Christianity and democracy

As president of an ecumenical think tank devoted to helping people form a social and political witness rooted in historic Christian teaching, I think a lot about the inter­section of faith and democracy. But my views on these matters were shaped, in part, by books I read as a young man.

A call to action

While in college, I read The Betrayal of the Church (Crossway 1986) by United Methodist evangelist Edmund Robb and his journalist daughter Julia Robb. The book documented how the mainline denominations, unbeknownst to most laity, were funding Marxist objectives informed by liberation theology. Ed Robb co-founded the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), which since 1981 has made Christian arguments for democracy, human rights, and religious freedom.

The Robbs’ book covered all seven then-still influential mainline Protestant denominations, but most obnoxious to me as a United Methodist was their coverage of how my denomination’s New York–based missions board had largely replaced evangelism with radical politics, including support for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Marxist rebels in El Salvador, and similar revolutionary groups in the Philippines and elsewhere.

For hardcore liberation theology advocates, the Sandinistas and similar regimes were ushering in God’s kingdom. But as the Robbs argued, Marxist dreams of an egalitarian society resulted in suppression of basic human rights, including religious freedom, freedom of speech, and trial by jury. Their book inspired me to alert United Methodist congregations in Virginia about where their dollars were going. This volunteer activism eventually led to my full-time employment with the IRD.

A spiritual defense

As a Georgetown University student I also read Michael Novak’s The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (Simon & Schuster 1982). This book strengthened my support of democracy and free markets. Novak, a Catholic layman, was also an IRD co-founder with Ed Robb. He offered a spiritual basis for democratic capitalism and a pluralist society, arguing against not just Marxism but also traditional societies that mandate a unitary societal purpose. Before Novak, the best-known arguments for free markets came from Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, both of whom argued from a secular and more utilitarian stance.

Novak defends democratic capitalism, saying it creates new communities as mediating institutions that offer liberty from totalistic structures suppressing human liberty and creativity, and it rejects utopian perfectionism, recognizing that the fallen world offers only approximate justice. Democratic capitalism is not the Kingdom, but it typically permits kingdom values to flourish more openly than politically or economically repressive alternatives.

A theological justification

In 1984’s The Naked Public Square, Richard John Neuhaus recounted a group of Methodist clergy pontificating on public issues, constantly declaring “we” must repent, or “we” must act, leaving unstated who “we” are. We Methodists? We Christians? We Americans? A foreign observer realized they were, to them, all interchangeable.

This assumption of interchangeability reflected the mainline Protestant attitude: “We” run America! My Methodist upbringing left me with similar unarticulated assumptions. Serious examination of Methodist political theology is rare since Methodists are more doers than deep thinkers. But Politics in the Order of Salvation (Kingswood 2001) by Theodore Weber powerfully explains Methodism’s profoundly democratizing political assumptions.

Weber says Wesley’s soteriology of divine grace for all “democratize[s] political authority.” Wesleyan theology sees a “political image of God,” corrupted but not erased, and for Weber, all image bearers are God’s political vice regents on earth. To him, Wesleyan political theology is more optimistic than other traditions because it relies on Trinitarian divine agency and on nature infused by divine grace. Constant reform and social improvement are providentially possible. This political theology is not “from God and therefore not from the people” but “from God and therefore through the people.” Such universal political responsibility expands the duty of governance collectively to all image bearers, irrespective of office. People do not confer authority on their rulers but are divinely “deputized” to govern by authorizing their rulers. Wesleyan prevenient grace enables a politically better world.

A view of past and present

Another Methodist writer who influenced me is British 20th-century historian Herbert Butterfield, best known for his 1931 The Whig Interpretation of History. But I much prefer his barely recalled 1944 The Englishman and His History (Archon Books), in which he extols the Whig political tradition for its historical patience, social harmonizing, and powerful narrative of liberty.

Whiggery offers a “continuity of past and present,” seeking a “moderate mode of politics,” realizing some evils must be “stoked away rather than kicked away,” with “a tempered faith in the course of history.” For Butterfield, “it involves a respect for the other man’s personality, a recognition of what is due to political opponents, a certain homage to what the other man may think to be a political good,” of “government by discussion,” mediated by “self-limitation.”

Liberty and democracy, informed by Christianity, desperately need a greater appreciation of “self-limitation” today. Butterfield, Novak, Weber, and the Robbs pointed the way for me.

—Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy