Let us ask an important question. Why did democracy fail in the Nephite world at this time? King Mosiah instituted a form of democracy in Mosiah 29, where judges operated according to the voice of the people, even if it did not look like democracy of the 21st century. However, as things progressed in the book of Helaman, the government became worse and more corrupt. We can see the failure of an effort to create a democracy.
Once at Brigham Young University, a guest speaker from the University of Texas asked each of the faculty members in the College of Humanities to read First Democracy by Paul Woodruff. It was about democracy and its beginnings in Athens. Although some Greek city-states were very democratic, like Athens, others were not, like Sparta.
The reason the book was really interesting to me, especially as I read it right at the same time I was reading these chapters, is that the same problems that threatened democracy in the Greek world and threaten it in the United States of America today, are specifically mentioned in these chapters in Helaman. For example, here are some of the characteristics that have to be in place in order for a democracy to work properly.
First, you have to have rule of law. Law has to be respected and in place. If you begin to corrupt or change the law, the foundations of democracy are threatened. The people who can control and change the law can exert a disproportionate power over the society. Democracy is diminished if not eliminated. That was what happened in the Book of Helaman. The people who got into power, the Gadianton robbers, immediately begin to corrupt the laws.
Second, Woodruff says that in order to have a strong democracy, rulers must be accountable to the people. Leaders must be held responsible for mistakes, and if necessary, removed from office. If you do not have a way of holding government officers accountable, then they begin to manifest again a disproportionate amount of power, and power tends to corrupt.
Interestingly, in Greece and Rome, you could not sue a person for personal damages while they were in office, but as soon as they left office they had no more governmental immunity and you could sue them for any kind of personal injury that you suffered because of anything that they had done. Just the threat—the fear of being sued when you left office kept a lot of the Roman administrators well within the bounds of reason. That is not the way we do things today.
The leaders in Helaman were not held accountable. Instead, they set up fences of immunity and were protected by their wealth. Democracy is threatened whenever people are able to use their wealth to increase their political power. Ideally, democracy means one person, one vote. However, if your vote does not count and somebody else’s vote does, democracy is diminished, so anything that we can do to be sure that everybody’s vote really does count is important in preserving democracy.
People are interested in voting when their vote really matters, but there is yet another thing. In order for democracy to work, if you have any representative aspects of your government, the representation needs to be proportional. If it gets too widely out of proportion, then the minorities in the community feel that their voices are not heard. They are disenfranchised, and that is not what democracy is supposed to be. We have to be on the lookout for places where minorities are not being heard or given a chance to be heard. In Zarahemla, the church is actually in the minority. The church’s voice in this chapter is not being heard. In fact, the church is being drummed out of town.
It is very important in a democracy to have public events where everyone can participate as King Benjamin had. He had everybody come to the temple, and had a sense of unity and celebration— especially celebrating common origins. The national heritage that we share in common needs to be preserved as a story that unites all of our people.
Education is very important. For a democracy, you have to have an educated populace, and you do not get the impression here that much education is going on in the city of Zarahemla.
There are many things that we can do to strengthen our democracy. There is more involved here than we might have thought, but in all of these cases, in ancient Greece, in America, and in Zarahemla, democracy was being threatened. It was a difficult time in Zarahemla.
It is easy to become a little bit cynical about democracy, and there is no question that democracy is messy. It is not a neat, tidy way to run a government. However, the alternative is tyranny, as the ancient Greek world has proved. That may be clean, but it is not what we want. Especially because it often does not allow people to make religious choices to worship according to the dictates of their conscience, to do the kinds of things that we know we are here on this earth to do.