As Jonah’s reader points out, our concepts of limited representational government stem far more from the Greco-Roman tradition than they do from the Old Testament. ~Heather Mac Donald

The Greek and Roman political traditions do have some direct bearing on the formation of the political ideas and ideals of modern European man (and, as Bradford argued, the Roman inheritance was deeply important for leaders of the War of Independence and the Framers), but it is telling that the societies where our tradition of “limited representative government” comes from were those least touched by these traditions until arguably the 16th and 17th centuries.  For that matter, the rise of the Cortes, French parlements, the Imperial Diet and Parliament in England was not related to some great nostalgic revival of senatorial practises or a longing for the good old days on the Areopagus, but arose from the pragmatic needs of government in medieval Europe. 

Medieval Christians remembered Rome, and none more so than the Byzantines, who maintained (with quite a lot of justification) that their polity was the Roman Empire, but wherever the practise and memory of imperial Rome was strongest you see constant challenges to the sort of consultative and decentralised government in the Cortes and the Diet or the complete absence of any such institutions.  The Roman tradition that medieval Christians remembered was that of the empire; the Republic would enjoy its revival as a model in the 17th and 18th centuries. 

In Byzantium, where the Greco-Roman tradition was joined with a thoroughgoing Christian worldview, you typically see small-scale consultative government apparatuses appearing only late in the empire in the time of the Comnenians during the revival of the Byzantine city, and there is never any question of the emperor needing to consult with anyone.  In England, we see the rise of Parliament as an adjunct to a strong central monarchy that nonetheless required consent to raise new revenues to wage the endless campaigns of the Plantaganets, and it is only during the the seventeenth century crisis over the King’s wars and the raising of revenue that we first see serious claims for the supremacy of Parliament and the practical application of entertaining fiction that sovereignty rests with “the people.” 

In any case, it is mainly in the seventeenth century that we see the reconfirmations of the chartered rights that our ancestors inherited and defended, pointing the way back down the winding road of specifically English legal and constitutional precedent.  There was a political application of covenant theology that expressed political compacts in terms of covenantal relationships, and this sort of language continued to be used in the colonies at the time of the rebellion, so it is fair to say that Christianity was not irrelevant to the development of representative government but it was something that was added on to an existing constitutional scheme and did nothing in particular to create that scheme.    

This constitutional tradition and even the liberalism that went along with its later stages are worthy of consideration insofar as they are our patrimony.  We are who we are in part because of these things, and that is worth acknowledging and respecting, but it does not require us to stop thinking about the truth of their claims and assumptions, especially when they seem to stand in conflict with much more essential aspects of our inheritance. 

But what frequently puzzles me about these sorts of arguments is why anyone, Christian or non-Christian, should care to defend or approve of Christianity because it helped pave the way in some sense for these political developments rather than because it is the heart of our civilisation, the source of all our meaningful cultural accomplishments and, well, the True Faith.  It may be interesting to note how certain forms of Christianity facilitated the rise of this kind of government in a very few countries, whence it has since spread, but surely it is relevant that in most Christian societies this form of government has arisen through the efforts of people starkly opposed to Christian tradition and Christian authorities.   

Liberal revolutions in Protestant countries, and I am principally thinking of England, have typically taken on a less overtly, simply anti-Christian colour, because there is much less in the way of institutional and social Christianity that impedes the liberal political vision and because historically the revolutions often take on a confessional tinge of defending “the true protestant religion,” as Sydney put it, against the innovations of crypto- and not-so-crypto-Catholics. Protestant Roundheads and Whigs could always take out their revolutionary hostility on High Church Anglicans and Catholics, rather than focus it on Christianity as a whole.  In every Catholic and Orthodox country where liberalism has arrived its rise has been much more hard-fought and adversarial because the churches in these countries have typically been opposed to liberal ideas–more readily recognising them as being basically incompatible with Christian teaching in many respects–and because liberals have viewed both the institutional and social roles of the churches as barriers to the different kinds of emancipation they want to usher in. 

Today this previous opposition to liberalism among the Catholics and Orthodox is supposed to be embarrassing to their modern brethren (as if Bossuet is more embarrassing than Voltaire), but I am increasingly of the opinion that many of these Christians did well not to fall for the siren song of liberalism.  Therefore I am also frequently puzzled by the need of some Christians to justify their religion in the strangest terms, as if to try to make people who are otherwise indifferent or hostile to the Faith appreciative that, but for Christianity, they would not be able to vote!  This is, of course, not really true, and the contortions into which some people must put themselves to make the arguments at one and the same time for orthodox Christianity and the role of Christianity in spurring on liberalism (even though the Christianity of political liberals through the ages has not always been exactly orthodox) are really quite remarkable. 

Christianity has been supremely important in shaping the mores, culture, literature, music, art, architecture and much of the philosophy of our civilisation, and if we need to dwell on the material culture that Christianity has inspired there are far more interesting things than liberalism and representative government to talk about.  I suppose I can understand that Christians wish to show that they are part of contemporary society in some way, and that Christianity is “relevant” to the modern discourse about freedom and rights and all the rest, but I am not sure I really understand what they hope to gain from this–except the occasional acknowledgement of Christianity’s historical importance from people who otherwise pay no attention to the Gospel.  There is an obsession with liberalism among certain Christians, captured rather well in the unfortunate expression of Mr. Bush that “freedom is God’s gift to humanity,” that does not seem to make very much sense, and in their arguments claiming Christian and divine origins for liberal notions they are really doing a disservice to all of the beautiful and remarkable fruits of Christian civilisation that are more important and which will outlast the airy abstractions of freedom and equality.