A Rumination on Parallels Between Voter Access and The Reformation

The difference between Republicans’ and Democrats’ respective widely held views on voting access each stem from an understanding of the sacred nature of the act of voting in our Republic. But, the clash between the parties, one for highly restrictive regulations on who can vote and how, and the other in favor of widespread access, is a result of two very different interpretations of that sacred rite.

This divide echoes another — the divide between the Catholic Church and the proponents of the Reformation on who was allowed access to God. The former believed access to God was, and should, remain exclusively attainable through the Church and its highly exclusive hierarchy. From the Latin scripture and proceedings, which were only understood by the highly educated and the clergy, to indulgences, the entire structure of Catholicism revolved (and continues to revolve) around a centralized hierarchy which excludes the masses and allowed the elite minority to dictate rules and maintain power.

Then came the Protestants, and suddenly God was no longer locked behind the gilded doors of the Catholic Church, it was everywhere. The Bible was translated into various languages, and anyone who could read, or hear it spoken, suddenly had the faculties to interpret it for themselves. Access to God was suddenly democratized.

Is it a coincidence that the Reformation so closely preceded the Enlightenment — when the concept of “individualism” arose to take center stage amongst Western Civlization’s sense of self? Not at all, it makes sense that the Reformation’s decentralization of God would soon lead to an empowered sense of self. This raising up of the individual, both spiritually and in society, was the precursor to the notion of Democracy which the United States of America exalted in its Declaration of Independence, and subsequently enshrined in its Constitution. They were colonists who fled their motherlands for a new world where they would have the freedom to worship as they chose, to claim their own access to the divine, and to make their own choices about what they valued and what they believed.

A choice, on behalf of one’s values and beliefs — this is what a vote is at its core. The removal of that choice from the American citizenry, who evolved from those principles of equal access and empowerment of the individual’s rights in a society that were born in reaction to the restrictions of the Catholic Church and pre-Enlightenment elitist hierarchical social stratospheres, is a contradiction of the very core of the American Nation. To restrict the vote is to restrict a citizen’s right to self-determination. How does that fit in a Nation built on the principles of freedom and justice? It may be a ‘great experiment’, but if we want to call ourselves Americans, the least we can do is attempt to see it through.