Is the age of popular democracy ending and the age of rule by kings returning? Some Christians hope so.
First Things recently published an article by Mary Harrington suggesting, even celebrating, the end of popular democracy, and the return of rule by paternalistic monarchy.
Mass literacy after the Reformation created the Whiggish tradition that became Anglo-American constitutional democracy, she notes. But mass democracy is now ending in favor of the “profoundly reactionary” digital revolution. Returning to governance by kings may now be our “least bad option” and even “urgently necessary.”
First Things was founded by Richard Neuhaus, also a co-founder of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, who authored our founding statement “Christianity and Democracy” in 1981, which noted:
We readily acknowledge that democratic governance is unsatisfactory. Everything short of the consummation of the rule of Christ is unsatisfactory. For Christians, it is precisely the merit of democracy that it reminds us of this truth and sustains the possibility of humane government in a necessarily unsatisfactory world.
Neuhaus quoted Reinhold Niebuhr: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
Harrington in contrast claims the Whiggish democratic age was for a particular human phase, saying:
Though many still believe in Whig history, it is already over—a casualty of the post-print counter-Enlightenment. For while believers in Whig history generally recognize the contribution made by the printing press to their story, most assumed the advent of digital culture would continue this trajectory. They were wrong. The digital revolution is profoundly reactionary. The transformations it brings are less revolution, in the laudatory Whig sense, than putsch—one that critically undermines every presupposition underpinning Whig history.
Harrington notes that medieval Christianity saw “all of material, political, and social reality as a hierarchical arrangement of the natural order, formed from above by the thoughts of God himself and governed by a system of analogical correspondences.” And “within this system, kings bore a relation to their polity analogous to that between Christ and his Church, between the head of a household and those within that household, and between the head and the body of a human being.”
The printing press enabled mass literacy and different interpretations of the Bible. It led to the English Civil War and the beheading of Charles I, and eventually constitutional monarchy with parliament supreme. These ideas, carried by radical religious dissenters to America, where “mass literacy and disavowal of kings would culminate, a century later, in the American Founding.” Harrington writes: “Whig history begins, then, with an English head of state losing his head. Or perhaps we might say with the democratization of headship, now understood as a quality whose proper scale is the individual.” And: “The idealized political subject for this reality-picture is rational, politically engaged, and agentic, able to absorb information, reason clearly, and form sober individual judgments.”
The original Whiggish liberals envisioned a literate elite as decision makers. But with time it seemed “obviously just and proper to extend to all these rational, self-directing subjects the right to engage in democratic politics.” This popularization of democracy, enabled by radio and tv, generated “supranational and pre-political forms of governance” known colloquially as the “deep state,” according to Harrington, who notes:
In the Whig version of history, an uprising or violent transformation is a “revolution” when it tends toward more freedom and other Whiggish goods. Revolutions that push in the opposite direction receive less complimentary descriptors: terms such as “putsch,” as for example Hitler’s 1923 attempt to overthrow the Weimar government.
The “digital putsch” displacing serious mass literacy has made people “less analytic” amid the “the re-emergence of modes of thinking that emphasize pattern, image, and symbolism.” She suggests that if “We the People” are no longer “rational print-era subjects” then society returns to the “medieval political problem of how to avoid the decline of absolution into tyranny.” Harrington says doubling down on print-era democratic “values” only generates a “new kind of oppression.”
To prevent this new oppression, and “absent the mass literacy that made democracy so obvious a choice for the early American republic,” Harrington thinks “a downgrading of the direct role played by “We the People” in decision-making may well be in the people’s best interests.”
Whiggish representative democracy sees “rulers and ruled necessarily have an adversarial relation,” with “carefully calibrated checks and balances within the U.S. Constitution.” But in a “post-print post-democracy, the agonistic relation between rulers and ruled ceases to be a safeguard and becomes a liability—for power now rests with a technocratic permanent bureaucracy, which views its relation to the people as agonistic but cannot be voted out.” This “swarm” cannot love the people like an individual ruler can.
