More Kings, Please? – Religion & Liberty Online

If there is one thing Americans seem to agree on these days, it is discontent with the American democratic system. According to a recent Gallup survey, half of Americans agree with the statement that democracy is performing poorly. Last year, a Pew Research Center poll found that 62% of respondents were dissatisfied with the current performance of our political system.

There are many reasons for this, much of it depending on what side of the political aisle one resides: frustration with Republican gerrymandering; frustration with Democratic gerrymandering; frustration with government attempts to curtail diversity, equity, and inclusion; frustration with wokeism in our nation’s institutions; frustration with uber-wealthy “techno-bros”; frustration with corrupt exploitation of government programs. Yet there is also an increasingly vocal minority, both on the right and the left, that argues that the classical liberal principles upon which our nation was founded are themselves the problem. Though such dissent takes many forms, one manifestation of this anti-liberalism is a certain conservative celebration of monarchy.

Enter author, speaker, and U.S. postal worker Jeb Smith. In the recently published Missing Monarchy: Correcting Misconceptions about the Middle Ages, Medieval Kingship, Democracy, and Liberty, Smith presents a 400-page salute to the ancient political system that simultaneously condemns the American constitutional order. “My eyes are opened, the truth revealed,” he writes. “I can never again describe America or any government based on democracy as ‘the land of the free and home of the brave’ but rather the ‘home of the slave.’”

Smith’s objective is to “correct false beliefs about the political systems of the Middle Ages while exposing the weaknesses within our own.” In a narrow sense, he achieves both results. Monarchy offers plenty of myth-busting regarding the medieval period, and a litany of accurate criticisms and complaints regarding contemporary American society and politics. Yet his broader, more provocative thesis that monarchy (and, specifically, a manifestation of monarchy that existed in “the feudal heartlands” of northwestern Europe from 600 to 1300 AD) is superior to democracy falls far from the mark, ultimately stumbling into incoherence.

In the first half of the book, Monarchy presents the case for the many objective goods (and alleged superiority) of the medieval period. Smith is at his best when leveraging historical scholarship to correct the record. Medieval wars in Europe, for example, resulted in far fewer casualties than usually presumed. The so-called Truce of God and Peace of God limited the number of days Christians were permitted to fight and sought to protect noncombatants. Commendable bonds of loyalty existed between lord and vassal defined by the system of noblesse oblige.

And contrary to many portrayals of the so-called Dark Ages, the era wasn’t all terrible. Peasants enjoyed more holidays and leisure time. Taxes were usually well below 5%. Kings controlled little land in their realms when compared to, say, the United States, where the federal government controls about 25% of our nation’s landmass. And the Catholic Church served as a capable counterweight to secular rulers’ ambitions to accumulate power.

Yet Smith soon gets over his skis. He notes that life expectancy rates in medieval Europe are skewed because of the much higher infant mortality rate, which is true, but isn’t exactly comforting for hopeful parents. “The peasants had far greater liberty and self-government than modern democratic citizens…. The rulers could not interfere with the rights of the people or manipulate them in any way.” That seems at odds with the characterization provided by Oxford medievalist R.W. Southern in his acclaimed The Making of the Middle Ages: “To nearly all men serfdom was, without qualification, a degrading thing, and they found trenchant phrases to describe the indignity of the condition.”

Smith claims that peasants had the freedom to move easily from one place to another and choose their lord: “Under kingship, a peasant could choose from hundreds, even thousands, of various customs, laws, and lords. It was beautifully diverse!!!” While it’s true that medievalists such as Mark Bailey and Christopher Dyer have presented serfdom as more negotiated and porous than previously thought—with migration common enough to be documented as a social phenomenon—it was by no means available to all. Thirteenth-century English jurist Henry de Bracton, for example, described the typical serf life as serving at the will of another.

Church-state relations are also a bit more complicated than Smith’s claim that they were “not antagonistic powers but complementary.” He approvingly cites Thomas Becket’s exhortation to English King Henry II that their government should not “consent to any innovation,” neglecting to mention that Henry had Becket murdered for resisting royal attempts to exert more control over the English church. Edward the Martyr, Stanislaus of Szczepanów, and Canute IV of Denmark are among the many saints revered by the Catholic Church who were martyred via political intrigue during this period. The investiture controversy between the Holy Roman emperor and other monarchs over the selection of bishops and abbots rocked Europe for half a century, with Pope Gregory VII excommunicating Emperor Henry IV in 1076.

Other examples also undermine Smith’s narrative. He approvingly cites historian Maurice Keen’s comment that there were “endless individual baronial rebellions against overlords who they claimed had oppressed them or had infringed on their rights,” because it seems to fit his medieval libertarian narrative. But who wants to live in a society suffering endless rebellions, with armies regularly marching through your lands and confiscating your property? He praises the Kingdom of Jerusalem as an exemplar for its decentralized system, though (jarringly) admitting that, “in many ways, the decentralization of the [Crusader] states led to their fall.” He condemns representative government but also lauds medieval monasteries for electing their abbots, which medievalist Donald Prudlo portrays as a precursor to representative government.

Smith’s unassailably rosy depiction of monarchy and the medieval era—which seems in part based on aspirational quotations from medieval thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas—is however not as problematic as his attempt to prove them categorically superior to democracy and modernity. The book is filled with a long train of unsubstantiated, superficial assertions: “The illiterate peasant knew his entire law more thoroughly than today’s lawyer, who must focus on a specific narrow section of law to master it”; “History supports the claim that only moral aristocrats can preserve liberty”; “Lies are always prevalent in secular and political societies.”

