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The Political Order
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of tomorrow. The safeguarding of this freedom of minorities is es
sential as a check upon the power of majorities and also as an ex
pression of the essential dignity—the individuality, the responsibility,
and the creativity—of man as man rather than of some men as
members of some particular aristocracy.
If democracy rests upon the convictions that the best form of gov
ernment is that in which the people govern themselves, that the
purpose of government is to serve the common welfare of all of the
people equally, and that the rights of the majority are limited by the
rights of the minority, the question naturally arises, upon what basis
do these convictions rest? They are sometimes held to be “self-
evident,” but as Professor John H. Hallowell suggests, they are not
self-evident to positivists, who tend to regard all value judgments as
expressions merely of subjective individual preferences.12 And such
positivists are not limited to the Machiavellis, the Hitlers, and the
Stalins alone; they also include those liberal jurists who prepare the
way for such tyrants by their interpretation of the rights of man, not
as natural rights which belong to him by virtue of his humanity, but
simply as legal rights which belong to him by virtue of their having
been conferred upon him by the state. From the standpoint of pos
itivism, man has no rights as man. In this view, what have traditionally
been called “rights” are in reality only concessions granted to man by
the state. Rights are simply the product of law, and as such they
merely represent the recognition on the part of the state of certain
claims which individuals make. The implication of this view is that
“rights” may be withdrawn or limited as the state desires. Such a
conception of the rights of man leads inevitably to the destruction of
liberal democracy and to the rise of some form of tyranny.
Far from being self-evident, the fundamental beliefs upon which
democracy is based rest ultimately upon certain theological convic
tions about the nature of man and the moral universe in which man
is placed. And, while each of these beliefs can be defended upon
some basis other than that of biblical faith, it is important—in view
of their historical connections with this faith—to ask what contribu
tions biblical faith makes to the continuing vitality of these beliefs
and thus to the nurture of the democratic form of government. With
out attempting to exhaust the contributions which Christianity may
make to the undergirding and strengthening of democracy, we may
12 See John H. Hallowell,
The Moral Foundations of Democracy,
Chicag
The University of Chicago Press, 1954, pp. 76-80.