Plato’s conception of the ideal State as described by Socrates was in fact part of an investigation into the concept of justice.  Socrates was in dialogue with Glaucon and Adeimantus on how best to observe what is just and unjust, the State was a way of viewing justice on the large scale before zooming in and examining justice with an individual lens.  The reality is that all States are in a process of creation and therefore so are the attributes of justice and the converse, injustice.

            Our own nation is in fact the closest thing to an ideal republic that has ever existed on the face of earth but we are in the process of creation.  Strange to think that even now, some two and a quarter centuries after the inception of our nation we still struggle mightily with the concepts of justice that were held in such high esteem by our founders.  The founders of these United States indeed had a mind much like that of Plato, they conceived of an ideal situation and drafted a manifesto that became the legal groundwork for the government of our nation.  Perhaps the greatest flaw in their vision was the extremely high standard they set for the Republic at its very inception.  It is not too bold an assumption to realize that most of the founding fathers imagined a State based on liberty and justice with a fair amount of fear and trembling.  The laws they drafted as part of their framework were designed to account for human depravity, of which they, as solid Protestants, had a firm apprehension.  Even at the inception of the great experiment of a democratic republic there was an understanding that mere human willpower could not be trusted to act in the interest of justice and liberty.  They designed a system of government with dispersed power and checks and balances as we all learned in junior high American history.

            But yet there still must be a ruler, a head, a commander in chief and this year we the people are tasked with his election.  Despite what many people would have us believe our nation was intended from it’s very beginning to be a Christian nation.  The founding fathers had in mind a government by the people, Christian people.  There is no way that a republic can be formed based on freedom and justice that does not include God, for God is the author of virtues such as these.  The very idea that a nation could be governed justly by the Godless is preposterous.  Socrates insists that those who lead, the guardians, must have eyes and be able to see, leading from that he asserts that the leaders must be philosophers.

And are not those who are verily and indeed wanting in the knowledge of the true being of each thing, and who have in their souls no clear pattern, and are unable as with a painter’s eye to look at the absolute truth and to that original repair, and having perfect vision of the other world to order the laws about beauty, goodness, justice in this if not already ordered, and to guard and preserve the order of them – are not such persons, I ask, simply blind? – Plato, The Republic

We have a choice to make as Christians in the United States, we can stand up and hold our politicians responsible for ordering laws about beauty, goodness and justice, we can insist that they adhere to the absolute truth (not the relative truth of legality) or we can watch as our nation careens further and further from the ideal of a republic and closer to the edge of dissolution. Christ commanded us to, “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” this applies not only to taxes but to the performance of our civic duty in elections.  We take our role in this democracy for granted, we assume we cannot make a difference, that the blind guides will forever prevail in politics but it need not be the case.  Our nation’s founders had faith that it could be otherwise, Plato reasoned that it could be otherwise, we are in a position to live up to those dreams and visions.