Religion and Moral Humility, Not Constitutions Alone, Sustain Democratic Liberty
Source: https://www.facebook.com/americanspectator/. "John Selden on the Centrality of Religion in a Democracy | The American Spectator | USA News and Politics." August 23, 2026. spectator.org
The Gist
The author argues that written laws and constitutions alone can't keep a democracy free and fair—people need shared moral and religious values to actually practice humility and restraint. Without a common religious foundation, he argues, people become hypocritical, tribal, and prone to blaming and excluding others, which destroys the civil dialogue democracy depends on.
Conclusion
A free democratic society cannot be sustained by constitutional structures alone; it requires a shared religious grounding that fosters humility, civility, and recognition of human oneness, without which political liberty degenerates into factionalism, exclusion, and incivility.
Premises
- Constitutions, even excellent ones like America's, can be gamed by those seeking power, as history and figures like Jackson and Obama illustrate.
- The Founders (e.g., Madison, Adams, Franklin) understood that political liberty requires moral and religious virtue among the people, not just legal structures.
- Religion itself can be misused or 'gamed'—people selectively apply moral strictures to others while exempting themselves, undermining genuine humility.
- Modern elites have attempted to expel religion from public discourse while simultaneously claiming moral exemption from communal obligations, a combination that is destructive.
- The biblical concept of an underlying 'oneness' connecting all people prevents total isolation and division; removing this concept from public life inevitably leads to exclusionary politics and factionalism.
- Democracy depends on civility and dialogue among differing voices to produce collective wisdom; incivility and the demonization of 'excluded others' destroys this democratic process.
- Historical figures like Selden demonstrated that religious humility—recognizing a higher moral authority governing all people equally—supports civil order and religious freedom, whereas the absence of such humility (as in Jacobin-style politics) leads to self-destructive cycles of blame and violence.
- Morality without religious grounding is unstable and self-serving, as it can shift according to convenience, whereas religion provides a fixed standard that governs and stabilizes morality.
Assumptions
- There exists an objective, divinely grounded 'oneness' or moral order underlying humanity that religion uniquely reveals or reinforces.
- Secular or areligious moral frameworks are inherently unstable or self-serving compared to religious ones.
- The decline of religious influence in public life is a primary cause of factionalism and political polarization, rather than one of many contributing factors.
- Historical religious figures like Selden and biblical frameworks (e.g., Sinai, Noahide laws) provide a valid model for contemporary democratic civil order.
- Political incivility and 'politics of exclusion' are essentially religious in nature (a substitute or false religion), rather than simply secular political tribalism.
- The comparison between modern political movements and the French Revolution's Jacobins is apt and illuminating rather than exaggerated.