"Yes and no," said the Rev. Stephen Noll, a U.S. Episcopalian who is vice chancellor of Uganda Christian University, in a sermon marking Uganda's independence day. He spoke on the Anglican campus two days after mailing his own absentee ballot for the U.S. election.

The whole question might seem anachronistic because the Bible was written thousands of years ago when modern notions of representative government were unknown. But Noll asserted that democracy is fully compatible with biblical principles.

"Over the past several hundred years, Christians have been in the forefront of promoting democracy," he noted.

On the other hand, Christians have often lived under non-democratic regimes, and for 1,000 years they "seemed to believe that monarchy - the rule of one divinely appointed king - was the normal Christian political arrangement."

The Old Testament concept of government was a form of limited constitutional monarchy, Noll said, citing Deuteronomy 17:14-20 and 1 Samuel 8. He said the Bible's detailed laws of justice, including those given to Moses on Mount Sinai, were "a kind of constitution" ratified by the people.

In Deuteronomy, God tells Moses that after his people enter the promised land they will choose a king. God says the monarch should be a believer, should not build up his own riches or lord it over the people, and must obey biblical law.

"The Bible does not require kings, but it does make clear that kings are to be constitutional" and bound by the moral law, he said.

The Israelites spent centuries without a king in a loose tribal confederacy that was unstable, chaotic and difficult to defend. Eventually the people demanded that the prophet Samuel anoint a monarch so that "we also may be like all the nations."

Samuel does their bidding and unhappily anoints King Saul. But before doing so, Noll noted, the prophet warns that "monarchy would become a burdensome bureaucracy and eventually lead the nation into ruin."

So much for the medieval "divine right of kings."

In Noll's view, therefore, the Bible teaches that government by monarchy "was founded in sin and lack of faith in God. It was provisional at best."

The New Testament, he said, develops and clarifies things.

It teaches that human government should preserve order and protect justice, which are beneficial. 1 Peter 2:13-17 tells believers to "live as free men" but "subject for the Lord's sake" to the rulers provided by God "to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who do right."

(This leaves aside the question of believers' duty when rulers do the opposite, which was addressed especially during the Protestant Reformation.)

But government cannot mediate the truths of salvation, Noll said, and that's a warning against African kingships, Islamic theocracies, ideologies such as communism and all other temporal systems that "claim absolute god-like authority."

Democracy makes no such assertions for itself and, to Noll, that very limitation is "the foundation of Christian support" for constitutional democracy.

Thus Jesus famously told the colonial ruler Pontius Pilate, "My kingship is not from the world" (John 18:36). Whether government is kingly or democratic, Noll said, the Bible can "give good advice to rulers, even while keeping for itself worship of the one King of all the ages, Jesus Christ," who is depicted in the Book of Revelation as establishing the future kingdom of righteousness.