PANEL TOPIC
Moral Engagement and Terrorism
How Can People of Diverse Backgrounds Unite in the Fight
Against Religiously-Inspired Terrorism?
PAPER TITLE
Engagement with the Hebrew Roots of Modern Democratic Values is the Way to Bring
Nations, Tribes, Tongues, and Ethnicities Together
PRESENTER
James R. Wallis, Jr., CPLP (M.Div., MA, MBA)
Adjunct Professor DeVry University and Averett University
THESIS/ABSTRACT
This paper will present the argument that both the Western secular and the religious roots of modern Democracy were inspired first by Hebrew Federalist ideas in the early Reformation period, and later by the case made for the modern welfare state based on Jewish social and ethical obligations to society. Those original seminal, covenantal ideas, social ethics, and the
God of Abraham, have all been carefully and consistently expunged in the name of modern secular democracy.
This paper will propose that we should reset our modern, republics, democracies and other assorted tyrannies by engaging again with the Hebrew Republic that so captured Western Europe in the “Biblical Century”, 1574-1680. Our attempts to “make the world safe for Democracy” consistently fail, because these federalist/covenant ideas are unnaturally planted in soil that will not sustain the tree of liberty. We should heed Paul’s exhortation: “The cultivated olive tree sustains the wild olive branches”, not the other way around. It is the “Jew first, then the Greek.”
Only when we have in mind both the Hebrew roots and the future success of those ideas, where all nations, tribes, tongues and people (Greek: ethne), are represented in the future kingdom of God’s people, will we be able to bring people of diverse background together.
Let’s make the 21st Century, the century of the Hebrew Covenant.
Roots come before fruit.

Democracy is a Turkey
It’s so easy to misunderstand one another. It’s so easy to misconstrue intent and motive.
Our diverse cultures and their corresponding dissimilar religions seem to be insurmountable barriers to unity in the face of rapidly-expanding power of Islamic terrorists. There is an almost irrational, desperate attempt to offer up modern secular, democratic, Western values as the answer to the existential threat of militant Islam. The Western, liberal, democratic paradigm seems inadequate for the challenges of the 21 st
century.
The secular, diplomatic hope is to just get Iran or Hamas or Hezbollah or Boko Haram to sit down at a bargaining table. The modern, rational mind thinks that Islamic-inspired beliefs will respond to carefully reasoned arguments, explanations, or offers of economic improvements that would stop the aggression and violence. This paper proposes that our modern secular bias is an insurmountable barrier to understanding and dealing with religiously-inspired Islamic terrorism.
Nation-states who value freedom have been forced to respond with force as they experience eminent, existential threats to their own existence. This paper considers the response individual journalists and citizens could develop. It focuses on recognizing and representing the true nature of the problem posed by the rise in our times of militant Islam. If a diagnosis is wrong, so will be the treatment. If the secular diagnosis is inadequate, a stronger, more viable alternative is a response grounded in Hebrew and Christian perspectives.
Today, the values and expectations of modern people and states reside in derivatives from the federalist republic, developed in the 16 th
, 17 th
, and 18 th
centuries. Today, we call it
“Democracy”. I will suggest that these progressive, secular ideas and values were born from the very Biblical and Hebraic world that modern, secular man has now rejected. When a politician or

individual from a free, Western country, tries to engage a Muslim, or to discuss Islamic-inspired terrorism using democratic values devoid of their true federalist roots, the result will be a failure to engage and cannot result in a solution to that terrorism. In short, it is engagement without the moral foundation that birthed democracy.
The democratic child has now divorced the federalist parent that birthed him, and unless individuals and communities to return to the simple, free, un-coerced offer of a federalist relationship with the Creator who is the source of our inalienable rights, neither individuals nor nation states will find a satisfactory solution to the civilizational crisis we now face.
If one sees Democracy as the origin and grantor of freedom and rights, then Democracy, or American values, or Western ideals, or the Judeo-Christian "religion" becomes the object of a person/nation's quest for liberty rather than God Himself, who is the well-spring of these values.
It is a first step for someone to truly accept and integrate democratic values. However, without the acceptance of the God of the Hebrew Republic who gave us the rights and responsibilities which are derived from a covenantal-federalist structure, we will end up with nothing more than incantatory democracy, and the harsh and unjust rule of men.
Democracy is a Turkey
The story of the misnaming of the turkey illustrates our dilemma of investing in democracies and democratic values, the rich strength and source of liberty that only is found in a free, constitutional Hebrew Republic. Just as the turkey is misnamed in almost every country where it is found, so Democracy is misnamed.
The famous Thanksgiving turkey is not from Turkey, and in most countries its name is just an exercise in creative fiction, or as The Economist calls it, “A Flight of Fancy”. Where I