Such an individual ruler is like El Salvador’s strongman Nayib Bukele, Harrington suggests, who through his online “iconography” recalls the “calculated pageantry of premodern monarchs, such as royal entries and triumphal processions.” Harrington does not mention that also like medieval monarchs, Bukele imprisons, tortures and kills his opponents without due process of law. She says classical liberals might be disappointed to realize “civil discourse” is not returning, nor is “small and limited republican government.” It will instead be “big government mediated by big data” that is “impersonal, less accountable, and less capable of friendship.”
Harrington concludes:
If this happens, and I think it will, the return of the king will be not only possible but urgently necessary. Left headless, an algorithmically swarming regime of machinic proceduralism would represent the most monstrous pseudo-democratic tyranny of all. Our best safeguard against this fate is the ordering power of a human ruler, with a human head capable of prudence and justice, and a human heart capable of friendship.
What Harrington articulates is an age-old human desire to discard freedom and responsibility in favor of a supposed “friend” who rules like a parent over children lacking the maturity to govern themselves. This intrinsic human desire, against which the Hebrew prophets warned, prefers a veneer of security over the self-rule to which humans, individually and collectively, at their best are called.
IRD’s founding statement observed: “The debate is between those who do believe and those who do not believe that there is a necessary linkage between Christian faith and human freedom.” Harrington and many others in postliberal Christianity, including but not limited to Catholic integralists and Protestant self-identified Christian Nationalists, think “liberalism” with its democratic freedoms was a failed experiment. They want to return to humanity’s more natural state of paternalism, under a “Christian prince” or some other benign despot.
Christians who remain Whiggish, classically liberal, and democratic believe that all humans equally bear God’s image and His calling to vice-regency and self-rule, through lawful democracy. We believe that humanity’s bent towards domination and greed warns against an unconstrained prince, “Christian” or not, who inevitably will exploit and repress his subjects. Resignation to such repression is easier than self-rule but it is not godly, virtuous or even pragmatically desirable. And God’s grace enables a better way, far better than Harrington’s grim vision of a populist despot who rules through online dictates and presides over mass prison camps.
Reinhold Niebuhr, channeled through Richard Neuhaus, is closer to godly reality:
“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
Or perhaps even more to the point was the Prophet Samuel who warned the ancient Hebrews who wanted a king: “And you shall be his slaves… And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
More from IRD:
Christianity & Democracy: IRD Founding Statement
American Liberty’s Ancient Pedigree
English Bibles, Refuted Clericalism, and Reformation Anglicanism
Comment by Qohelet on August 13, 2025 at 10:16 pm
Mr Tooley is wise to raise the example of Bukele. It’s easy to see the attraction Salvadorians have to him: the country seemingly is a lot safer. But what if it’s your innocent son, or husband or father swept up with no due process. How can that be considered safe? Safe for who?
I really like Tooley’s statement about all humans bearing the image of God and being called to rule through lawful democracy. The only thing I see to add is the idea of the personal responsibility all of us have due to that calling. We have a duty to research issues and stand with the truth, even if that is inconvenient to us. We have a duty to seek honest leaders and throw out dishonest ones. The character of a democracy is only as good as the character of its people, and democracies are failing right now because many prefer to believe what’s convenient than what’s true.
Comment by Glenn Wheeler on August 13, 2025 at 10:44 pm
Let’s look at what democracy has given you…Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Lindsey Graham, a $37 trillion national debt, an economy that survives only on debt monetization, a fractured country with people at each others’ throats, a country where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, endless wars where you bomb and kill third-world people practically every day
Yep, that is the best system. No doubt about it.
Comment by David on August 14, 2025 at 8:58 am
The US has never really gotten over the Civil War. It would have been better to let the South go, though ending slavery was noble.
Comment by John on August 14, 2025 at 11:47 am
Glenn Wheeler,
You sound like someone who has a better system in mind. Please share.
