Hi, everyone. This is Curtis, and I am excited to tell you about a new feature of the GoodFaith podcast and it's called Campfire Stories.

Now, in a great campfire, everyone has the opportunity to share their stories. And so, in Campfire Stories, we want to hear from you.

We want to hear a story about what you are doing along the themes of the GoodFaith podcast, perhaps it's something about how you're living out your relationships with political polarization, how you are trying to reflect the image of God in your institution and organization, or what you're doing with your money or your vocation, anything that has been sparked by the themes that we've covered here in the GoodFaith podcast is fear game.

It doesn't matter if it's a big story, a small story, or something in between, as long as it's a story about what you are doing in your life.

We're not so much interested in hearing just thoughts. We want to hear stories of doing. So, we'll put a link in the show notes where you can just click on it and then supply us the basic outlines of your story of doing of living out the themes of GoodFaith podcast.

And we'll look at it and we may invite you to share that story on a GoodFaith blog, a social media, or perhaps even invite you to come on the GoodFaith show yourself and talk to me and share your story.

Like, how cool would that be? I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to talk with you. So, please consider joining the campfire by actually joining actively and sharing your story with others gathered around the campfire. Thanks.

Welcome to the GoodFaith podcast. I'm David French with Curtis Chang and we're recording this on podcast on Good Friday.

So, a lot of listeners will get this on Saturday and many listeners also listen to this on Sunday if you listen on Easter Sunday.

If you are happy Easter and we're going to talk a little bit about Easter and talk a little bit about this moment and it's meaning towards the end of the podcast.

But this is not going to be overall an Easter themed podcast. It's going to be different.

The title is why Christians should defend a democracy, which sounds a little what? Why would we need to talk about that? What's going on?

And why we need to talk about that is I think there's a couple of interesting reasons that we're going to get to in a minute, but Curtis, let's just first sort of define our terms. Okay. So when we say why Christians should defend democracy?

What exactly are we talking about? Right. We're going to be using democracy as a shorthand here for a particular form of governance known as liberal democracy.

Now when we say liberal democracy, we're not using the term liberal in the contemporary political sense of liberal versus conservative.

It's the older classical definition of liberal, which is really liberating from kind of the history of monarchy and absolutism. Right. That's what liberal democracy is.

And liberal democracy is really the set of institutional norms. It's a collection of institutional norms like the rule of law, balance of powers in the government, free and fair elections, civil rights, human rights, individual rights.

And I can go on, but this set of institutional norms that we basically have taken for granted now in America.

It's it borrows from ancient Greek democracy, but it really took its modern form in the 17th, 18th century, it became embodied in England, probably first.

And it really established itself in the United States and then really spread out in the founding of the United States and then spread outward there, especially in the countries that we collectively called the West.

And the thing about liberal democracy or democracy I'm going to use as a shorthand to really understand is it's just an abstraction that really becomes real only in the form of democratic institutions.

Democracy is only made real when it's embodied in things like a fairly elected legislature, an executive that operates under the rule of law, a judicial body that, you know, announces its in axis rulings and fairness and transparency and a military that submits the civilian rule and, you know, you can go on election agencies that guarantee free and fair elections, you can throw a free press in there.

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