grew up in Brazil it is called a “peru”. The many names of the bird “speak of early globalization and confusion” according The Economist. A tongue-in-cheek graphic, “Gobble-isation”, illustrates the spread of the bird from its native roost in Mexico across, around, and back to the
Americas. (Staff, 2014)
The bird was a big staple of the Aztec diet, and by one estimate Montezuma levied 1,000 birds a day for his royal court. He made a gift of 1,500 birds plus a sizable load of gold to Cortez before the Spaniard razed the Aztec capital. Those birds, some dead and some alive, plowed the waves back to Europe and there were eagerly prized by the 1% who liked a spectacular bird
(taste was not important) to bedazzle guests at big banquets. According to The Economist article,
“Pheasants, herons, swans, and even flamingos and peafowl” had served this purpose until the more impressive and better tasting “pavo” gobbled its way into European hearts and stomachs.
The bird bounced from court to capital and before you could pluck another 1,000 for a king and his entourage, the bird was the centerpiece of many a royal feast from Spain to India. The naming confusion just added to the fun and the spread of the bird from royal tables to the rest of us. The original name in Spanish was “guajolote”, a mispronunciation of “huehxōlōtl” in the classical Aztec language, Nahuatl. My favorite Spanish word for Turkey is the Southern
Guatemalan, “chompipe”, which sounds like good food to me. The Economist comments:
“Of all the turkey’s misnomers, the official Linnaean name from 1758 must qualify as the wrongest: Meleagris gallopavo gallopavo . It crosses Greek roots with Latin to mean
“guinea-fowl chicken-peacock chicken-peacock”. Wrong on five counts, but typical. The only thing the turkey’s namers have got right consistently is that the bird is not-fromhere.”
There are many more interesting names for the turkey, but if we had even a bone of decent multi-cultural sensitivity, we should call it the “Aztec” or “Mexico”. Ironically, in
Turkey, they call it the hindi , which means India Bird.

Democracy is like the turkey. It is not the prettiest form of government, it can’t fly, and it is universally misnamed. We think we know what Democracy is. We argue long and loudly about Democratic values. We’ve built fleets of ships, and many institutions to make the world safe for Democracy. It is the favorite, noun, verb, adverb, and adjective in today’s vocabulary.
There are so many names for democracy that even Wikipedia (the people’s place for democratic knowledge) has a hard time categorizing them all. Here’s a sample: ( emphasis added )
There are direct and representative kinds. One can categorize them by types: based on mode of communication, on location, level of freedom, religious democracies, or others.
Representative democracies can be liberal or illiberal. They can be chunked as: electoral (modern occidental or liberal democracies), dominant-party system, parliamentary democracies
(Westminster or Jacksonian), Soviet democracy or council democracy, even totalitarian democracy. Your flavor might include non-partisan democracy or an organic /authoritarian democracy, first used to describe Bonapartism.
Then there are: (from the Wikipedia page-some definitions included in italics)
Anticipatory; Associationalism, or Associative; adversialism, or adversial; Bourgeois –
Some Marxists, Communists, Socialists and Left-wing anarchists refer to liberal democracy as bourgeois democracy, alleging that ultimately politicians fight only for the rights of the bourgeoisie ; Consensus; Constitutional; Delegative; Deliberative;
Democratic centralism; Democratic dictatorship; Democratic republic; Economic; Ethnic democracy – coined to describe democracy in Israel ; Grassroots; Interactive; Jeffersonian
– named after American statesman Thomas Jefferson, who believed in equality of political opportunity (for male citizens), and opposed to privilege, aristocracy and corruption . Market; Multiparty; New– Maoist concept based on Mao Zedong's "Bloc of
Four Classes" theory in post-revolutionary China ; Participatory; People's; Radical; Semidirect democracy; and Sociocracy.
Democracies can be categorized by power source or power structure. I had the privilege to interview Joaquin Balaguer, the blind-president of the Dominican Republic in the late 1980’s, and he shows up under the Wikipedia article for Christian Democracy, “a political ideology which emerged in nineteenth-century Europe under the influence of conservatism and Catholic

social teaching.” There are political parties the world over that have the word in their name.
There are as many definitions and lists of Democracy as there are names for the “huehxōlōtl”, the universally misnamed turkey.
In brief, power is derived “from the people, who in turn, delegate that power to elected representatives”, in a democracy. (Steven L. Taylor, 2011) It is clear that everyone from
Chairman Mao to assorted dictators and well-meaning rulers of countries prefer to be labeled as
“democratic”. It is a catch-all term, one that can’t be challenged very seriously in our day and our age. Democracy is synonymous with our modern values and freedoms.
The push for democracy is a loud and steady drumbeat for those who live in oppressive, totalitarian states and when waves of popular upheaval, dissent, or revolt occur, they are often called “democratic” regardless of the real nature or intent of the movement. It certainly is the goal of modern governments, and is often used interchangeably with “Western values” or
“Western ideals.”
Natalie Jaresko, the Ukranian Finance Minister, was interviewed on NPR’s radio program, Fresh Air , in regards to loans that Ukraine was seeking to support the country in the face of Russian aggression and disruption of the economy. The loans were needed to stabilize the banking and financial sectors. In the face of more dead and more wounded than the USA suffered in 10 years in Afghanistan, she said that Ukraine needed US investment.
“Let Ukraine show that our model, our model of a free market economy, based on a
European, on Western values , can succeed.” … She spoke for the people of Ukraine who
“shared their desire to be a successful market economy, a part of Europe, and a part of the
Democratic Free World .” (Jaresko, 2015) ( emphasis added )

