One of the best recent books about the American founding is “We the Fallen People: The Founders and American Democracy” by the Wheaton College professor Robert Tracy McKenzie. In it, he details at length the founders’ own reservations about human nature. As James Madison famously wrote in Federalist No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”
This proper skepticism about human virtue pervades the Constitution. At every turn, the power of government is hemmed in. Each branch checks the other. The people check the government, and the government checks the people. The Bill of Rights attempts to safeguard our most fundamental human rights from government overreach or the tyranny of the mob. No faction can be trusted with unchecked authority.
But, as Professor McKenzie argues, this understanding faced an early and serious challenge in a political movement that we’d recognize today — Jacksonian populism, the idea that “the people” were, in fact, righteous enough to rule. You see echoes today in the constant refrain from the Trumpist right that “we the people” represent the “real America,” the virtuous core that can save the nation from what they see as a decadent left.
The very concept was, and is, destructive to its core. The sense of virtue creates a sense of righteous entitlement. In Christian America, the belief that “we” are good leads to the conviction that the churches will suffer, our nation will suffer and our families will suffer unless “we” run things. It closes our hearts and minds to contrary voices and opposing ideas.
Putting aside for the moment the long history of religious misrule, recent events demonstrate the reach of Christian sin. In 2021 our nation suffered when many Christian activists, Christian members of Congress and Christian Trump aides participated in an attempt to overturn an American election and helped instigate a violent assault on the Capitol.
But one doesn’t have to look to national politics to see that threats can emanate from within the church as well as without. One of the most terrifying and poignant parts of the hit Amazon Prime documentary series “Shiny Happy People” was the story of Josh Duggar, a young man who was raised in a deeply religious family. He was protected from the corruption of the “outside world” in almost every way that could be devised. He was home-schooled and grew up in a house without a cable television and with limited access to media. And yet he was depraved enough to molest his own sisters.
My wife and I both grew up in a fundamentalist community that tried hard to protect the church from the world. Yet it turned out that my wife needed protection from the church. She’s a victim of child sex abuse. The perpetrator taught vacation Bible school.