The GOP presidential primary is functionally over, even before Super Tuesday arrives this week, and the 2024 general election is all but underway. Christian voters are once again faced with the pressing question of how to “vote for our values” in an increasingly secular and hostile public square.
Unfortunately, many prominent Christian voices offer little help. Their goal tends to be a Poorly defined Christian nationalism and/or narrow political issues. They ring uncertain, otherwise obtuse, about what Christian political action should look like in America. Sometimes they even seems to suggest— perhaps inadvertently — that Christian political engagement itself, not just Christian nationalism, is a threat to our country, or that there is no relationship necessary between Christianity and democracy.
These experts and public intellectuals may have good intentions. But their advice does not answer the questions of pew members who are viscerally experiencing a decline in Christian influence in America. Rather, the overarching message to evangelical voters is that they are wrong about their political theology and that there is little, if anything, to worry about in American democracy—or, at least, that Christian involvement in politics could not improve anything.
We are evangelical policy scientists at Biola University, and we believe that such misguided insults rely on the intelligence of evangelicals and fail to address their real and important concerns. In fact, the average evangelical voter’s intuition is correct: American democracy East in trouble; he do it takes a committed Christian Church to correct the situation; and there East enough evidence to support this claim.
Let me be clear: we are not advocating for an established church, an institutional church-led government, or any encroachment on the religious freedom of non-Christians. But we believe, consistent with the best episodes of American history, that a vibrant and culturally influential Christianity is essential to preserving the United States as a free and democratic society.
Our constitutional system and our political culture would not exist without Christian ideas, they will also not be intelligible or sustainable in the long term if orthodox and significant Christian influence disappears. Christianity provided the vision of creation, knowledge, and humanity that made liberal democracy possible. Indeed, any society in which democracy flourishes draws its water from wells dug by Christianity.
Our history tells us so. There were many deep disagreements among the Founding Fathers, but they almost all agreed that virtuous citizenship was essential to a functioning democracy – and that virtuous citizenship religion required, which in this context meant Christianity. “Our Constitution was made solely for a moral and religious people. » wrote John Adams in perhaps the best known quote to this effect. “It’s totally inappropriate for someone else’s government.”
A simple procedural democracy is certainly achievable without such a religious foundation, as demonstrated by European countries that have maintained democratic processes while becoming secularized, or through constitutional design influenced by other, more Christian societies (e.g. Japan). .
But at its best, America has boasted much more than just procedural democracy. Indeed, simple proceduralism – like Abraham Lincoln argued in his debates with Stephen Douglas on slavery and the nature of human rights – undermines the moral legitimacy of true democracy. In other words, a society that votes for representative government but does not have a deeper foundation in Christian ideas about freedom and individual rights may technically be democratic, but it will not have the culture of freedom, of the conviviality and open debate we are witnessing. I always yearned for America.
It was Christianity that provided a secure moral foundation for these cultural elements of American democracy, and our political system continues to need Christianity to secure these principles, constitutional structures, and social norms. The connection between Christianity and democracy in the founding era was so well understood that French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville called Religion is the first American political institution because “it does not give (Americans) a taste for freedom (but) singularly facilitates its use.”
As our culture becomes secularized, the vitality and viability of American democracy are anything but guaranteed. Many secular scholars affirm human dignity and rights, but when they do so from premises inconsistent with Christianity or the transcendent moral foundations it provides, the logic becomes fragile and often inconsistent. Beyond this academic barometer, the question of whether a society moving toward secular horizons can maintain a healthy democratic order in the long term is by no means a settled question.
Evangelical voters may not specifically express this issue as the source of their concern. But we believe that this is an uncertainty in the minds and hearts of our brothers and sisters that too much writing on Christian political action fails to address – and that it This is a legitimate concern. We believe a GOOD Or TRUE democracy needs Christianity and that a strong symbiotic relationship between the two is beneficial to the common good.
