Why did the Founders of America give us a Republic?
But let us ask forerunner question: Why does mankind need government at all?
Even that Natural man can answer this question simply by observing human nature and history. Human beings live in families, communities, towns, and nations, but wherever people gather there will eventually be disputes over property, resources, contracts, boundaries, crime, leadership, and competing interests. As societies grow larger, informal agreements and family authority are no longer sufficient to maintain order. Government develops because someone must settle disputes, defend the community, punish wrongdoing, and establish rules by which people can live together.
The Christian, however, understands the deeper reason. Mankind is fallen. Pride, greed, envy, selfishness, anger, and the desire for power are part of human nature after the Fall. Left completely unchecked, these impulses produce conflict and eventually violence. Government therefore exists in part to restrain evil and provide enough order for civilization to function.
James Madison summarized the problem well when he wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” But that creates another problem: the men who govern are not angels either. Government is necessary because mankind is imperfect, yet government itself is administered by imperfect men.
And so here lies the great paradox of government. Man requires government because he is imperfect, selfish, passionate and capable of harming his neighbor. Yet government cannot be separated from human nature because government itself must be administered by men. The very creatures whose passions make government necessary are entrusted with its power. Therefore, the question is not simply how government can restrain mankind, but how mankind can restrain government, preventing degeneration, and eventual harming of the public it was trusted to keep secure? Polybius's solution was mixed government. But the American Founders made it better.
“Well, what have you given us, Doctor Franklin.” A Republic if you can keep it.
But why a republic? Why didn't the Founders establish a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a pure democracy? Why did they instead construct something different? In the History of Humanity, it has known several forms of Government that Civilizations have brought in to keep order… But what are those governments and why do they matter? Every Government has its Degenerated form, and that form of Government is also well known. So here are the List of Governmental forms and their degenerations from the most stable to the most unstable.
1. Monarchy degenerates into Tyranny…
2. Aristocracy Degenerates in Oligarchy…
3. Democracy Degenerates into Mobocracy…
But Polybius noticed that by Merging the different forms of government, they could delay their degenerations and provide some stability to prolong that governmental form. Polybius had rightly reasoned that mixed Government was the answer and he was half-right.
Polybius saw the Roman Republic as a mixed government containing elements of all three forms. The Consuls provided the monarchical element, giving Rome decisive executive leadership. The Senate supplied the aristocratic element through a smaller deliberative body, while the popular assemblies supplied the democratic element by giving the citizens a voice in government. None of the three completely controlled the others. Each depended upon and restrained the others. But the save guards begin to fall one by one.
By the time of the American Founding, the problem was therefore not simply discovering who should rule. History had already demonstrated the dangers of rule by one, rule by the few, and rule by the many. The greater question was how to construct a government powerful enough to maintain order while preventing any one person, class, faction, or majority from acquiring enough power to dominate everyone else.
The American Founders, having extensive knowledge of History of the Roman Republic, Anglo-Saxon and Ancient Israel, guided by the bible and the teachings about the true nature of mankind were able to craft a better Government for Public. Knowing the Fallen Nature of Mankind, they understood that Governments will always be prone to abuses of Power and that the nature of government is the Centralization of power.
Americans having lived and suffered from the experiences with imperial government, just reinforced the lessons they had learned from history about censorship, taxation, standing armies, unjust searches, legislative authority, judicial independence, and concentrated political power which were all taught in blood by the hands of the British.
The British, who had a hate for the colonist, subjected the American Colonist to all manners of cruelty that define an Unjust and Despotic government, having spurned the colonist and their repeated pleas for the redress of grievances, the colonist would be forced into war as the King of Britain ramped up pressure to subdue freedom Loving Americans that have enjoyed that right, largely from the founding of Jamestown. The call to go to war to restore their God-given rights after a long train of abuses and unresolved grievances by their ungodly rulers in Britain was not undertaken lightly. So, America gave King George a list of 27 grievances rooted in biblical principles that the King of Britain had committed and refused to address, against the colonies, with his belief in Divine rights of kings saw Americans as rebels and unruly, gave the order to send even more troops to America. With the letter to the king, America gave moral reasoning for the war that would be fought between the independence Colonies and Britain. The war revealed to the colonies as it ramped up, that they had to come together in unity or they would lose the war for the rights they have always enjoyed as Colonist. So, the Groundwork for Governance of the American colonies was done under the interim national government call the Continental Congress.
Having fought a government they believed had become too powerful, the Americans initially created a national government under the Articles of Confederation in 1781, that deliberately left enormous authority with the states. However, the experience soon revealed the opposite problem that a government can also be too weak to perform the duties for which government exists in the first place.