This theme that democratic values are Western and include a free-market economy are common themes when any one discusses modern political systems. Kishore Mahbubani, the
Dean and Professor in the Practice of Public Policy of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public
Policy at the National University of Singapore, has made a list he calls the Seven pillars of
Wisdom, “that Asia has imported from the West. These so-called ‘soft-democratic’ values, freemarket economics, science and technology, meritocracy, pragmatism, peace, rule of law, and education.” (Tricks, 2014)
Jeffrey Stout makes the secular case for deliberative democracy. His hope is that discussion or deliberation will result in good government. “In the ancient world, democracy meant rule by a particular class, the commons. For us, its strictly political referent is a form of government in which the adult members of the society being governed all have some share in electing rulers and are free to speak their minds in a wide-ranging discussion that rulers are bound to take seriously.” (Stout, 2009)
Will Democracy Work for Islam?
Our modern dilemma of the (in)compatibility of Islam with other civilizations is nothing new. Paul K Davis highlights one-hundred decisive battles in history, and sixteen of those involve Islam. (Davis, 2001) By the time the Crusades happened, Islam had already successfully conquered scores of “nations”, and had been repulsed at Tours (732 AD), and subdued the
Byzantines at Manzikert. (1071 AD).
Winston Churchill faced Pathans on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border as a young lieutenant. He was called in to relieve a small enclave of British at Malakand and his memoirs later became the first book he wrote. He contrasts the Christian religion and the Mahommedan.

“Indeed it is evident that Christianity, however degraded and distorted by cruelty and intolerance, must always exert a modifying influence on men's passions, and protect them from the more violent forms of fanatical fever, as we are protected from smallpox by vaccination. But the Mahommedan religion increases, instead of lessening, the fury of intolerance.
It was originally propagated by the sword, and ever since, its votaries have been subject, above the people of all other creeds, to this form of madness. In a moment the fruits of patient toil, the prospects of material prosperity, the fear of death itself, are flung aside. The more emotional Pathans are powerless to resist. All rational considerations are forgotten.” (Churchill, 1898) ( emphasis added )
Lt. Churchill was pretty clear as to which religion was peaceful. “In each case civilisation is confronted with militant Mahommedanism. The forces of progress clash with those of reaction. The religion of blood and war is face to face with that of peace. Luckily the religion of peace is usually the better armed.” (Churchill, 1898)
A modern voice agrees with Churchill.
“As I see it, the fundamental problem is that the majority of otherwise peaceful and lawabiding Muslims are unwilling to acknowledge, much less to repudiate, the theological warrant for intolerance and violence embedded in their own religious texts. It simply will not do for Muslims to claim that their religion has been “hijacked” by extremists. The killers of Islamic State and Nigeria’s Boko Haram cite the same religious texts that every other Muslim in the world considers sacrosanct.” (Ali, 2015)
The author of these bold words is Ms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the author of Heretic: Why Islam
Needs a Reformation Now . She is a somewhat solitary voice, but not the only one who is calling out Islam today.
Wafa Sultan, is an exiled Syrian woman who states her case in the book, A God Who
Hates . The “Dickensian details” are too graphic to repeat here, but she describes a similar construct as Churchill described in 1898, in the chapter entitled, The Nature of God In Islam . She ascribes those roots as fear-based, one that derived from the struggle for survival in the harsh and unyielding environments in the Arabian desert.
“Before we can expose the true nature of an ogre, we have to examine the need that produced it, we have to explore, even if only briefly, the environmental circumstances which participated in its creation. When one examines the social, political, and economic

situation of the Arabs before Islam that paved the way for its emergence, one can more easily understand the nature of God in Islam.” (Sultan, 2009)
Her own experience in Syria with her grandmother, sisters, friends in our own day and age are an oppressive and dismal story. Her answers are secular and pained, but powerful nevertheless. “The wisdom of the age we live in cautioned me against writing this book and warned me that I might have to pay with my life for doing so, but I am undaunted. My belief that good will ultimately triumph over evil has encouraged me to speak out.” (Sultan, 2009, p. 7)
“After the 9/11 terrorist attack Americans asked themselves:
‘Why do they hate us?’
My answer is: ‘Because Muslims hate their women, and any group who hates their women can't love anyone else.’
People ask: ‘But why do Muslims hate their women?’
And I can only reply: ‘Because their God does.’ (Sultan, 2009, p. 51)
Another voice that came from within Islam is Dr. Tawfik Hamid. He wrote a book with the hope, “that by the end of this book the reader will be able to determine if Islam is really hijacked by some people, or if the Muslims have been hijacked by Islamic teaching.” (Hamid,
2005, p. ix) He is pretty straightforward as to the obstacles we and Muslims face in this regard.
“I have concluded from my personal experience with Islam that the violent behavior of
Islamists against the West is aimed at ending Westerners' freedom and bringing them under Islam. Quite simply, Muslims hate Westerners because they are not submitted to
Islam, they drink alcohol, and there is freedom for women. They invent other "reasons" for their hatred in order to gain support for their Islamic cause from uninformed
Westerners.
Unfortunately, the ONLY way for Muslims to be satisfied with the West is for
Westerners to submit to an Islamic or Taliban-like system, end their freedom, and suppress women.” (Hamid, 2005, p. viii)
Women are at the center of another largely unnoticed civilizational collapse in Islam: the irreversible decline in female fertility as women gain education and exposure to western,

