Worshipping the idol of democracy
In Dostoevsky’s “The Adolescent,” his character Makar Ivanovich Dolgoruky states, “A man cannot live without worshipping something; without worshipping, he cannot bear the burdens of himself. And that goes for every man. So that if a man rejects God, he will have to worship an idol that is made of wood, gold, or ideas. So those who think they don’t need God are really just idol worshippers, and that’s what we should call them.”
Irish author and keen observer of America, Os Guinness, writing in his newest book, “The Magna Carta of Humanity,” notes that “The rejection of God is far from inconsequential. Those who displace God must shoulder the consequences. They must necessarily put someone or something is his place, which means substituting an idol, and doing that is never inconsequential, either for an individual or for entire societies.”
I think I need not list here how the world – and in particular the West – has been rejecting God more openly and more rapidly since the Enlightenment. The record speaks for itself. But if the above is true, and I believe it is, then in the rejection of God, replacements have come – as Dolgoruky states, as either “wood, gold, or ideas.”
Guinness posits that one of these idols is democracy itself.
One need merely to peruse statements from elected politicians and the cultural elite to see how democracy is becoming a religion to growing numbers.
Look at the way American politicians talk about American democracy using religious terminology. President Joe Biden says “the battle for the soul of America is not over,” and “we should be able to change the rules to protect the heart and soul of our democracy.” In his effort to change the way American votes, Biden said “We will choose — the issue is: Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadows, justice over injustice?” The leader of the US Senate, Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, states “It is very, very difficult to put into words what has transpired today. This temple to democracy was desecrated.” A temple, of course, is a place of worship and the “temple” he is describing is the US Capital Building. The mainstream media is part of this idol worship as well. The tag line for the influential Washington Post is “Democracy dies in darkness.” Again, that nod to religious terminology of light and darkness.
And then there is this, which is fascinating because it shows that even those who hate and fight against Communism are susceptible. In late May and early June of1989, Chinese students at Tiananmen Square, in their protests against a tyrannical Communist government, erected a ten-meter-tall statue made of plaster and papier-mâché which they called the “Goddess of Democracy.” The result of those protests are well-known and I have no doubt the students wanted genuine freedom, but in 2007 the Victims of Communism Foundation in the United States erected a more durable and permanent copy of the statute in Washington, DC. While their aim in doing so was to thumb their nose at the Chinese Communist government and serve as a memorial to the 100 million who died in the last century under communism, it is still a form of idol worship. “Democracy” is not a god or a goddess. It is an idea and as Dostoevsky notes, idols come in the form of ideas too.
What does it mean, though, if people and institutions are worshipping democracy as an idol? I think it only serves to take us in the direction, ultimately, of authoritarianism and possibly totalitarianism. Polish professor, philosopher and politician Ryzsard Legutko, in his book “The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies,” writes that, increasingly, there are eerie similarities between communism and liberal democracy as it is becoming. He notes that both communism and liberal democracy insist that history is moving in their directions and that history is “on their side.” Both require that social institutions – the family, faith institutions and private and voluntary associations – conform to the rules of liberal democracy. And both are devoted to social engineering to making this happen. As Englishman John O’Sullivan, the former editor of the conservative publication National Review writes in the forward “In short, like Marxism before it, liberal democracy is becoming an all-encompassing ideology that, behind a veil of tolerance, brooks little or no disagreement.”
As individuals and institutions come to “worship” the idol of democracy, and as this democracy moves further in the direction that Professor Legutko describes, those individuals and institutions will use this new religion to push for, or outright grab, power, power to remake the world in their image. As Legutko notes, “Both communism and liberal democracy are regimes whose intent is to change reality for the better. They are – to use the current jargon – modernization projects. Both are nourished by the belief that the world cannot be tolerated as it is and that it should be changed: that the old should be replaced with the new. Both systems strongly – and so to speak – impatiently intrude into the social fabric and both justify their intrusion with the argument that it leads to the improvement of the state of affairs by ‘modernizing’ it.” Of course communism killed 100 million people in the last century alone in its utopian vision of “changing reality for the better.” Where liberal democracy, in the direction it is currently headed, takes us remains to be seen.
Solzhenitsyn wrote that many woes had befallen Russian because “Men have forgotten God.” Many woes – and much worse – will befall the West not because men and women have forgotten God, but because men and women have rejected God, and replaced him with faith in idols, one of those being democracy.