Fighting force with force: Nelson Mandela, former President of the African National Congress and the first democratically elected President of the republic of South Africa

“Democracy is a lost cause,” said a young correspondent of mine from the UK. I was saddened to hear such despondency from one so young. Hardly the voice of one with world-changing fire in the belly. I came away reflecting that if this is the spirit of the next generation then perhaps democracy is indeed a lost cause. I think I understand something of my friend’s frustration, but I am certain that he had missed the big picture…

Emmeline Pankhurst and Emily Davison - who in the early 1900s both endured prison and gave their lives (the latter literally) in order that women’s votes should be represented in the government of Great Britain 

My grandparents’ lifetimes saw democracy extended in Britain for the first time to include women. In my parents’ lifetime democracy was introduced in India, and a whole swathe of countries on the African subcontinent.

Mahatma Ghandi - prophet of passive resistance in the 1940s  - an inspiration to the struggles for democracy in the USA and South Africa - the “Father of Indian Independence”

 In my own lifetime I have seen democracy extended in Poland, brought to the Africans of South Africa, and enforced by the U.S. supreme court so as to include the votes of African Americans.

(left) Martin Luther King Jr prophet of African-American enfranchisment in the 1960s and (right) Lech Walesa whose service of the working people of Poland in the 1980s took him from prison to presidency

The big picture is unmistakeably that the tide for one-person-one-vote democracy has been steadily on the rise. Perhaps my young friend’s skepticism about the value of enfranchisement is the natural consequence of growing up in a society ruled by policies seemingly founded on the basis of one-dollar-one-vote; a world in which transitions of government are peaceful, arguably, because men and women in the street do not really feel themselves to be stakeholders in one or another outcome and because the most powerful economic interests feel largely unthreatened by the transfer of office from one party to another, confident that they can negotiate policy perks whichever party gains the right to govern. 

Roosevelt in the 1930s and Nye Bevan in the 1950s - men of different colors but whose respective governments labored against the drivers of economic depression and social exclusion

In the 20th century there was a clear and sustained struggle to bring the interests of working people into the political process. That is what the labour movement was all about. In such a world it was easy for educated people engaged with the realities of workers lives to identify a cause which merited a lifetime - indeed a century of struggle. Today in the West the lie of the land is quite altered by that century. The working classes as they existed and as they were known no longer exist. At the bottom of the pile today we find an underclass - the children and grnadchildren of men and women who have either never known employment or who - even with two or three “McJobs” have no hope of ever escaping the need for government support, or of owning their own home, supporting their family and making their way in the world.

Further up the economic scale we find a massively casualized workforce; a class of people with income but no security. For instance I have a neighbour who works as a superindent of a division of one of Australia’s major civil engineering corporations. he oversees a staff of thrity and is responsible for hiring, firing and administrating the payroll. He is employed as a casual. No rights. No holiday entitlement. No sick leave. No security. Things are not always much more secure for more highly skilled or educated workers. Corporations which in the past would have provided a diligent worker with a career for life now engage double-graduate management-level staff on contracts of no more than three months at a time. 

A high standard of living often masks the underlying stresses, debt and insecurity that characterise life for many among today’s middle classes.

So while the stuggle for the worker may look like a twentieth century issue, there is a sense in which todays Western middle classes are the new Western working class - and that the common good still needs to be rescued from the greed of the few.For all these reasons it is possible that my young despondent friend may have been quite unaware that the whole point of the democratization we have witnessed over the last three generations emerged precisely to redistribute power in society so that things might be ordered for the good of all rather than the profit of the already rich and powerful. More immediate to his thoughts would be today’s reality. In a system of one-dollar-one-vote disparities of economic interest were significant enough when the comparison of pay between a shopfloor worker and a CEO stood at a ratio of 1:35  -which it did in the States in 1970. By 1985 that ratio had shifted to an average of 1:1000. Today is is hard even to begin to calculate. In one well-known US corporation the current quotient is 1:50,000 The inequalities of society may differ from age to age but fundamental drivers remain - namely that those with privilege, wealth and power (by they Kings, media moguls or oil barons) wish to keep it and…well…not share it.

It is not always simple to determine what a movement for greater democratization of wealth and power should look like when the “enemies” of democracy are so various and difficult to identify. No one wants to give a century to tilting at windmills. But the fact that the ballot has not been enough should only spur us to pursue additional means by which to serve the common good and to ensure that our natural resources and our labour are harnessed for the good of all and not just the good of the few. (The movement of some companies from free trade to fair trade would be one example.)

(Left) Cadbury, making moves to fairer trade: enabling producers to add value at their end of the food chain, and paying fairer prices to the producers of raw materials. (Right) Fair trade quinoa farmers in Ecuador

Today’s struggles for inclusion and  representation will take different forms and oppose different behemoths - some more subtle than others. But on one front or another, for the sake of loving our neighbour as ourselves, it behoves every generation to contend for democracy in its day. Democracy is not, then, a lost cause but a perpetual cause.

The late Rosa Parkes, a social activist whose brave refusal in 1957 to give up her seat in a Montgomery bus triggered the Civil Rights movement which ended the USA’s policies of segregating and disfranchizing African-Americans, policies embedded in centuries of legalised racism

As I mentioned in a different post (Changing Culture Changing Church) the UK’s electoral reforms and labour movements found their roots and their people in the Great Evangelical revical of the 18th century and in the leadership of the Dissenting and Methodist Chapels. Some might see it as ironic therefore that the “Great Emergence” among the 21st century churches could be regarded as a radical democratization of initative within the Christian community. Is it ironic or is it that - as with democracy at large - it behoves every generation of Christians - whatever the behomoths of the time - to contend for the priesthood of all believers in their day. Is the priesthood of all believers - with everything about church-life and mission that such language implies - also a perpetual cause? I believe that there is something in that parallel. Indeed I have given some years to serving that spiritual democratization, seeing it as true to the Apostle Peter’s vision of the priesthood (IPeter 2) and the prophethood (Acts 2) of all God’s people.

John Wesley’s ordination of non-Oxbridge graduates, his emancipation of working men to positions of leadership, patterns of accountability which took no account of position or pay, and the Methodist practice of wealth-sharing earned the Wesleyans formal charges of “communism” and “collusion with the French”!!

You might ask what I mean by a democratization of initiative? What might that look like for the churches? For a fuller answer you will have to read my other post “Changing Culture Changing Church.” But as I reflect on the metoaphor of democracy today I want to flag three implications held by that metaphor:

• Democracy is not a movement for anarchy or the canonization of localised self-interest. It is a movement to secure policies that serve THE GOOD OF ALL IN ITS SOCIETY. It is not in that sense tribal, parochial or piecemeal.

• Democracy is not anti-leadership. Rather it is about the placement and accountability of LEADERSHIP in order that it beEXERCIZED IN THE INTEREST OF THE PEOPLE

• Democracy is not a movement away from an old order to disorder. It is fundamentally a movement towards the expression and organizing of a NEW ORDER

Those observations may not be to the taste of those who might prefer to reject all sense of religion being “organized.”However, if my obeservations are correct, and if there is indeed a democratizing energy to this “great emergence” then perhaps it has in store for us a more revolutionary time than we have yet imagined.