democratic values. David Goldman, in How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam is Dying, Too) , makes the definitive case that the secular West, the totalitarian East, and nearly all of Islam is destroying themselves by low fertility rates, below replacement. The only two exceptions in the world are Western protestant peoples, and Jewish people of all types in Israel. He describes
Islam’s predicament. (Goldman, 2011)
“A people facing cultural extinction may well choose war, if war offers even a slim chance of survival. That is just how radical Islamists view the predicament of traditional
Muslim society in the face of modernity. The Islamists fear that if they fail, their religion and culture will disappear into the maelstrom of the modem world. Many of them would rather die fighting.” (Goldman, 2011)
The great irony of the democratic solution for Islam, AKA The Arab Spring, is that the exposure to the secular West results in the leap from theocratic Islam straight over to the formerly hated, decadent Western lifestyles. According to Goldman’s detailed research, the highest percentage of prostitutes and drug addicts in Iran is among the more highly educated women. (Goldman, 2011)
The great hope of secular liberalism was that rationality and science would overcome the irrationality of primitivism and religions. George Will commented on the growing chaos and war in the Middle East in this context. “Pat Moniyhan used to talk about the liberal expectancy -- that was the belief that when modernity came, pre-modern forces, religion and ethnicity would lose their history-shaping power. That's all we read about nowadays--are these supposedly premodern forces dominating the modern age.” (Will, 2015)
This same alarm was expressed by the editor of The Economist , John Micklethwait, in his departing column, “The Case for Liberal Optimism”. Despite the positive-sounding title, he says,
In 2006 it was still easy to convince yourself that history was ending—that the
“Washington consensus” of democracy and capitalism would liberate the world. But freedom’s momentum has sadly stalled.

Democracy is no longer the presumed destination.
Countries that looked mildly hopeful nine years ago, such as Russia and Turkey, have acquired tsars and sultans. The Arab spring has turned to winter. Above all, authoritarians have found a new model in China.
(Micklethwait, 2015) ( Emphasis added )
A popular secular solution to Islamic radicalization has been for leaders to call for economic aid and jobs for Muslims. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, , (D) Hawaii, and an Iraq veteran, commented on the ongoing diplomatic efforts of Sec. John Kerry with Iran in this regard. Sec.
Kerry had made the claim that Isis and Al-Qaeda are engaging in "criminal conduct, rooted in alienation, poverty, thrill-seeking, and other factors." If so, then Gabbard said, "if we really looked at what he's saying, and if that's really the cause, then the solution would be just to give them a trophy, give them a hug, give them a good paying job, 10,000 dollars, and a skateboard, so they can go and get their thrills and say, 'Ok, great', they're gonna be happy and they won't be fighting anymore.' That's not the case.” (Gabbard, 2015)
In Gabbard’s opinion, terrorists are not alienated from their governments, but they do have an ideology that fuels their attacks. "I think, in my opinion, it is really not recognizing that
Islamic extremism is the enemy. And you can see this through their actions, through the decisions this administration has made, and Libya is a perfect example, where if you don't know who your enemy is you end up going to war with people who are not your enemy." … Rather than eliminating our enemies, these Islamist extremists, they're stronger there now than they were before.” (Gabbard, 2015)
Probably, the most significant voice to speak up and describe accurately the true nature of
Islam and its incompatibility with democracy was the president of Egypt, Al-Sisi, in a speech delivered to Al-Azhar, a gathering of Muslim clerics in Egypt. Here a few excerpts:
“It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible! … corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is

antagonizing the entire world. … Is it possible that 1.6 billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants—that is 7 billion—so that they themselves may live? Impossible! … I say and repeat again that we are in need of a religious revolution . You, imams, are responsible before Allah. The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move… because this umma is being torn, it is being destroyed, it is being lost—and it is being lost by our own hands.” (Ibrahim, 2015)
( emphasis added )
President Sisi is now the first Egyptian president to ever attend a Coptic Mass and is pushing for reform. So, if some within Islam recognize the problem, can they succeed on their own? Ms. Ali does not think so.
“Islam is at a crossroads. Muslims need to make a conscious decision to confront, debate and ultimately reject the violent elements within their religion. To some extent—not least because of widespread revulsion at the atrocities of Islamic State, al Qaeda and the rest— this process has already begun. But it needs leadership from the dissidents, and they in turn stand no chance without support from the West. (Ali, 2015)
But the “West” is in a politically correct maelstrom that refuses any criticism of a
“religion”. The help the West is offering in its secular, progressive incarnation is not proving to be effective. Lord Malcolm Pearson, a member of the House of Lords in England, has faced heavy criticism for daring to discuss and criticize Islam. He calls out “political correctitude”.
“Our political leaders go intoning that Islam is a religion of peace, when of course, it actually isn't. And what they mean is, millions of Muslims live peaceful lives. But that is not the same thing at all. And so they are completely terrified of looking at the reality of what is going on in our schools and elsewhere, because they are frightened of being accused of Islamophobia, which is an unreasonable fear of Islam, when in actual fact the fear is completely reasonable. … Well, I think it's quite wrong to talk about
Islamophobia, because the fear is entirely reasonable. I fear Islam, and I think I have very good reason to do so.
And so do you, starting with 9/11 and going on from there, and seeing what is happening in North Africa. Of course, we should fear Islam. But we should be allowed to talk about it, and we're not allowed to talk about it, because if we do we are thought of as causing religious hatred and offending their sensibilities. (Pearson,
2015) ( emphasis added )
Ms. Ali sums up the insuperable divide between Islam and democracy. She has identified five precepts of Islam that require “amendment” before Islam can experience a “Muslim
Reformation”. She says that Islam must recognize and repudiate”,