Comment by Gary Bebop on August 14, 2025 at 12:28 pm
“Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will return.” The King is coming. Ponder that truth. Get ready to welcome the King. Democracy is not salvation. The balance between true representative governance and a corrupt, captive, gerrymandered constellation of states is always tenuous. I live in one of those blue gerrymandered states. “Democracy” here is a cruel sham, an oxymoron. What we have is arbitrary rule by the blue sect.
Comment by John on August 14, 2025 at 3:47 pm
Gary Bebop,
Yet Christ will be like no king before nor since. Whereas earthly kings expect others to die for them, Christ gave up his own life for all of us. Whereas earthly kings would have us kiss their feet, Christ insists on washing ours. To look to any earthy monarch to usher in the coming of Christ the King is folly. The problem with monarchy in the past is that always risks seeking to replace the ideal it claims to point to, becoming an idol to itself. Hence the truth in Neuhaus’ statement: “We readily acknowledge that democratic governance is unsatisfactory. Everything short of the consummation of the rule of Christ is unsatisfactory. For Christians, it is precisely the merit of democracy that it reminds us of this truth and sustains the possibility of humane government in a necessarily unsatisfactory world.” Democracy assumes humanity’s fallen and imperfect nature and the tendency of all government toward tyranny in the absence of checks and balances. I also live in a gerrymandered state, Gary being one that bleeds red rather than blue. Both are suffering from a lack of checks and balances, which can be resolved. I support laws and efforts to end gerrymanding in both our states, in accordance with the true principles of liberal democracy.
Comment by Gary Bebop on August 14, 2025 at 5:13 pm
I understand the (forensic) argument that democracy is better than despotic monarchy, but there are many caveats. C.S. Lewis argued that a king serves under God and is expected to represent God’s righteous reign. Kings represent the high bar of moral order, a check on the mob. Democracy often fails us because “every man is king,” so to speak. This levelling does not prove itself out in our mean streets but only mocks it. America is a pageant of struggle to rebalance the moral order. That struggle is often a battle of optics. “The incident has gone viral” because the mob is voting.
Comment by John on August 14, 2025 at 9:26 pm
Gary,
Let’s separate the myth of monarchy from the reality. Reality is that monarchy is one mob leader overthrowing his rivals and declaring himself above the people who got him there. All the pomp, ceremony, and appeals to religion come afterwards to justify the fact of his rule. These pretensions of legitimacy, however, are not what bring about monarchy. Israel had to beg God for a monarch and even then He warned them it not turn out well for them. Let’s try to be wiser.
C.S. Lewis supported democracy. “I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall and therefore think men are too wicked to be trusted with more than the minimum power over other men.”
I don’t know what work of his you’re were referencing above, but I’ll you remind that Lewis’ own experience of monarchy would be a constitutional monarch “reigning, but not ruling” in a country where the actual political power reside in a democratically-elected Parliament. I’ll admit if there is a safe way to do monarchy then the British seem to have gotten right. In their system the monarch can serve as an icon of national patriotism and head of both church and state without having the power to oppress his/her people in anyway, infringe on their religious liberty, or assume actual god-like authority. If there can be said to be any benign form of earthly monarchy, then it is the British model, but precisely because it assumed the democratic mechanisms and limits on power. Had the country not, I’m sure Charles I would not have been the last king to have his head removed.
Comment by Glenn Wheeler on August 14, 2025 at 9:48 pm
John,
I agree with what you say about monarchy. The British monarchy and noblemen developed the idea that they were a special class of people, made by God superior to everyone else, and that is what gave them the “right” to rule. That is obviously ridiculous, and no sane person would want idiots like that to rule over them.
At the same time, though, who would want people who aren’t smart enough to navigate their car through a Wal-Mart parking lot to be the voters who tip an election to one candidate or the other? That’s what the United States has now…and look at the type of leaders who rise to the top in that system.