After just a few years the Founders called for a convention of states, in which to address the problems and issues of the Articles of Confederation. The Founders have been confronted with both sides of the problem, one being Britain with its demonstrated the dangers of concentrated governmental power and the other being the Articles of Confederation which demonstrated the danger of insufficient governmental power, The task at Philadelphia was not to create the weakest government possible but, was to create a new kind of government strong enough to govern while preventing that strength from becoming tyrannical in nature.
So, what to do? The Founders solution was to strength the government but make the power of the government check itself. But, how? Polybius gave us half the answer in his admonishment, Mixed Governments. So, the Founders did just that.
The Executive branch is the president, the head of the nation, elected not by the public but the Electoral college. Ensuring that the president is not elected by mob rule. People are picked to give their vote, one from each congressional district, plus two from each state.
The legislative Branch which is made of two Chambers. The Senate and the House of Representatives. Each having a different role and Different Function.
The Senate – two from each state. No more, not less. Elected for 6 years, slower in change adding more stability. Appointed by the state Government via election within the state government, to ensure that the individual state and their issues can be brought up and addressed, not really affected by lobbying or public activism. (The 17th Amendment did away with this function and safeguard against government concentration of power into one branch.)
The House of Representative is elected by the people to voice the issues of the public, easily influenced by lobbyists and Community activism. Elected for 2 years.
Out of that meeting of the states came the remedies for both extremes which provided treatments and protections against future abuses, from Creation of the bill of rights, to the right to Speak as you see fit and the barring the Federal Government from having an opinion about what religions are allowed. Though they made it clear that Americans should prefer Christian rulers above all others, however the regulations of what religions were allowed within a state or the practice thereof was left to individual states, the reasoning being that individuals that didn’t not want to be part of that religion could go freely to another state that may be more in line with that person’s ideas. Then there is the Impeachment Process for those that are caught abusing power, to a convention of the states and lastly, the right to bear arms. The Right to bear arms against the Government is the last line of Defense against tyranny.
But the Constitution could not provide the virtue required for the Government to operation as it is intended to.
The Founders had constructed an extraordinary governmental machine, but they understood that no arrangement of offices, elections, checks, and balances could make wicked men righteous. A Constitution can restrain power, but it cannot create virtue. It can divide authority, but it cannot make the people exercise that authority justly. The Republic therefore depended upon something outside the machinery of government itself: the moral character of the people.
John Adams expressed this problem plainly when he wrote:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
But why would that be?
Because republican government requires self-government in two different senses. The people must be capable of governing themselves politically, but the individual must also be capable of governing himself morally. A man who cannot restrain his own appetites, passions, greed, anger, or desire for power must eventually be restrained by someone else. As personal self-restraint disappears, government must increasingly substitute external restraint for the internal restraint that has been lost.
This brings us back to the problem discussed at the beginning of this article. Man is fallen. The Constitution can place barriers between fallen man and absolute political power, but no arrangement of governmental offices can remove man's fallen nature.
The Founding generation did not approach this problem within the religiously neutral culture familiar to modern Americans. They inherited a civilization deeply shaped by Christianity and the Bible. This can be seen not merely in private letters and sermons, but in the public documents and actions of the Founding generation itself.
Several of the original state constitutions openly acknowledged God, Providence, Scripture, Christianity, or Protestant Christianity. Some required explicitly Christian professions from those holding public office. Whatever modern Americans may think about such requirements, their existence demonstrates something important about the mindset in which the United States Constitution was written: religious liberty did not mean that Christianity was expected to disappear from public life but lived out in public life.
John Jay, one of the authors of The Federalist Papers and the first Chief Justice of the United States, would later describe America as a Christian nation and argue that Americans should prefer Christians as their rulers. Again, this did not mean establishing a particular denomination as the national church. It reflected a belief that the character of those entrusted with political power are to be Christian in nature.
The actions of the Continental Congress toward the Bible provided to be another example. During the Revolution, when the war disrupted America's normal supply of Bibles, Congress considered importing thousands of copies from Europe. Robert Aitken later produced the first complete English-language Bible printed in the newly independent United States. Congress approved his undertaking and recommended the edition to the inhabitants of the country.
These were not the actions of a generation that regarded Christianity as irrelevant to the public welfare.
Nor did these ideas suddenly appear in 1776.
The American Founders inherited centuries of conflict over the relationship between God, government, rulers, and the people. The Protestant Reformation had restored widespread access to Scripture in the common language. William Tyndale's English Scriptures had once been smuggled into England and condemned by authorities. The later Geneva Bible became especially influential among English Puritans and contained marginal commentary that could challenge claims of unlimited royal authority.
Behind these conflicts stood a principle much older than America:
The ruler himself is under law because the ruler himself is under God.
