British Prime Minister Kier Starmer announced this morning that he would resign from office. A growing number within his Labour Party felt that if he stayed in power, the party would lose badly the next general election in 2029. Many wanted Andy Burnham, a left-wing former mayor, to lead the party and thus become prime minister.

Anthony Seldon, a historian who has written biographies of every prime minister from John Major to Rishi Sunak, explained what went wrong for Starmer:

Firstly, he never worked out what the job was—what does the prime minister do? Secondly, he never knew what he wanted to do, above all not on economic policy. And thirdly, he didn’t know who to appoint.

Once you’ve got those three things happening it’s never going to work. It’s just a question of how quickly the wheels come off.

Here we see a fundamental flaw in democracy: what it takes to be elected is not necessarily what it takes to govern. Politicians running for office can make promises they have no obligation to keep when they win. They often run to the extremes during the primaries to “excite the base,” then pivot to the middle during the general election to win the independent vote. And once in office, unless they are term-limited, dire conditions are required to remove them—the very calamities they are elected to prevent.

In the case of the British prime minister, this means a rebellion within his party. In American politics, this means the person in office loses the next election or is impeached and removed.

Sentences that changed the world

I am imagining what the autocrats in Russia, China, and North Korea are thinking this morning. The UK will now have its sixth prime minister in seven years. Surely the stability that results from an unelected and thus unremovable leader is preferable to such volatility?

But if we were to ask the families of the nearly five hundred thousand Russian soldiers who have been killed so far in Putin’s war with Ukraine, they would have a different response. Or the millions of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority group in China, who have suffered unspeakable atrocities at the hands of the Communist government, including forced sterilization of young women and the mass detention of more than a million people. Or the 60 percent of the population in North Korea who are living below the poverty line.

I was in Washington, DC, recently, where I visited the National Archives. There I stood before the original Declaration of Independence and pondered the sentences that changed the world. You can recite the most famous with me: “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.”

But what comes next is critical as well:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

Read that again: “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish” their government if it becomes “destructive” to their flourishing.

Why is this true?

“The real reason for democracy”

In his 1943 essay “Equality,” C. S. Lewis explained that many people have believed in democracy because “they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government.” However, according to Lewis, “The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true.”

Many in office demonstrate that they are not “wise and good” and fail in their governance. As a result, “Whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure.” Thus the reactions I assume are occurring in Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang this morning.

Lewis took a different approach: “The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows.” The atrocities resulting from autocracy in Russia, China, and North Korea are proof of his assertion.

America’s Founders would have agreed with Lewis, which is why they wanted a system of checks and balances to prevent unaccountable power in any person or branch of government. The British have taken a similar approach in their parliamentary system.

The key to effective democracy

This system, whether secularized people realize it or not, is based on the assertion with which Lewis opened his essay: “I believe in the Fall of Man.” But this applies to voters as well as to those for whom they vote.

To govern each other, we must be able to govern ourselves. But a glance at the crimes and atrocities that make up any day’s headlines will show that we are unable to do so.

Accordingly, the ultimate key to effective democracy is the gospel. Only Jesus can forgive our sins and transform our hearts. Only he can govern us in ways that enable us to govern each other. Only he can reverse the Fall in our lives and through us in our culture.

When we walk with Jesus, we become like Jesus (1 John 2:6). And when we are like Jesus, our world cannot be the same (cf. Acts 17:6).

The Scottish biologist and evangelist Henry Drummond claimed,

“To become Christlike is the only thing in the whole world worth caring for, the thing before which every ambition of man is folly and all lower achievement vain.”

Do you agree?

Quote for the day:

“A man who walks with God always gets to his destination.” —Henrietta Mears

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