What is needed is a system that allows a different kind of leaders to rise to the top.
Comment by John on August 14, 2025 at 10:54 pm
Glenn Walker,
Ok. But what would that system look like and how would you develop it? I don’t think the voters are necessarily the problem, or if they are it’s apathy, not over-participation, that is the problem. Average voter turnout in the 19th Century was often between 75-90%. Now it’s more like 45-60%. And that’s just presidential elections. Other elections it’s abysmal. People don’t vote enough in local elections which are important not just because they’re where the majority of actual governing happen, but they’re where the majority of future higher office-holders come from. You got get to the root. One way to combat apathy at the local and state level is to do more to combat gerrymandering, which I know accounts for a lot of lackluster politicians in my backyard. Probably yours too. Another reform would be to introduce term limits on all federal offices. It’s harder to build up the same kind of power bases and entrenched interests when you’re working on a fixed time limit. This would guarantee new blood and fresh voices every few years without impeding the voters. Third, I think the electoral college has outlived its usefulness. It already conforms with the popular vote ninety percent of the time, but when it doesn’t it always has the effect of creating greater partisan bitterness. It would also likely lead to less voter apathy and force both candidates/parties to moderate their platform/rhetoric to speak to a more generic American audience (meaning less appeal to entrenched bases and interest groups and more trying to create broader coalitions that transcend regional, racial, and cultural divides). My point being when it comes to most of the issues people are citing about our government on this page, the likely solutions would be to enhance rather than impede our democratic institutions to create more checks and balances and encourage more, not less civic engagement. Certainly, I don’t see any of these problems going away under a proposed monarchy. If anything the opposite is true. Anyone who for instance thinks monarchy would bring down the national debt should study the reigns of Charles I and Louis XVI closely. Wanna guess how many political revolutions were started by a monarch being unable to pay his bills?
Comment by Salvatore Anthony Luiso on August 14, 2025 at 10:56 pm
I’ve long been of the opinion that content is more important than form in governance. A democratic government is not always best—neither is a monarchical. Both can be corrupt, tyrannical, and terrible.
I’m surprised the author seems to think the Israelites of Samuel’s day rejected democracy in favor of monarchy. In fact they rejected theocracy in favor of monarchy.
Comment by Glenn Wheeler on August 15, 2025 at 7:54 am
John,
The changes you advocate may sound good, but they are pie-in-the-sky, not ever going to happen. People say, “Democracy would work if…” but the “ifs” are never going to happen.
With the current system in the United States, elections will always be decided by the simpletons who cast their votes based on the sound bytes they hear on MSNBC or Fox News.
Comment by Gary Bebop on August 15, 2025 at 10:22 am
The internet has given every man a throne room. That’s pretty clear from the comments in this section. Here, the bloviator is king. Trying to clothe C.S. Lewis in the guise of an American democrat is ludicrous. He was much more nuanced than that.
Comment by John on August 15, 2025 at 1:11 pm
Glenn Wheeler and Gary,
I don’t know how old you are, but I can tell you now, no one under 40 watch MSNBC or Fox News anymore. I also think my ideas are way less pie-in-the-sky than the idea of an American monarchy or the type of theocratic state proposed by Christian nationals. Again if the two of you think you have an answer that’s much more feasible, I’m all ears.
C.S. Lewis did believe democracy was the best government in a fallen society, which is what we are and would continue to be even under a monarchy. In this he was agreement with Churchill and Neuhaus. I didn’t clothe him in anything, Gary. I gave you his own words.
Let me ask you both one question. Do you believe you yourselves are rational and informed enough to vote? Forget about the person who can’t navigate the Walmart parking lot. Forget about the guy sits in his parents’ basement making cat videos all day. I’m asking whether the two of you think you can make good, informed decisions when voting.
