Democratic governments and, even more importantly and harder to achieve and maintain, democratic societies, depend on the moral choices of individual people. A democratic society can be promoted by political institutions but a democratic government has to be the product of informed, moral choices by individual voters. The number of people who make the right decision for democracy to happen won't be unanimous or by consensus but it has to achieve an effective margin of voter to happen.
I don't think that will reliably happen unless voters knowingly choose to sacrifice their own, possible advantage to the good of other people, most of those people personally unrelated to them and I don't think that will happen, reliably, in general society unless people feel that they have a real, consequential moral obligation imposed on them by their Creator. The demand for equality is made equally for yourself and all others or it is an empty pose which has selfishness as a real motive.
The mere habits of courtesy allegedly common among entirely secularized intellectuals (speaking for anyone who has ever observed university faculties in real life, HA!) or among people who write for a living (again HA!) or by mere human convention or that weakest of all potions, societal mores, won't do it. Among themselves and for themselves there has never been a human grouping which, absent a belief in those consequential moral obligations, or the kind of permission we are so apt to grant ourselves, the most savage cruelties, oppression and murder have been and are allowed to be visited on other groups and individuals for the rankest of material gain by theft.
The old superstition that democracy was a product of natural forces is one of the stupidest of the ideas of the so-called enlightenment. Democracy doesn't just happen, it won't just arise as a result of the workings out of physical laws. Democracy, in the real meaning of the word in the modern world is as a product of a belief in equality and a moral obligation to respect rights held by everyone. In the places it arose those were contained in the Mosaic Law, the Hebrew prophets and the Gospels. Those are why democratic goverment arose where it arose. I see it as a very gradual, very slow shedding of the habits of pagan feudalism, not of the triumph of science over religious belief. As was pointed out in Marilynne Robinson's treatment of the passage from Thomas More's Utopia, the cruelty of late medieval English law was not found in the Bible.
As Jurgen Habermas, himself an atheist and a Marxist, admitted that there is nothing else that feeds modern, egalitarian democracy, there is no other source of sustenance for it as a social and, so, political reality. That remains the case no matter which issue of equality under discussion. If there are other, possible sources for it, in, example, Islam, is certainly worth investigating and pursuing because a persuasive Islamic egalitarian, democratic movement gaining hold over more than a billion and a half people would certainly be a good and great thing. It is not possible in any system, religious, philosophical or scientific, which features assertions of inequality. It is certainly not achievable through atheist materialism and in a society which is governed by either overt philosophical and scientistic materialism or the vulgar materialism which de-religionied secularism drifts in the most unsurprising manner. I believe the decrease in actual democracy in the past fifty years is a product of that drift. I doubt it is an accident that the height of American democracy achieved in the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act came during a period of increased religious observance in the country or that it was among very serious Christians that the abolition movement arose and became powerful enough to overturn slavery.
The 18th century, so-called enlightenment concept that, somehow, democracy or, more minimally, a tolerably decent society would be the product of "enlightened" self-interest, is such transparent nonsense that it should have always been considered a fraud and a means of the self-interested "enlightened" men who invented it to gain advantage for themselves. If there is no controlling and effective belief that such "enlightened" men are not to use their supposed superior faculties to set themselves up above those not so endowed to their own material and social adventure and their own preening self-regard. The wiser of the exploiter class would manage "the masses" for their own advantage more wisely than the stupider and less "enlightenedly" self-interested and if you think they would manage to maintain that wise management as their property and power went to their spoiled children and grand children, I question your knowledge of human nature. It's hard enough when that requirement is imposed by God through consequences of what happens when powerful-selfish people and classes get out of control, when it is based on something more easily managed or ignored, there is no chance of it being any better than a hypocritical mouthing of piety. Thomas Jefferson, who was, in fact, a sort of unitarian deist who didn't choose to believe in consequences nearly as much as he felt confident in his own cleverness, grew more attached to slavery in the decades after the United States gained independence, as his high sounding Declaration was turned, immediately, into a mockery.
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