1.
Muhammad’s semi-divine status, along with the literalist reading of the Quran
.
Muhammad should not be seen as infallible, let alone as a source of divine writ. …
The Quran’s eternal spiritual values must be separated from the cultural accidents of the place and time of its birth.
2. The supremacy of life after death.
The appeal of martyrdom will fade only when
Muslims assign a greater value to the rewards of this life than to those promised in the hereafter.
3. Shariah, the vast body of religious legislation.
Muslims should learn to put the dynamic, evolving laws made by human beings above those aspects of Shariah that are violent, intolerant or anachronistic.
4. The right of individual Muslims to enforce Islamic law.
There is no room in the modern world for religious police, vigilantes and politically empowered clerics.
5. The imperative to wage jihad, or holy war . Islam must become a true religion of peace, which means rejecting the imposition n of religion by the sword. (Ali, 2015)
My observation is simple: it is hard to imagine a current circumstance in the secular, democratic order that would lead any Muslim to repudiate any of these five fundamental tenants of their religious construct. Ms. Ali admits as much:
Trapped between two worlds of belief and experience, these Muslims are engaged in a daily struggle to adhere to Islam in the context of a society that challenges their values and beliefs at every turn. Many are able to resolve this tension only by withdrawing into self-enclosed (and increasingly self-governing) enclaves. This is called cocooning, a practice whereby Muslim immigrants attempt to wall off outside influences, permitting only an Islamic education for their children and disengaging from the wider non-Muslim community. (Ali, 2015)
Not only does the secular West offer no “home” to the Muslim, but the secular West’s misdiagnosis of Islam as a religion of peace only leads to more Islam. Daniel Pipes, a brilliant critic of our modern Islamic dilemma explains the problem when “politicians pretend Islam has no role in violence”, … “they worry that focusing on Muslims means fundamental changes to the secular order, while denying an Islamic element permits avoid troubling issues”.
But, of course, this interpretation neglects the scriptures of Islam and the history of
Muslims, seeped in the assumption of superiority toward non-Muslims and the righteous violence of jihad. Ironically, ignoring the Islamic impulse means foregoing the best tool to defeat jihadism: for, if the problem results not from an interpretation of Islam, but from random evil and irrational impulses, how can one possibly counter it? Only

acknowledging the legacy of Islamic imperialism opens ways to re-interpret the faith’s scriptures in modern, moderate, and good-neighborly ways. (Pipes, 2015)
Why Democracy is the Wrong Bucket and Why Hebrew Federalism Is
Even the most articulate supporters of modern democratic values suspect that it is not working. The Economist explored this theme in March 2014, in an in-depth article, “What’s
Gone Wrong with Democracy?” The fundamental weakness of democracy was highlighted early in the article, “ Representatives of more than 100 countries gathered at the World Forum on
Democracy in Warsaw that year to proclaim that ‘the will of the people’ was ‘the basis of the authority of government’. This has always been the fundamental flaw of democracy, recognized even by Aristotle, the “father” of democracy. The will of the people cannot be trusted. He placed democracy in the “bad” column of forms of government along with tyranny and oligarchy. The
“good” governments were monarchy, aristocracy, and polity or republics.
Herman Hoppe goes even further in his analysis of the flaws of modern democracy, and takes on Artistotle’s categorization of the good and the bad. The title of his book, From
Aristocracy to Monarch to Democracy: A Tale of Moral and Economic Folly and Decay , is also the thesis of his work. Hoppe observes:
“Ironically, the very forces that elevated the feudal king first to the position of absolute and then of constitutional king: the appeal to egalitarian sentiments and the envy of the common man against his betters and the enlistment of the intellectuals, also helped bring about the king’s own downfall and paved the way to another
, even greater folly: the transition from monarchy to democracy .” (Hoppe, 2014, pp. 295-298) (emphasis added)
Democracy is the greatest folly according to Hoppe, because under even a bad monarchy, the looting of the public and the people was somewhat constrained. Democracy makes everyman a king, with the right and power to take from everyone else as well. “Thus, privilege and legal discrimination — and the distinction between rulers and subjects — do not disappear under democracy. To the contrary. Rather than being restricted to princes and nobles, under

