Carter’s Mystery Bible of Democracy
This week, as Congressman John Carter argued against a moratorium to protect the Gulf Coast from further oil spills resulting from risky offshore drilling, he searched for a frame of reference that would make his objections to reasonable regulations make sense. Stretching for justification of his position, he appealed to an idea of representative government that he claimed had its base in the Christian Bible:
“We say that the people will elect representatives to represent them in this Congress and in State legislatures across the country and other legislative or quasi-legislative bodies to speak on their behalf, to vote on their behalf, and to set up laws and rules which establish what a civil society will be and what we will consider right and wrong in our world. This is a simple concept, arguably, a biblical concept going back for centuries and centuries, in fact, thousands of years.”
What was this biblical concept Congressman Carter referring to? Can any such thing actually be found in the Bible?
Legislature. Democracy. Vote. Represent. None of these these words are found in the Christian Bible.
The word elect is found in the holy scriptures of Christianity. In the Bible, however, that word is used only to refer those who have been chosen by Christianity’s deity, God, not to refer to the creation of a body of the people, by the people, for the people.
The concept of law is strong within the Bible, but it’s not the sort of law that we know and operate under here in the United States. The law of the Bible is an arbitrary conception of the law, dictated by the deity Lord God, who creates law like a monarch, without question or input from human beings, as in Psalms 119, which talks about “the law of the Lord”, or “the ordinance of the law which the Lord hath commanded” in the Book of Numbers, chapter 19.
At the core of American democracy is a separation of church and state. That separation is founded not just in the First Amendment, which declares freedom of religion and forbids Congress to take any action to establish religion in law, but also in the original body of the Constitution, which contains no reference to the Bible, and declares that there shall be no religious tests required for public office.
In contrast, throughout the Bible, public office was described as fundamentally religious in nature, with leaders chosen by the deity God, not by the people. There have been many ancient sources for the American practice of democracy, such as the Greeks, and the Iroquois. Christianity’s Bible is not among those sources. When Congressman Carter seeks to push the United States into a Biblical frame of reference for government, he pushes the nation away from the principles of democracy.
[...] The current incarnation of the Republican Party in Congress often seems to be dominated by politicians who believe that Christianity should have a privileged status recognized by the U.S. federal government. There’s John Shimkus, who believes that climate policy should be determined not by science, but by the Christian Bible. Mike Enzi and David Vitter push for Christian mottos in the Capitol building. John Carter asserts that the Christian Bible is the foundation of American government. [...]