Photo by Ryan Kosmides on Unsplash
What do you call a huge publicly-owned monopoly run by greedy, power-hungry shareholders, which can change the rules of the marketplace at will and force consumers to buy at the point of a gun? Democratic government.
Explanation
It is really popular to hate Big-Name-Retail-Store and Big-Name-Restaurant and Big-Name-Manufacturer and Big-Name-Whatever for being evil monopolies that want to eat babies and kick puppies. Yet, the biggest one of all that really does kill babies and harm puppies often gets a pass.
It is extremely strange to me that trust in the government is at an all time low and yet people of both major American political parties seem to look to government still to fix their problems.
On the Democratic side, they think the problem is we just need to reform the government and ensure the government is made to act in everyone’s best interest. They continue to appeal to this concept even though it has been proven to fail over and over and over. It makes no sense.
On the Republican side, they say they believe the problem is big government, but suggest cutting the biggest parts of government and they clutch their pearls and scream, “How dare you!” Republicans, particularly at the state and federal level, desire a big monopolistic government as much as the other party, regardless of their rhetoric.
If you truly believe that government should not get to tell you what to do, then you should act that way. If the government says everyone has to wear a purple hat and 40% of the population refuses to wear a purple hat, guess what? The government cannot make people wear purple hats. But, if everyone wears their purple hat and demands the government stop people from making people wear purple hats, but will settle for the compromise that the government gets to dictate that people have to wear cool colored hats, well, those people all believe government has the right to tell people what colored hats to wear.
It’s an absurd illustration, but that’s the rub. In a democracy, where the people are the government, part of acting according to Romans 13, is ignoring the government when it does something it has no business doing.
The problem is that too many Christians read this passage and think it applies in literal fashion to a modern government:
Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.
Romans 13:2 (ESV)
This statement was made under the rule of a foreign occupying nation by a totalitarian government. In a representative democracy, the people are the authorities. We are the government. At least, that’s what my social studies teacher taught me. We decide who has power and who doesn’t. We decide who makes laws and who doesn’t. We, as a general population, are the ultimate arbiters of what our government is and is not and those decisions are not down to simple majorities.
Therefore, we, as participants in the government, need to consider our role as rulers just as much as we are subject to the laws themselves:
For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.
Romans 13:3-4 (ESV)
We must not be a terror to good conduct, but to bad. We need to hold our representatives accountable by voting them in or out based upon how well they serve the public, but also by directly resisting any unlawful regulation they put upon us.
A democratic republic is a complicated place for a Christian to live, much more complicated than the foreign autocracy under which Paul lived. More complicated, but far superior.