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| Magna Carta, Summer 1215 |
by Charles J Chaput, O.F.M., Cap. (a Capuchin Franciscan, is archbishop of Philadelphia. This essay is taken from an address delivered at BYU on 23 Jan 2015. www.byu.edu/chaput )
Eight Centuries ago Magna Carta asserted an idea upon
which our society depends: religious faith is an important guide and moderator
for democracy.
Exactly 800 years ago, in the summer of 1215, King John
of England had an interesting exchange of views with his barons and bishops in
a meadow called Runnymede. The result was a list of 63 royal commitments and
concessions that we know as Magna Carta.
The Great Charter—Magna
Carta in Latin—has gone through long periods of being ignored or belittled.
Designed to make peace, it resulted in civil war. In its original wording, it
was poorly organized and never had the force of law. It survived only a few
months and was annulled by the pope. Despite all of this, Magna Carta emerged
over time as the cornerstone of English liberties. Its genius is this: It
limited a sovereign’s power. It started the process of carving out space for
what would become civil society.
The charter said that free men had the right to be judged
by their peers under the law of the land. It said that justice could not be
sold to the highest bidder. The Great Charter thus holds the earliest seeds of
due process. Its impact can be seen on the Bill of Rights of the United States,
on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and on national constitutions
around the world.
What’s most interesting, though, is this: Magna Carta
begins and ends with a royal oath that “the English Church shall be free and
enjoy her rights in their integrity and her liberties untouched.”
Our political system presumes a civil society that
pre-exists the state. It’s an idea that is already emerging in Magna Carta’s
demand for recognition of the rights of the church and the rights of persons.
In the American model, the state is meant to be modest in scope, constrained by
checks and balances. Mediating institutions like the family, churches, and
fraternal organizations stand between the individual and the state. And when
they decline, the state fills the vacuum they leave. So protecting these
mediating institutions is vital to our freedoms. Alone, individuals have
little power. But organized communities—including communities of faith—are a
different matter. They can resist. They can’t be ignored.
We need to remember that democracy is not an end in
itself. Majority opinion doesn’t determine what is good and true. Like every
other form of power, democracy can become a means of repression and idolatry.
When we divorce our politics from a grounding in virtue and truth, we transform
our country from a living moral organism into a kind of golem of legal
machinery without a soul.
This is why working for good laws is so important. This
is why getting involved politically is so urgent. This is why every one of our
votes matters. We need to elect the best public leaders, who then create the
best policies and appoint the best judges. This has a huge impact on the kind
of nation we become. Democracies depend for their survival on people of conviction
fighting in the public square for what they believe—legally and peacefully, but
zealously and without apologies. That includes all of us.
The terrain of our lives in the 21st century
is very different from the world in 1215. But the power of religious faith even
today to limit the power of the state might be very familiar to the men who
gathered at Runnymede.
As the Founders knew, and we forget at our peril, the
American project of ordered liberty can’t work without the support of a moral
people—a people formed by living faith in a living God. Religion is to
democracy as a bridle is to a horse. And only
religious faith can guide and moderate democracy because it appeals to an
Authority higher than democracy itself.
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