Is Liberal Democracy a Religious Value?
On Church and State in Modern Times
I’m going to write about the relationship between liberal democracy and classical Judaism. But I’m taking Judaism as simply one example amongst many ancient cultures that emerged before the discovery of liberal democracy (which was the historical result of the Protestant Reformation). If you aren’t Jewish, I encourage you to think about my argument through the prism of your own culture and tradition.
I offer my perspective neither to delegitimate liberal democracy nor to castigate Judaism as illiberal, but to surface what Leo Strauss calls the “quarrel between ancients and moderns”:
Liberal Democracy is good for secular utilitarian reasons—it protects us from religious persecution insofar as we are a minority.
The value of liberal democracy is mainly negative, though—negative liberty protects dissidents, and Jews are sociologically dissidents.
But from a Torah point of view, the goal is not liberalism and negative liberty, but theocracy. The prophet is authorized by virtue of “the word of God,” not majority rule.
Even in the Talmud, where majority rule is established—we’re talking about a majority of sages (not direct or representative democracy). The sages derive their authority from other sages (through a process of transmission); the model is aristocratic (rule by the best) not rule by all.
The Jewish legal principle that Minhag yisrael halacha hi (“social consensus dictates law”) is arguably a proto-democratic principle, but it’s a far cry from the idea that we should vote our sages in or out of office. Even if custom gets a vote, the people don’t have the power to vote their judges in and out of office. Rabbis don’t have term limits.
Even if we grant that Torah values align in their ends with many of the values of liberal democracy—such as the safeguarding of human dignity and basic equality of rights—the means espoused by both the written and oral Torah are undemocratic. Perhaps the means are not fundamental, and Jewish tradition is agnostic (pluralistic) about how to achieve just ends. But this would at best make liberal democracy one possible solution amongst many; it would not make it the telos to which the Torah points.
If Jewish values were reducibly democratic, rabbis wouldn’t attend rabbinical school, but would run for the office of rabbi. Credentialism is a soft form of the charismatic-theocratic model of old.
All of this said—Hillel’s golden rule seems to align with a quasi-libertarian argument that we can’t know how we all want to be treated, only how we don’t want to be treated (thus we have a right to be left alone and not patronized), but in general Judaism is very paternalistic—God and prophets know best and better than us. God does not respect our right to privacy, but penetrates into the deepest chambers of our hearts.
Deuteronomy centralized power in one place, the Temple, perhaps corresponding to the value of centralized rather than decentralized government—it provides the basis for Statism, but not for liberal democracy. Jewish attitudes to Statism have shifted over time, generally correlating to whether we liked who was in charge.
My argument is not against liberal democracy—of which I am a fan—but against assuming it’s a core ahistorical Jewish value, rather than a discovery born of experience with its own set of tradeoffs.
Religious people can embrace liberal democracy as a means to an end. They can embrace liberal democracy for self-interested and utilitarian reasons. It is not clear that they can see liberal democratic states as the best or final form of government without reducing theology to politics, which is what Spinoza and Carl Schmitt do. The separation between Church and State is a practical solution to a metaphysical problem. To treat it as a metaphysical solution is to make a category error.
Why am I wrong? And if I am not, what are the implications?
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Where in the Torah or Talmud does it say or imply that we are to read it with an eye toward the form of government we choose?