While modern democracies exert ideological pressure on its citizens to conform, Smith asserts: “A medieval person was free to think as he wished.” Tell that to the Cathars, gnostics in southern France, against whom the pope decreed a bloody (if perhaps necessary) crusade in 1209; or various pagan peoples in northern Europe who were encouraged but also sometimes coerced into conversion, as Charlemagne did to the Saxons in the late eighth century.

Granted, Smith offers legitimate complaints regarding modern democratic politics: the ignorance of voters, our endless and inane election cycle, our astronomically high debt, federal programs to address poverty and educational crises that exacerbate those problems, the use of occupational licensure to effectively create cartels, and overregulation among them. Yet many of his grievances have less to do with the American constitutional republic created by the founders as with the ballooning, ideologically progressive administrative state of so-called bureaucratic experts, a system for which we have to thank, among others, Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Undoubtedly, various Republican administrations have contributed to this problem, but to categorically blame the founding for this requires more than an exasperatingly steady stream of assertions.

Indeed, for a book presenting itself as an extended critique of democracy, there is shockingly little discussion of what the founding generation believed, the constitutional order they created, or how contemporary scholars today understand their achievement (or, seemingly in Smith’s view, their mistake). It is only in chapter 11 that we are finally introduced to any explicit references to the American founders, where Smith quotes second president John Adams and his cousin Samuel Adams, who taught that the fledgling republic required virtuous citizens. Thus when Smith declares, “If voters understood how far from the founders they have fallen…” the reader can only scratch his head, given the paucity of information actually discussing said founding.

There is no substantive discussion of the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, or the political theories and practices of that generation. Instead, we are treated to more boilerplate “post-liberal” attacks on the Constitution: “The ratification of the Constitution was not a great movement for liberty; instead, we quickly became oppressive regarding taxation, regulation, free speech, violating private property, and more.” Yet, confusedly, elsewhere he attacks Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party, who in his estimation, were “the desecrators of the decentralized, aristocratic, agrarian, and libertarian Union the founders created.” So the original constitutional order was good? Or was it that it was immediately perverted?

Given that elsewhere Smith labels democracy “a corrupt, backward, and oppressive system,” it may be neither. “I never consented to be under a secular government or a national political party,” he opines. (Did medieval peasants consent to be baptized as infants or subject to feudal lords and kings?) “The foundation of the United States was far more secular, and, yes, even oppressive than most conservatives believe,” he says elsewhere.

Yet has Smith truly grappled with the complexities and nuance of political theory? “We universally agree it is immoral if one person forces another to do his will when it is against their own.” No, actually, we do not. All societies are premised on various types and degrees of coercion. And, per political thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, coercion isn’t necessarily bad if it’s directed toward the objective good. Did not Smith, a self-professed Protestant, in some sense coerce his children by raising them Christian, or, even more simply, demanding they do their chores?

Citing Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Communist China, Smith avers that democracies have “an inherent defect” that trends toward totalitarianism. Perhaps it’s early, but describing democratic nations such as the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries, Australia, and Japan, whatever their flaws, as “totalitarian” is a bit overwrought. And monarchies, too, can be totalitarian—consider Tamerlane.

Moreover, Smith seems impervious to the many authentic goods in our present democracy. He accuses Republicans of hypocritically going through the motions regarding lower taxes and school choice, “but [they] never specify just what they really mean and certainly would not implement such ideas.” Perhaps Smith is unaware of scholarship tax credits, which exist in 14 states; or charter schools, which exist in most states and the District of Columbia. Indeed, even in New Hampshire, bordering Smith’s own state of Vermont, families have the ability to apply state funds to private schools or home-schooling expenses. In May of this year, their state senate passed legislation eliminating reporting requirements for home-school parents and a bill empowering parents to send their kids to different school districts.

“We blindly follow any dictates coming from DC no matter how unconstitutional, immoral, or unlawful they are,” Smith declares. That would be news to our Supreme Court, to which approximately 7,000 cases are annually filed. “In a democracy, the typical citizen does not dare resist his wayward government,” he mourns. Really? Whatever our opinion of them, an estimated 8 million people participated in the national March 28, 2026, “No Kings” protests. Last year thousands of Americans resisted federal immigration authorities in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, among other cities.

What of Smith’s proposed solutions? He urges America to “reinstitute Christianity into society, including the classroom,” and to “institute biblical principles and government.” That seems quite the task. He recommends several possible options to move forward, including abolishing the state and all centralized authorities; allowing counties to create their own small self-governing societies within a state; a libertarian Christendom; and distributism. None of these, in a pluralistic society celebrating its 250th anniversary and still seeming to prefer republican government to its alternatives, are remotely practical. There’s also the thorny question of which version of Christianity to reinstitute and which biblical principles (some Christians think racial reparations are biblical, others that IVF is).

Undoubtedly, the medieval era was not nearly as dark and deplorable as secular education and the entertainment industry have taught us to believe. Whether it was demonstrably better than the (often soul-crushing) one we inhabit—and whether there is any realistic way to unwind 700 years of historical string—requires more careful and thoughtful analysis than on hand here.