democracy, privileges come into the reach of everyone: Everyone can participate in theft and live off stolen loot if only he becomes a public official.” (Hoppe, 2014, pp. 321-324)
Public officials and the modern state also take on the divine mantle previously misascribed to kings. The case for this observation is made by the modern father of free markets and libertarianism, Ludwig Von Mises in his powerful, secular work on human behavior and economics, Human Action . He describes the divinization of the state:
It does not matter whether the absolute ruler bases his claims on the divine rights of anointed kings or on the historical mission of the vanguard of the proletariat or whether the supreme being is called Geist (Hegel) or Humanité (Auguste Comte). The terms society and state as they are used by the contemporary advocates of socialism, planning, and social control of all the activities of individuals signify a deity. The priests of this new creed ascribe to their idol all those attributes which the theologians ascribe to God— omnipotence, omniscience, infinite goodness, and so on. (Mises, 2009)
Therein lies the greatest weakness of modern secular democracy: it is religious and the god it represents is no match for the god of Islam. One might even argue that they are the same god, and the secular order and Islam find common ground. Stephen Schwartz makes this argument in The Left and Islam Apologetics . The roots of the left’s embrace of control and totalitarianism has deep roots. Schwartz explains,
After the Bolshevik Revolution, Muslims under Russian rule were granted a special status. The Communist International held the 1920 Baku Congress of Peoples of the East in which Muslim delegates called for struggle against the West with Russian support.
There, a Bolshevik intellectual, Karl Radek, declared,
‘We appeal, comrades, to the warlike feelings which once inspired the peoples of the East when these peoples, led by their great conquerors, advanced upon Europe. We know, comrades, that our enemies will say that we are appealing to the memory of Genghis
Khan and to the memory of the great conquering Caliphs of Islam . . . when the capitalists of Europe say that a new wave of barbarism threatens . . . we answer them: Long live the
Red East, which together with the workers of Europe will create a new civilization under the banner of Communism!’ (Schwartz, 2015) ( emphasis added )
Eric Rosenberg argues that there was one voice in ancient history that offered an alternative to the barbarism of ancient times that is alive and well today. His article, The

Whispers of Democracy in Ancient Judaism , makes the case. He states that as moderns we do not understand how novel and earth-changing was the Hebrew call for individual responsibility through a covenant with the One, true God. “Until their call to monotheism nearly four millennia ago, the worldview in the Levant was very different. Life was an endless cycle devoted to agrarian pursuits and appeasing warring gods in aid of those pursuits.” (Rosenberg, 2012)
Rosenberg refers to Thomas Cahill’s book, The Gift of the Jews . Rosenberg quotes Cahill that democracy "grows directly out of the Israelite vision of individuals-subjects of value because they are .images of God, each with a unique and personal destiny." ( emphasis added ) A longer quote by Rosenberg is particularly significant for our argument.
Similarly, the University of Chicago historian William F. Irwin lectured in the 1940s that it was the ancient Jewish prophets and their advocacy of freedom that would find an early expression in the Magna Carta and later in the American Bill of Rights. Perhaps that is partly because the ancient Jews had such terrible experiences with monarchs. Before the
Jews swapped their political system-one of a collection of judges-for a monarchy, to be like other Near Eastern governments, the prophet Samuel warned of the predilection of kings for tyranny and over-taxation. A people will buckle under a king; Samuel warned to no avail. "He will take your best fields, Vineyards, and olive groves, and give them to his servants. He will tithe your crops and grape harvests to give to his officials and "his servants. He will take your male and female slaves .... As for you, you will become his slaves."
One can hear, without too much strain, the distant echoes of Samuel's admonitions in
Thomas Jefferson's catalog against King George in the Declaration of Independence.
(Rosenberg, 2012)
This is the true root of modern democracy, the value of an individual grounded in a relationship with the only true God. Ceding our desire for safety and security to a strong central government, is a rejection of God’s freely-offered liberty through a representative republic. More importantly, the offer of liberty vice tyranny and oppression has been available to tribes, tongues, nations, and ethnic groups right from the start of human history. With the exception of the
Hebrews, and then peoples inspired by Christianity in its various incarnations, most people of the

world have either consciously rejected the offer of covenant with God, or changed and diluted it to rob it of its liberty, freedom, and power.
A key modern myth is that monotheism came after polytheism. It has implications for political science. John Eidsmoe, in his modern epic study of the Historical and Theological
Foundations of Law makes this point.
“If man was originally monotheistic, his concepts of law, and the Source of that law, might be very different from what they would be if we cling to the assumption that man was originally polytheistic. We will explore the evidence and those assumptions further as we look at the world of ancient man. And we will look for clues and evidence as to whether ancient civilizations in different parts of the world held common concepts of morality, a common Law of Nature, that may indicate a common bond, a common origin, or a common Source.” (Eidsmoe, 2012)
The modern day Karin people of Central Asia (modern day Myanmar) are a great example of this theme. Don Richardson details a group of people who lost God’s book a few millennia ago during their migration from the Levant to Asia. His book, The Melchizedek Factor
(formerly titled, Eternity in Their Hearts ), tells this amazing story. When missionaries found the
Karin in the mid 1800’s they had maintained two parallel beliefs, one in Yahweh (!) and the other in the nats (demons). Their hymnology and stories of Yahweh were exemplary of
Abrahamic and pre-mosaic type concepts, with full creation and fall themes. Eidsmoe comments on Richardson’s thesis. (Richardson, 1981)
Don Richardson, in his fascinating book Eternity in Their Hearts, examined the ancient
Greeks, the Incas of Peru, the Santal people of India, the Mbaka of Africa, the ancient
Chinese and Koreans, those of Burma, of Hawaii, and many others. He contended that when missionaries came to preach Christianity to these people, the people frequently responded that they had known this God in the distant past but had lost contact with Him.
Richardson believed this has serious implications for missionary evangelism: missionary approaches might be very different if the people being evangelized had once known God, even imperfectly or by a different name, than if they had never known Him at all."
(Eidsmoe, 2012)
Richardson called these connections, redemptive analogies. Eidsmoe then explores that same implication for political science and government organizations in three volumes and 1,400

