Prime-Time Historical Ignorance

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Katy Tur and an MS NOW panel show that ignorance of our nation’s history is rampant. We’re coming up on July 4th, celebrating the Declaration of Independence in its 250th year. Apparently, some people have never read the Declaration of Independence. Let’s not forget that it’s not a standalone document. The Constitution references it: “done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independance of the United States of America the Twelfth.” That’s a reference to the Declaration of Independence, 12 years after its signing.

The MS NOW panel questioned whether House Speaker Mike Johnson’s prayer during a National Mall event celebrating the coming 250th anniversary of America was appropriate or accurate. Here’s what Johnson prayed:

You gave our fathers the wisdom and faith to establish this new nation, premised on the biblical and foundational principle that all men are created equal and free before you. Through Your divine providence, our Founders acknowledged and boldly proclaimed this self-evident truth: That every single person is created in your image and that we are endowed by you, our Creator, with our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Tur opened the discussion by speculating on whether Johnson was “putting God over” the Declaration and, by extension, over our government. The simple answer is “yes.” Johnson responded with a “newsflash” for MS NOW: “The Declaration literally proclaims the self-evident truth that our rights come from our Creator.”

Sen. Ted Cruz commented, “How can Katy Tur and MSDNC be so historically ignorant? The Speaker is not putting God ABOVE the Declaration—he is literally QUOTING FROM the Declaration: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’” The Declaration also states that God is “the Supreme Judge of the world” and the need of “a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.”

What’s the alternative? Anarchy, where everyone does what is right in his own eyes (Judges 17:6)? We have a lot of that today when people celebrate the various assassination attempts on President Trump, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and Luigi Mangione being charged in the fatal shooting of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, on a Manhattan sidewalk on December 4, 2024. Women are lining up to support him.

What about a pure Democracy where the voice of the majority is the voice of God and becomes the standard of government legislation? The phrase “democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch” is a metaphor warning that pure majority rule can lead to the tyranny of the majority, where the dominant group exploits the minority.

There is so much talk about democracy that few people have considered what our founders said about it. Democracy is no moral cure-all. John Winthrop (1588-1649), the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, declared direct democracy to be “the meanest and worst of all forms of government.”[1] John Cotton (1584-1652), a seventeenth-century Puritan minister in Massachusetts, wrote in 1636: “Democracy, I do not conceive that ever God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed?”[2] James Madison (1751-1836), recognized as the “father of the Constitution,” wrote that democracies are “spectacles of turbulence and contention.”

Pure democracies are “incompatible with personal security or the rights of property…. In general, they have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”[3] John Adams, the second president of the United States, stated that “the voice of the people is ‘sometimes the voice of Mahomet, of Caesar, of Catiline, the Pope, and the Devil.’”[4] Francis A. Schaeffer described democracy as “the dictatorship of the 51%, with no controls and nothing with which to challenge the majority.”[5] The logic is simple: “It means that if Hitler was able to get a 51% vote of the Germans, he had a right to kill the Jews,”[6] if that’s what the majority of people wanted.

Democracies degenerate into exploitation because rulers discover that if they promise certain benefits to a majority of voters, they can get those voters to put them in power. These voters realize that with their chosen ruler now in power, they can pressure him to vote in their best interests by threatening not to vote for him in the next election. The following is attributed to Alexander Fraser Tytler (1747-1813). (Note: I have not been able to find the source for it, but it’s true nevertheless.[7])

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent force of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote for themselves largesse [benefits] from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always foiled by dictatorship.

Randall Holcombe’s book, Liberty in Peril: Democracy and Power in American History, states that while “the Founders wanted those in charge of government’s operations to be selected by a democratic process,” they “also wanted to insulate those who ran the government from direct influence by its citizens” because “[b]y insulating political decision-makers from directs accountability to citizens, the government would be in a better position to adhere to its constitutionally-mandated limits.”[8] In this way, “the Constitution created a limited government designed to protect liberty, not to foster democracy,”[9] where the majority rule directly.

Let’s dispense with all these forms of government and declare, “We have no king but Caesar.” How did that work out?

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[1] Quoted in A. Marvyn Davies, Foundation of American Freedom: Calvinism in the Development of Democratic Thought and Action (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1955), 11.

[2] Letter to Lord Say and Seal, quoted by Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, eds., The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, [1938) 1963), 1:209-210. Also see Edwin Powers, Crime and Punishment in Early Massachusetts: 1620-1692 (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1966), 55.

[3] Quoted in Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Federalist, (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 61.

[4] John Adams, quoted by Gilbert Chinard, Honest John Adams (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., [1933] 1961), 241 in John Eidsmoe, “The Christian America Response to National Confessionalism,” in Gary Scott Smith, ed., God and Politics: Four Views on the Reformation of Civil Government (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1989), 227-228.

[5] Francis A. Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century (1970) in The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview, 5 vols. (Westchester, IL: Crossway Books, 1982), 4:27.

[6] Schaeffer, The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century, 4:27.

[7] Tytler did write the following: “The people flatter themselves that they have the sovereign power. These are, in fact, words without meaning. It is true they elected governors; but how are these elections brought about? In every instance of election by the mass of a people—through the influence of those governors themselves, and by means the most opposite to a free and disinterested choice, by the basest corruption and bribery. But those governors once selected, where is the boasted freedom of the people? They must submit to their rule and control, with the same abandonment of their natural liberty, the freedom of their will, and the command of their actions, as if they were under the rule of a monarch.” Book 1, Chapter VI – Political reflections Arising from the History of Greece, 217.

[8] Randall G. Holcombe, Liberty in Peril: Democracy and Power in American History, 2nd ed.(Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2019), 15.

[9] Holcombe, Liberty in Peril, 16,

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