Comment by Gary Bebop on August 15, 2025 at 4:30 pm
John, you ask these questions because you imagine yourself to be a cognoscente holding a seminar? Give it up. Trying to proof text C.S. Lewis is laughable. Lewis much higher regard for the monarchical principle than your misapplied citation implies. In fact, through the monarchy “vital elements of citizenship–loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the hierarchical principle, splendor, ceremony, continuity–still trickle down to irrigate the dustbowl” of the modern state.
Comment by John on August 15, 2025 at 5:42 pm
We can debate Lewis all-day, but like I said his experience of monarchy would be one undergirded by the very democratic practices you’re attacking. Just to be clear I was never advocating the abolishment of the British monarchy, which I consider one of the safest and most benign forms of monarchy in the world and clearly of importance to the British people as part of their identity. But America has no monarch by design. Indeed our identity as Americans was born on the rejection of monarchy and the systems of hierarchy that support it. All the reasons Lewis lists for retaining the British monarchy in his own home country are in America reasons against it because it go against the nature of what means to be an American. Our citizen oaths have always been to a document and set principles, not a man. Our consecration of secular life begins with the opening lines to the Declaration of Independence. Any attempt to appoint a monarch over America and surround him or her with the splendor and ceremony of the British model would be seen as rightly as farcial for the same reason they are seen as sacred and glorious in Britain.
I asked the question because it’s occurred to me that everyone from Stephen Wolfe to Mary Harrington who criticizes democracy and so-called “mob rule by the simpletons” never seem to think themselves among the simpletons. I’d have at least a little more respect for Wolfe and others like him if they would stand up and say, “Make me a serf. Put to me to work on a manor for absentee lord. Bound me and my children to a land we don’t own forever.” Instead the Wolfes of the world always seem to assume they’ll be part of whatever master class or new elite surround the throne, which is not surprising really. I mean if you can’t trust yourself to vote wisely in a local election, how could you possibly presume to have the answers to rebuild society from the ground into something better? Even Plato expected he would be one of the philosopher-kings. It’s always someone else’s vote that’s the problem, isn’t it Gary?
Comment by Gary Bebop on August 15, 2025 at 8:06 pm
You still want to pin an indictment on me. What crown do you wear? You are way too ardent about interrogating a stranger on the internet. Bad impression.
Comment by Glenn Wheeler on August 16, 2025 at 12:23 am
John,
Your argument is related to who thinks they are qualified to vote.
Who said anything about voting?
Voting is what got the United States in the mess it’s in. Every idiot, from President to Senator to Representative, was installed by voting. And those idiots are what got the United States into this mess. So why do you think voting would get the United States out of this mess?
Voting is the problem, not the solution.
Comment by Td on August 16, 2025 at 10:03 pm
The comments on here are insane. The funny thing is that they were spurred on by a piece written about an obscure fringe article.
Comment by John on August 17, 2025 at 9:05 am
Glenn Wheeler,
America is a republic. Always has been. Saying voting is the problem here is akin to telling someone they never should have learned to walk because they’ve made some bad choices recently. In any case regardless of what you think of voting as process, all government has some similar form of decision-making, it’s just some limit who make the decisions more than others. So I’ll ask it this way, do you think you’re one of those select few who can make the decisions or you consider yourself another “simpleton” who needs to be kept out?
Comment by Glenn Wheeler on August 17, 2025 at 11:54 pm
John,
You keep desperately asking, “Do you think you’re qualified to make the decisions?” But that is just a device to keep you from having to face the fact that the system in the United States is unworkable and will only lead to ruin.
As the toilet finally flushes and it all goes down the drain, will you still be crying, “Do you think you’re qualified to make the decisions?”
Don’t get so attached to unworkable, pie-in-the-sky theory that you no longer see reality.
Comment by John on August 18, 2025 at 9:19 am
Glenn Wheeler,
You’re so convinced the current system doesn’t work and must be removed, yet refuse to give any indication of what you expect to follow it. You don’t strike as an anarchist and you’ve rejected monarchy earlier in this post. So what are you proposing instead?