of the population; and thus, in the words of James Madison,

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.

Yet there are those today who advocate not only freedom of religion, but freedom from religion. It is amply demonstrated by a stream of Supreme Court decisions reaching back over the past 60 years that have increasingly restricted any public expression of faith. We can describe this as freedom from religion. But is this what the founding fathers had in mind?

What happens, then, to a nation where the influence of sound religion declines, where morality is seen as something antiquated that we can do without, or something we can each make up for ourselves, where virtue is seen as something for the naïve and silly?

A favorite quote of Jefferson’s from Montesquieu tells us:

When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community. (written by Thomas Jefferson in his Common Place Book).

What rules then in the place of religion, morality, and virtue? Simply put—raw ambition, greed, and lust. Vice and wickedness take over in the population.

Jefferson goes on:

It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. . . . degeneracy in these is a cancer which soon eats into the heart of its laws and constitution.

John Adams adds:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, … would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net.

In the final analysis then, our sacred liberties are threatened whenever liberty is understood as license. Liberty places critical restrictions on the power of government to infringe inalienable rights; license says, “I am free to do whatever I want.” Many Americans today understand liberty as precisely license—and the harvest is one of moral degeneracy. 

Thus it is clear from the Founding Fathers that moral degeneracy is the greatest threat to democracy, and thus our liberties. Why?

Benjamin Franklin explains it:

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.

Patrick Henry expands on that thought:

Bad men cannot make good citizens. It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience, is incompatible with freedom. No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.

Samuel Adams puts it succinctly: [M]en will be free no longer than they remain virtuous.

My brothers and sisters in Christ, when we survey the moral progress of our nation since the time of our founding fathers, there are bright spots—the of abolition of slavery, the elimination of institutional racism, the expansion of women’s rights and roles in society, and so on … yet there is much cause for concern.

In this regard, the prophecy of the Apostle Paul comes to mind:

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come:  For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,  unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. (2 Tim. 3:1-4) 

Does not this description fit much of what we see in the contemporary American character? If such be true, then our democracy is indeed in grave danger.

What is the greatest threat to our democracy?

I close with the words of Daniel Webster:

Our ancestors established their system of government on morality and religious sentiment. Moral habits, they believed, cannot safely be on any other foundation than religious principle, nor any government be secure which is not supported by moral habits. . . . [I]f we and our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us, that shall bury all our glory in profound obscurity.

May God preserve our democracy from such an end.

*Originally presented to St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral in Wichita, KS on July 3, 2022. The "patristic" quotes are from a compilation from years ago that were intended for use in homilies; they were never intended for publication which explains the absence of citations.