There is ample evidence for this belief. Empirically, the widely used Freedom House rankings governments around the world show that democracy and Christianity do not always go well together. But the ranking also suggests that democracy is most robust, classically liberal and durable in predominantly Christian societies. The non-Christian democracies of today too often become the authoritarian dictatorships and illiberal democracies of tomorrow. India and Turkey are excellent current examples of such “democratic backsliding”.
The historical story is more complicated: democracy has its origins in pre-Christian Greece; Christianity predates the post-Enlightenment era, during which democratic governance became the Western norm; and many pre-Reformation Christians were skeptical of democracy as a valid form of government. From a strictly chronological point of view, it is therefore true that at least procedural democracy can exist without a Christian context – although it is also true that modern democracy was born from the typically Christian culture of Western Europe, and that Protestant missionary efforts greatly, even indirectly, contributed to the spread of democracy throughout the world.
But the theological arguments for Christianity’s unique value for democracy are long-standing and compelling. Great minds of Christianity Rock And Augustine has Aquinas, LutherAnd Calvin all believed that a people faithful to the revealed will of God was essential to the peaceful stability and flourishing of the country. any of them Company. This should not be controversial for Christians: if we believe that God created and ordained the morality of our world, then we must understand that following God’s commandments will generally promote domestic tranquility and peaceful relations between neighbors and nations.
Although many civic virtues conducive to a free society are also discussed in classical Islamic, Chinese, and Western philosophy, as Christians we of course believe that God’s moral law is found in its fullest sense in the tradition Christian. (Even many skeptics and atheists will admit Christianity literally remade the worldand in its flowering of modern democracy.) Here in the United States, the “laws of nature and of nature’s God,” as the Declaration of Independence so eloquently said, fundamentally illuminate the American political order. Respecting them will be essential to maintaining this order in the years to come.
A Christian foundation for democracy is never more vital than in times, like ours, of enormous societal upheaval and intense political animosity. Christianity provides a transcendent moral framework. It makes claims – about the nature of humanity, about our world, and about our responsibilities to God and our neighbor – that exceed the authority of the state and thus limit it to certain legitimate purposes. It is this moral transcendence that establishes an essential basis for a healthy democracy that effectively limits the totalitarian impulses of factions including James Madison famous warned.
Without a state church, the influence of Christianity can shape the institutions and practices of a government. It can provide an enduring basis for human rights, dignity and freedom that are not dependent on the mercurial and capricious dictates of human government. In this sense, Christianity constitutes a critical check on the ever-present tendency of the state to expand its power at the expense of human freedom.
This is not only true on a large scale – in academic philosophy or in an abstract sense. It is the institution of the local church, animated by a philosophy of servant leadership and brotherly love, that lays this essential foundation. The local church is (or should be) the cornerstone of civil society, publicly and vocally imposing a transcendent moral standard on citizens and the state.
For American evangelicals who sense the risk to democracy posed by our post-Christian culture, this role of the local church is good news. If you have a hunch, rightly so, that the soul of America is not well because its moral foundations are dangerously eroded and that this poses a significant threat to American democracy, it is in the Church local that the work of rebuilding these foundations begins.
And that must be rebuilt, if the broader structure of democracy is to endure in the United States. A substantial Christian presence is necessary for a democracy worthy of the name – a free society in practice, not just on paper. Society is much more than the state, and it is the churches that can hold the political system together by providing transcendent support and constraining democracy itself.
As things stand, we are not optimistic about the future of our democracy if churches and Christian leaders neglect (or undermine) their civic role, and that future is not abstract to us. This is the future we are sending our students into. This is the future we are raising our children in and want them to inherit. This is the future that, if the Lord delays, it is our Christian duty to steward well – a future in which “we can live a peaceful and quiet life in all godliness and holiness” (2 Tim. 2:2). .
Today and in the future, Christianity does not need democracy, but a good and just democracy most certainly needs Christianity.
Scott Waller, Darren Patrick Guerra and Tim Milosch all teach in the political science department at Biola University.
