Original sin as the bedrock of democracy

More from Barton Swaim’s Wall Street Journal review of Reinhold Niebuhr’s  Major Works in Religion and Politics, explaining why the doctrine of original sin is necessary for a stable democracy.

From Barton Swaim, Sifting the Wheat From the Chaff – WSJ:

In “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness” (1944), also included in the Library of America volume, he defended democracy on the modest grounds that it provided the only way by which intransigent and self-seeking groups might live with one another without violence and destruction. By deluding themselves into believing democracy could achieve a harmonious society governed by reason and reciprocity, the “children of light” (moral idealists) would end up ceding power and prestige to the “children of darkness” (moral cynics).

The Christian doctrine of original sin, then, isn’t some irrelevant relic from the days of Puritanism but the without-which-not of stable democratic government. In that doctrine, he writes in one memorable passage, “one may understand that no matter how wide the perspectives which the human mind may reach, how broad the loyalties which the human imagination may conceive, how universal the community which human statecraft may organize, or how pure the aspirations of the saintliest idealists may be, there is no level of human moral or social achievement in which there is not some corruption of inordinate self-love.”