Does Christianity provide the right elements for democracy?

To answer the OP's question, it is important to recognize that legally, the U.S.A. was not established as a Christian nation. It was instead based on innovative, seventeenth-century ideals of Deism and freethought. The founding documents of the United States, namely the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation (no longer in effect) and the U.S. Constitution do not invoke Jesus Christ (or His Father, for trinitarians keeping score) as the reigning deity, or reference Christianity as the civic religion of the newly independent republic. And this was not implicit, either; those documents were written in an age when the English Parliamenters were required to give their oath of office "on the true faith of a Christian", and explicit declarations of faith in political documents were common, and expected.

Instead, we see that the Declaration invokes a generic, unnamed Creator as the author of human rights and the inspiration of our moral insights. It tells us also that this Creator gives us leave to violently overthrow any civil authority that is not established by "the consent of the governed"; a notion that certainly is not promulgated in the Sermon on the Mount or the Epistles of Paul. These Revolutionaries audaciously invoked Divine Command Theory to justify a revolution against a divine-rights monarchy, at a time when the orthodoxy of established religious sects would have no toleration for such a notion. They did this, not as a clever rhetorical trick, but because they earnestly believed in Deism--in a monotheistic Creator deity who reveals himself exclusively through the built-in reasoning faculties and moral conscience of everyday individuals, and not through the miracles and preachings of larger-than-life messiahs, priests, prophets, and kings.

We can see more of this Deistic approach in the writings of Paine and Jefferson. Paine wrote his Age of Reason after the Revolution. Jefferson snipped out all of the miraculous out of the New Testament Gospels and pasted the remainder into a literary piece he called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth; an endeavor he described as recovering diamonds from a dunghill. And Paine was even less forgiving in his descriptions of the Christian faith.

The New Testament gives very little practical advice on handling political power or administering a state ("my kingdom is not of this world", etc.). Thus, Christian rulers have borrowed extensively from the Old Testament ethos, perhaps out of political expedience rather than theological wisdom. Perhaps it was inevitable that popular sovereignty and freedom of expression would not exist until a secular, Enlightenment-era regime took over. It is certainly established history that countries under Catholic rule stifled religious and scientific insights, but those under Protestant rule fared little better. John Calvin, for example, ordered a theologian executed for publishing a treatise On the Errors of the Trinity.

On the other hand, one could argue (and many have argued) that the relative success of the American project is due to its Christian population (and the same has been said about many other prosperous countries as well). This is not inconsistent with Scripture, and could well be true. One could also argue that an environment where there is no temporal power associated with religious institutions encourages true piety, and is therefore more favored by G-d. A reading the 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom gives a sympathetic view to this argument.

Christianity and democracy both are subjects one could study individually for an entire lifetime. It's a complicated question, and one that can't really be answered without a lot of opinion and guesswork.

Christianity, or at least Catholicism, teaches us to honor and respect our traditions. It is a corporal work of mercy to bury the dead and a spiritual work to pray for them and tradition, as G.K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy is the "Democracy of the Dead". Tobit was ruined because he persevered in burying the dead.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of their birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy - Chapter 4

This is our faith, being continually built upon by men with good ideas and others who accept them. The heresies pass away, not because they're not popular, but because they're wrong and right thinking men and women come to find them distasteful. So too with bad laws, and that is the point of democracy.

Catholicism provides sacraments, sacred oaths, which bind adherents to the Church with public disgrace, and private shame as the penalties for breaking them. When the Church was first forming, Pliny the Younger used the word Sacramentum to describe the oaths which the followers of the Way took to avoid bad behavior and to provide for the needs of the group. Sacramentum is also the word used for the oath that Roman soldiers would take when enlisting themselves. It's just a few words that actually change your status.

So, to answer the question, in a democracy, all men are the king, in baptism, we are baptized into Christ's Kingship. In a democracy, everyone must be informed, in baptism, we are baptized into Christ's role as prophet - giving us direct access to the Holy Spirit. In a democracy, all men and women need to be prepared to sacrifice themselves for the good of all, in baptism we are baptized into Christ's priesthood and His sacrifice and ours ought to be the underpinnings of a just society that reflects the glory of Heaven as best it can given our limited means and fallen nature.

(More on "Sacramentum", Scott Hahn, Swear to God)

Does Christianity teach the values for democracy to work?

The idea of democracy was first posited as a way to assure that the rights of wealthy slave owners would be least impinged by each other in Greece.

The freedom of democracy comes at a price. It requires a great deal of self-restraint.

Japan is probably the only culture (maybe Germany as well) where the people have enough natural self- restraint to practice democracy without it being a disaster. The only other way democracy can work is if it is layered on top of a Christian culture. When the Holy Spirit produces the fruit of self-control in a large percentage of a population, democracy can appear functional.

Christianity is not about "taught values". It is about a changed heart.

After the civil war in the US many Christians were abandoning Christianity for political progressivism called liberalism. They assumed that the peace and prosperity of the US was a natural result of democracy and rejected the idea that it had any relationship to Jesus.

As a result, we tried to make the world safe for democracy (WWI). We pressured European countries to give their colonies the freedom of democracy. We even gave democracy to Iraq, the result was 200,000 dead Iraqis.

At the end of history before every tear is wiped away and the former things are not remembered, we will be able to look back over the whole of human history and we will see every possible type of human government. While today we keep searching for the best form of government, what we will know then is that they are all complete failures because they are not of the Lord.

Read Rodney Stark's The Victory of Reason. His entire book is an argument that says the answer is yes. From respect for humanity's images dei to an understanding of property rights being grounded by a common transcendent God, he makes the argument you're looking for.

The term "democracy" comes from ancient Greece, where what is generally considered the first democracy was established in Athens in 507 BCE. Democracy thus predates Christianity by a significant margin.

As for "Christian values" having an influence on the success of democracies, note that many of these democracies, especially in Europe, were created by overthrowing monarchies which often had close ties to the Church.

There are a few problems with this approach; firstly, democracy cannot make sense if there is something with a super-vote; if we ignore the Christian hot-points, and say that (silly example) there's a religious law that says "chairs must be blue". At this point, it doesn't matter if 95%+ of the population wants to use different colour chairs - they are trumped by religious law. Thus, true democracy does not exist while there is somebody with an absolute trump.

The second issue is that what you say is not specifically a Christian value (rather: it is applied much wider than that by many cultures and people - I had a discussion here about the definition of "Christian values", but never articulated it as a site question), and indeed it is not even strictly applied as a Christian value by all; there are various sections of Christianity that have (both past and present) shown significant issues with gender roles, and the worth/righteousness of individuals acting entirely within the law of the land (starts with "h"...). While this is true of all society, religion tends to slow-moving on issues like this, since changes here (or anywhere) challenge doctrine and dogma.

The third issue is that Christianity hasn't exactly done a good job of showing a working democracy; instead, every time there's a difference of opinion it has fragmented into different factions, schisms and sects. Showing this level of inability to work as a cohesive democratic body on policy in the Christian domain does not bode well as an example for setting policy outside core Christian arenas.