How Freedom and Democracy are Intertwined with Christianity

There are two great articles out today highlighting the correlation between democratic freedom and Christianity. First, Ben Kinchlow (above) writes...

"President George Washington, in his 1776 farewell speech, issued one of the gravest warnings in American history:

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.

He continued:

Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education … reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Washington clearly understood the folly of attempting to substitute education for morality (the quality of being in accord with the standards of right and wrong).

Liberal-oriented educators and intellectuals insist that our children can make moral choices in a vacuum. Their position is that choices can be made without regard to any absolute standard of right and wrong. The argument for situational ethics (any decision depends on the situation you are in) presents our youth with a shifting morality as the basis for making decisions. The fact of the matter is, however, that the intelligentsia make these assertions without due consideration of the end results.


Absent religious principles (which, in Western civilization, are taken from the Judeo-Christian Bible), what, if any, are the standards of right and wrong? Who sets them? Has it become merely a matter of opinion? And if so, whose? What, one could reasonably ask, is the foundation upon which we base our actions and order our society?"

Kinchlow's article goes on to argue, like others before him, that the very foundation of Western civilization, and the freedoms we enjoy in it, are in fact, based on the Bible, and rightly so.

Vox Day's latest offering points out how the Left is abolutely clueless when it comes to the history of Western civilization...

"Being for the most part historically illiterate, few intellectuals are prepared to admit that modern representative democracy and the basic concept of individual rights are 18th century phenomena that were the byproducts of a Christian society. They prefer to attribute both institutions to the Enlightenment, despite the fact that it was the Enlightenment that led directly to the revolutionary horrors of the French revolution and it is the Enlightenment that presently serves as the inspiration for the anti-democratic authoritarian bureaucracy of the European Union.

It is written that a house divided against itself cannot stand. In like manner, an intellectual movement cannot reasonably be considered the cause of two diametrically opposed conceptual phenomena.

And it will become increasingly difficult for intellectuals to deny the connection between Christianity and democracy as the recognized, even celebrated, post-Christianity of Europe has been closely followed by European post-democracy. The development of European post-democracy is much less recognized, is not at all celebrated, and yet it is in some ways further along than the more widely reported continental post-Christianity."

For all of the hand-wringing about Christianity being a 'repressive' religion, one wonders what the world would look like without it's influence.

"Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention .... In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom marching in opposite directions. But in America I found they were intimately united. ”


The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other .... They brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion." Alexis de Tocqueville