Christian Morality

And just last year, the Chinese government and the Vatican concluded an agreement by which it will allow a state-sanctioned merger of the official and underground branches of the Chinese Catholic Church (each of which holds about half of China’s seven million Catholics as members), in exchange for the Government having a say in the future election of bishops.

This way of life started early. “Children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America. “The same spirit pervades every act of social life.”

Civic participation was thus the norm, not the exception. In 1892, the University of Georgia’s president, Walter B. Hill, reported (with perhaps only slight exaggeration) that he’d made a test case of a small town “and found that every man, woman, and child (above ten years of age) in the place held an office—with the exception of a few scores of flabby, jellyfish characters.” America, he concluded, is “a nation of presidents.”

Henry Robert published his Pocket Manual of Rules of Order for Deliberative Assemblies,