pages. The evidence is abundant. If people had once known God’s order for society through covenant, then the re-set point for both the modern secular West and for Islam is to identify where the train went off the tracks and go back and pick up from that point. Instead the steady, insistent goal of modern states and “actors” is to push forward, to progress, to trust in the vision of national and international law as it has evolved in contradiction to God’s consistent and free offer of individual, communal, and corporate relationship of a covenantal (federalist) relationship.
One of the best illustrations of this is found in Ancient Greece. Victor Davis Hanson makes the case that the roots of modern democracy came from the agrarian model and voluntary militias of the Greek farmers prior to the Greek Classical age. His comprehensive and detailed analysis of the local, free, farmers who tilled crops to produce an income year round was both the economic and philosophical base for the later Greek city-states. The fiercely independent farmers would periodically be called up to battle, usually win, and then return to farming. Their model of warfare became the phalanx of Greek and Roman successes later on. (Hanson, 1995)
The parallels of the Greek farmers to the farmers in the books of Joshua and Judges is striking. Periods of peace, followed by episodes of warfare, then return to peaceful living.
Hanson’s farmer advanced the full production of vines from planting to creating the wine. Wine presses were a common feature of each 10-20 acre farm. When God came looking for Gideon he was hiding in his winepress. The differences between the Greek farmer and the Hebrew farmer are several. The Hebrew was first, they had no armor or armor, and they had a covenantal relationship with God, not a polytheistic set of arbitrary Greek gods.
The parallels support Eidsmoe’s and Richardson’s thesis. Monotheism came first, there is
“a common bond, a common origin, or a common Source.” In our time, Hernando de Soto has

made the case that these same entrepreneurial, creative building of wealth, based on titled property are common to all people. His book, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else , makes this case. Only the obstacles of un-free, corrupt governments stand in the way of people expressing their divine, created nature. He argues that the five mysteries of capital include, “The Missing Lesson of US History”, where titling property to legal individuals was the basis for capitalism. (Soto, 2000) We would also argue that individuals have to choose both for themselves and their governments to return to a personal relationship with the one True God in order to experience both individual and social liberty.
The Hebrew Century
The birth of our own modern idea of the state and democratic values grew out of what was called the Biblical Century, the period between 1574 to 1680. Eric Nelson has made the definitive case that modern, free, democratic institutions were born out of the discussion in the biblical century based on the study of Hebrew models and roots. “For these and other reasons, the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed a truly remarkable burgeoning of Hebrew scholarship across Europe. Its extent is captured by the 1694 Bibliotheca Latino-Hebraica— compiled in Rome by Carlo Giuseppe Imbonati—which lists over 1,300 works authored by
Christian Hebraists during the period.” (Nelson, 2011, p. 14)
Dr. Meirav Jones, Director of Academic programs at the Herzl Institute has researched the use of the Hebrew Scriptures in human history. Her political Hebraism research shows that
100 books were written at this time with some form of the words, “Hebrew Republic” in their titles. The Hebrew Republic was the foundation for structure and philosophy of modern governments.
“Looking, for example, at the systems of social justice which was part of the Jewish contribution at this moment in history. How do we run our societies, that the rich give

