COMMENTARY: Without people’s trust, democracy doesn’t work

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421,1551(at sign)compuserve.com.) (RNS)-Do you trust your neighbor? How about […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421,1551(at sign)compuserve.com.)

(RNS)-Do you trust your neighbor? How about the federal government?


If you answered”no”to these questions, you are not alone. The vast majority of Americans trust neither their neighbors nor their government, according to a recent study conducted by The Washington Post, in conjunction with Harvard University and the Kaiser Family Foundation. The series of stories reporting on this alarming phenomenon could have been titled,”In None We Trust.” Not too long ago, the vast majority of people trusted their neighbors to do the right thing most of the time; they also had faith in their government. But in the past three decades, those attitudes have been dramatically reversed. According to The Post survey, two-thirds of Americans don’t trust each other; three-fourths don’t trust the government.

This distrust walks hand in hand with a profound ignorance about national life. The study indicates an unbelievable number of Americans know about as much about their government as one would expect of an eighth-grader, and not a very advanced eighth-grader at that.

To say that Americans are fleeing the public square is a major understatement. They barely know it exists. The study found that only 24 percent of Americans can name both of their senators; only 6 percent know the name of the chief justice of the Supreme Court. A full 34 percent can’t identify the Senate majority leader; nearly half are unaware of the identity of the speaker of the House of Representatives. When asked to name the vice president of the United States, 40 percent of those surveyed drew a blank.

So if Newt Gingrich’s car broke down on one of the nation’s highways, he shouldn’t expect the typical American to recognize him and pull over. His chances of immediate rescue wouldn’t be vastly improved if Al Gore were on board.

Not knowing who holds particular offices is disturbing enough, but our problems are far deeper than ignorance of political personalities. A stunning number of Americans don’t understand the basics of how their government works. For example, barely half knew that the Supreme Court’s job is to decide which laws are constitutional and which are not.

We can safely conclude that a majority of Americans have, at best, only a dim understanding of our system of checks and balances. Meanwhile, a majority believes we spend more on foreign aid than on Medicare (foreign aid comprises less than 1 percent of the budget; Medicare is responsible for more than 10 times that amount).

Why does this matter? Simply because our government is based upon what the founders described as”the consent of the governed.”Clearly, they assumed a consent that is well-informed. Eternal vigilance truly is the price of liberty. To turn away from our civic responsibilities has very serious consequences, something akin to announcing the dissolution of the armed services. It is a message that we will offer no resistance to tyrants.

Americans must never forget that power abhors a vacuum. As citizens abandon the field, elites and special-interest groups fill the gap. We have already fallen into a dangerous cycle: Citizens are increasingly estranged from government, leaving the governing to special interest groups, which in turn promote policies that further alienate voters.


Christians have a special responsibility in this area because they believe that government-along with the family and the church-is a human institution ordained by God. The apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans, said that civil authority deserves our respect.

Centuries later, the great reformer John Calvin built on Paul’s ideas.”Civil authority is a calling, not only holy and lawful before God,”Calvin wrote,”but also the most sacred and by far the most honorable of all callings in the whole life of mortal man.” It is true that some Christians have worked under the assumption that government is sinful and should be avoided at all costs. The result is that they had no influence on the government that-like it or not-governed them. These days, even as general apathy has increased, religious conservatives have become more involved in public life. This has earned them some criticism, but I believe they deserve praise for their political activism and hope their example inspires other Americans to do likewise.

The Post series is a wake-up call that should alert people to this unalterable fact: When you take the”self”out of self-government, you open yourself up to tyranny.

MJP END COLSON

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