The king was not God. Parliament was not God. The people were not God. Every earthly authority remained accountable to an authority above itself.
This Christian understanding of higher law became part of the religious and intellectual inheritance brought across the Atlantic by generations of English Protestants. The Founders combined that inheritance with English constitutional traditions, colonial experience, classical republicanism, and the lessons of Greece and Rome when constructing their own political system.
So…Why Didn't They Establish a National Church?
This is an obvious question. If Christianity occupied such a prominent place in the Founding culture, why does Article VI prohibit a religious test for federal office? Why does the First Amendment prohibit Congress from establishing religion? Because Christian civilization and a federally established denomination are not the same thing.
America contained Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists, Quakers, and numerous other Christian communities whose theological disagreements were often substantial. Giving the federal government authority to determine the nation's official denomination would have created precisely another concentration of power.
The Constitution therefore denied the federal government certain religious powers while leaving the American states and Individuals free to practice their faith and, originally, leaving considerably more authority over religious arrangements with the individual states.
Religious liberty should not be interpreted as religious indifference. But, to the contrary, The Founders believed that religion and morality were essential to republican government while denying the federal government authority to dictate a man's conscience. And it is here we find another check upon political power. The Constitution restrained the government externally through divided powers, federalism, elections, and law. But Christian morality restrained the individual internally by teaching that his actions remained accountable to God even when government could not see them.
So, The Constitution could tell a President what powers he did not possess. But it could not make him an honest man.
It could tell Congress what laws it could not pass. But it could not make legislators virtuous.
It could establish elections. But it could not make voters wise.
It could establish courts. but it could not make judges just.
Those qualities had to come from somewhere else.
If the Constitution was the machinery of the American Republic, Christian morality is the oil the Founding generation expected the machinery to run upon.
Without the machinery, even virtuous men could eventually find themselves ruled by concentrated political power. But without virtue, the machinery itself would increasingly strain under people determined to circumvent its restraints.
The American Republic therefore depended upon two kinds of restraints: the Constitutional restraint upon government and moral restraint upon the individual.
The Founders attempted to provide the first through the Constitution. But They expected religion, family, church, community, and personal virtue to provide the second. But, If the second fails, the engine will seize and break completely. And while I hear the modern-day arguments…Apply any Philosophy or Religious Virtue contrary to Christian virtue and the Machine is designed to break, for it is built for only one kind of people and no other.
But what happens if the moral foundation is removed?
If the moral principles that restrain both the people and their rulers are rejected, the erosion of the constitutional order will eventually become tyrannical. It may not happen in a single generation, nor will the Constitution necessarily disappear from the books. The machinery can remain standing while the principles that restrained its operators gradually disappear.
As personal virtue declines, the individual increasingly looks to government to restrain what he, himself, will no longer restrain within himself. When people lose the ability or willingness to govern themselves, the government assumes more authority and power to govern them. The constitutional restraints upon which government rests become obstacles to be circumvented rather than principles to be faithfully obeyed.
Eventually, people will find themselves governed by a government that has become tyrannical. It is at that point that the principles of the American founders are recognized and that the government itself could become the object of resistance. But here we encounter another danger… The removing a tyrant does not automatically produce liberty.
If the people themselves have lost the virtues necessary for self-government, then revolution will merely exchange one form of tyranny for another. For a people lacking wisdom, self-control, justice, and reverence for God may overthrow a government they consider oppressive only to establish one that gives even greater authority to their own passions, appetites, vices, and whims.
This is the great danger of forgetting that liberty requires morality and virtue.
The purpose of revolution is not merely to destroy an existing government. The purpose is to restore a just government. If the people have abandoned the moral principles by which justice itself is measured, they may possess the power to tear down a government without possessing the wisdom to build up a better one.
As the bible makes plainly…
“Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people.”
— Proverbs 14:34
The strength of a nation therefore cannot ultimately be measured by the size of its armies, the wealth of its treasury, or the complexity of its Constitution. A nation may possess all three and still destroy itself from within by way of bad philosophy and bad religions.
Therefore, A free people must possess the Christian moral virtues necessary to remain free.
The Constitution can restrain government. but it cannot make men righteous.
The law can punish wickedness. But it cannot create holiness.
Government can protect liberty. But it cannot manufacture the character required to preserve it.
That is why Christian morality is not an ornament placed upon the American constitutional system after the fact. It is part of the moral inheritance within which the system is designed to operate. When that foundation is deliberately rejected, the constitutional machine may continue to run for a time—but with each generation, the erosion of its moral foundations makes its eventual failure more likely to happen If that foundation is not restored to its proper place, eventually the machine will break.
Restoring the Republic, therefore requires more than political reform. It requires a nation to repent, return to God, Jesus, return to His Word, the bible, and return to His ways.