something of their land to the poor? And how do we distribute resources? One is the idea of tithes, and then one is the idea of the Sanhedrin, the model for how we organize our judicial system. Which represents for these thinkers a current system as a whole, or the idea that you shouldn’t have a monarch, which was a huge question. Of course, in the
Torah, in the Jewish tradition, there are all sorts of interpretations, should you have a king, or should you not have a king? Various political thinkers at this time, in early modernity, were saying you should have a king or should not have a king, based on taking different Jewish sources as their model.” (Jones, 2011)
This same theme is picked up in Paul Johnson’s excellent, History of the Jews. He traces the roots of modern political philosophy back to the ancient Jewish roots.
“The notion of the covenant is an extraordinary idea, with no parallel in the ancient Near
East. It is true that Abraham’s covenant with God, being personal, has not reached the sophistication of Moses’ covenant on behalf of an entire people. But the essentials are already there: a contract of obedience in return for special favour, implying for the first time in history the existence of an ethical God who acts as a kind of benign constitutional monarch bound by his own righteous agreements.” (Johnson, 2009, p. 17)
But the now distorted and bloated welfare state of modern governments that little resembles the ethical neighborly responsibility of the Jewish model, is sadly mirrored in the hostility of secular, Western polities and social structures. Johnson points to the anti-Jewishness of Karl Marx as the key source. His anti-Semitism became the anti-capitalism of our modern age.
Marx was not merely a Jewish thinker, he was also an anti-Jewish thinker. Therein lies the paradox, which has a tragically important bearing both on the history of Marxist development and on its consummation in the Soviet Union and its progeny . The roots of
Marx’s anti-Semitism went deep. We have already seen the part anti-Jewish polemic played in the works of enlightenment writers like Voltaire. This tradition passed into two streams. One was the German ‘idealist’ stream, going through Goethe, Fichte, Hegel and
Bauer, in each of whom the anti-Jewish elements became more pronounced. The other was the French ‘socialist’ stream. This linked the Jews to the Industrial Revolution and the vast increase in commerce and materialism which marked the beginning of the nineteenth century. In a book published in 1808, François Fourier identified commerce as
‘the source of all evil’ and the Jews as ‘the incarnation of commerce’. (Johnson, 2009, pp. 348-349) (emphasis added)
Our picture of modern institutions and possible models would not be complete without a reference to the monumental work of Daniel Elazar (deceased), the former chair of Federalist
Studies at Temple University. He demonstrates that two times in human history have the ideas of

a federalist (covenantal) republic been implemented: The Hebrew Republic from Moses and
Joshua through Samuel, and in the founding of the American Republic. Neither has been perfect, but serve as models for a re-set for both modern governments and Islam. Elazar describes his own journey into this insight.
Sometime during the period when I was completing high school and beginning university
I discovered the covenantal basis of Judaism and the Jewish people, perhaps the best kept secret of my otherwise rather good Jewish education.
During the next several years, my university studies of history brought me face to face with the covenantal basis of Reformed Protestant Christianity and its derivation from the same biblical tradition.
It was also at that time that my study of American government led me to understand how the American polity was founded on that Reformed Protestant covenantal tradition in its
Puritan expression and in its secularized Lockean form. (Elazar, 1996)
Elazar’s lucid observation of this mixture of covenantal traditions and the secular
Lockean form have been played out in our own time. The secular form has certainly overtaken and now dominates the political landscape. We have suggested it is powerless to offer a counter force or superior moral alternative to the Islamic model of Sharia and Jihad.
We close with the words from Professor Veith, warning us that with the loss of the meaning of a symbol (democracy) we are powerless to withstand the decline of civilization as we know it.
Long after the meaning has seeped out of it, the symbol may still be used, as for instance when the past of mankind is not related to a present under God but to the opinions of an agnostic or nationalist historian. … The concern about civilizational decline has its roots in the anxiety stirred up by the possibility that historical form, as it was gained, might also be lost when men and society reverse the leap in being and reject existence under
God. (Veith, 1994, p. 131)
One hopeful suggestion is embedded in this brief research, and that is a forward look at the results of the Hebrew Republic. The key is to re-set our political philosophy and institutions to a benchmark and standard that God has already revealed to the lawgiver, Moses. This model is covenantal-federalism, also known as the Hebrew commonwealth or the Hebrew republic. This

model has been well known to humanity for the last three and a half millennia, but only rarely has been applied successfully or correctly. If we look to the end of the book, we find this very hopeful and redemptive situation, described by John in his Revelation.
“After these things I looked and there was an enormous crowd, which no one was able to number, from all nations and tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, who had been clothed with white robes and they had date palms in their hands.” (Revelation 7:9)
One key observation to note is that the word commonly translated “peoples” is the Greek word, ethne, from which we get the word, ethnic. This future vision, one we already see in our experience around us, is that no matter how we can slice it, people of different nationalities, tribes, ethnic groups, and languages, including all Muslim peoples will be represented as those who have repented of their false ideas and believed in the Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth. This scene also suggests that all alienations between peoples, the need for representation, identity, selfworth, diversity, inclusiveness, multi-culturalism, pluralism, marginalization, justice, and fairness have a place they can be resolved, and it is with the people of God in the Kingdom of
God. In short, this scene descries the person and the people we’ve been waiting for, and it isn’t our current crop of political leaders.
This paper has proposed that we should reset our modern, republics, democracies and other assorted tyrannies by engaging again with the Hebrew Republic that so captured Western
Europe in the “Biblical Century”. Our attempts to “make the world safe for Democracy” consistently fail, because these federalist/covenant ideas are unnaturally planted in soil that will not sustain the tree of liberty. We should heed Paul’s exhortation: “The cultivated olive tree sustains the wild olive branches”, not the other way around. It is the “Jew first, then the Greek.”

Only when we have in mind both the Hebrew roots and the future success of those ideas, where all nations, tribes, tongues and people (Greek: ethne), are represented in the future kingdom of God’s people, will we be able to bring people of diverse background together today.
Let’s make the 21st Century, the century of the Hebrew Covenant, the Hebrew Republic, and the
Hebrew Messiah. We need to revive the understanding that roots must come before fruit.

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