Does Democracy Need Religion?

Joseph Loconte

Current suspicions about religion are unrealistic—and unreasonable

The French statesman Talleyrand returned from a visit to the United States during Jefferson’s presidency and was out of sorts. He was struck by the diversity and energy of the nation’s religious groups—quite unlike anything in his native Catholic France. But that wasn’t what troubled him. “I found there a country with thirty-two religions,” he remarked, “and only one meat sauce.”

European elites, as well as their American counterparts, are much more worried about American religion these days than they are about American cuisine. Indeed, ever since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a storm cloud of suspicion—and outright hostility—has settled over the debates about religion and public life. Unchecked, it not only will poison our politics, but weaken our democratic freedoms.

The problem is truly transatlantic. European leaders, for example, openly mock the “theocratic” flavor of American politics. Just days after a second round of bomb attacks in London, Polly Toynbee of The Guardian starkly warned about religious conservatives of all kinds. “How could those who preach the absolute revealed truth of every word of a primitive book not be prone to insanity?” she asked. Criticism of conservative belief, though, is equally strident among American progressive elites. William Thatcher Dowell, of New York University, sees support for the public posting of the Ten Commandments as “made-in-America Wahhabism.” Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. calls President Bush “a fanatic” because of his use of moral and religious language. “The most dangerous people in the world today,” Schlesinger writes, “are those who persuade themselves that they are executing the will of the Almighty.” Author Gary Wills says the political prominence of Christian conservatives signals the eclipse of Enlightenment reason—and an invitation to fanaticism. “Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity . . . fear and hatred of modernity?” he asks. “We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein’s loyalists.”

Others locate the problem not only with conservative religion, but with traditional belief in God. Writing in The New York Times Magazine just weeks after 9/11, Andrew Sullivan voiced a typical note of contempt: “If you take your beliefs from books written more than a thousand years ago, and you believe these texts literally, then the appearance of the modern world must truly terrify.” His conclusion: “It seems almost as if there is something inherent in religious monotheism that lends itself to this kind of terrorist temptation.” The same theme was sounded recently by Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under President Clinton. “The great conflict of the twenty-first century will not be between the West and terrorism,” he wrote. “The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists; between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority.”

What an astonishing reversal: The American creed affirming the God-given worth of each individual—the most transformative doctrine of liberal democracy—is dismissed as an attack on “modern civilization.” This is the new dogma of liberalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It represents not only a break with the religious beliefs of the vast majority of Americans; it is a radical departure from the democratic assumptions of the Founding generation.

For all their revolutionary idealism, the American Founders were the most realistic political leaders in history. No generation took the problem of human sin more seriously. None thought more deeply about how to reconcile the tragedy of human nature with the idea of representative government. “Even if every Athenian citizen had been a Socrates,” warned James Madison in The Federalist Papers, “every Athenian assembly would have been a mob.” In addition to a political system of checks and balances, they reasoned, democracies needed citizens of virtue—and religion was the surest way to produce them.

The religion foremost in their minds, of course, was Christianity. Even Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the most religiously unorthodox of the Founders, praised the public benefits of faith. “No nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be,” he said. “The Christian religion is the best religion that has ever been given to man, and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example.” John Jay was utterly sober in warning of the consequences of widespread disbelief. “No human society has ever been able to maintain both order and freedom, both cohesiveness and liberty apart from the moral precepts of the Christian religion,” he said. “Should our Republic ever forget this fundamental precept of governance . . . this great experiment will then surely be doomed.”

It is precisely this “fundamental precept” that progressives and others are rejecting. What are the likely results? By publicly denigrating religion, they undermine respect for faith-based institutions. By denying that certain rights are natural and unalienable—the gift of a Creator—they place all rights at the mercy of elites. By demanding a rigid separation of church and state, they pressure courts, schools and other public institutions to marginalize religious ideals. Yet, as many social scientists predict, the greater the decline of religious belief and practice, the greater the social breakdown—and the more that government must intervene to fix it. Thus, by admitting no moral authority outside of the individual, progressives invite a massive expansion of government scrutiny, regulation, and control over everyday life.

Yet for the generation of Madison and Jefferson, the final check against government abuse of power was to be citizens animated by the moral claims flowing from their faith in God. That’s why the Founders made religious liberty the “first freedom” of democratic government. They put the emphasis on freedom for religion: to create as much civic space possible for religious institutions to challenge the state and impart the virtues needed for citizenship. This, in part, was what they meant by a nation “under God.”

Consider one of the fruits of America’s understanding of faith and freedom: our deep tradition of social protest and social reform. Who led the decades-long fight to end slavery in the United States? It was Northern evangelicals, who petitioned lawmakers, rescued runaway slaves, and helped give birth to the Republican Party. Who launched massive rescue missions for thousands of poor families during the economic upheaval of the early twentieth century? It was that British import known as the Salvation Army. Who led the civil rights movement in the face of violent white supremacists and a hostile legal culture? A Baptist minister, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., joined by brave foot soldiers from black churches around the country. Who now is leading America’s campaign against the sexual trafficking of women and children around the globe? It is conservative Christians, mobilized through churches and non-governmental organizations.

In each case we see the energy and idealism of religious believers, unmolested by the secular state. America’s historic commitment to religious liberty is what makes possible these great challenges to corrupt political and social regimes. In The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, economist Robert Fogel says it’s impossible to understand America’s commitment to social justice apart from the moral influence of religion. Churches and the lay movements they spawned “have often served as critics of state policy and as advocates of individual rights,” he writes. “They played a leading role . . . through which the common people have been drawn into the process of shaping American society.”

No one is claiming, of course, that religious freedom is beyond abuse in the United States, either by pastors or politicians. William Livingston, an eighteenth-century Presbyterian leader in New York City, complained that “there is more Iniquity committed under the Robe, than is repented of under the Gallows.” Fair enough. Religious belief has indeed been a source of incalculable human suffering. But the Founders, who were acutely aware of the legacy of sectarian violence in Europe, never became cynical about biblical religion.

By contrast, today’s intellectual class has championed the idea of democracy divorced from the ideals and institutions of religion. Elections, political institutions, and an ethos of “tolerance” will keep the democratic machine running; no need for tough-minded belief or the “virtue-crats” who wear it on their sleeves.

Behind this thinking lurks an old utopian idea: the belief that human nature is ripening toward perfection, thanks to education, economic equality, science, and secularization. Progressives here and in Europe are animated by the secular ideals of the Enlightenment—with its exaltation of the individual ego—and oppose any religion that might stand in the way. How they manage to sustain this attitude, in light of the atrocities committed in the name of secularism in the last century, beggars the imagination.

Nevertheless, the 9/11 attacks have only deepened their hostility. Virtually all traditional religious views—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic—are now considered a brand of “fundamentalism” that threatens civic peace and individual freedom. Thus liberal academic conferences probe the violent irrationality of faith, aided by silly books such as When Religion Becomes Evil and The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. “While religious people generally not mad, their core beliefs absolutely are,” writes Sam Harris. “In fact, it is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.” Religion as pathology: Here is the revenge of Freud, only cruder and dumbed down for a mass audience.

Perhaps it’s time for the leaders of modern liberalism to reflect on the observations of another Frenchman. Alexis de Tocqueville’s insights into the sources of America’s political and social strength, recorded during his visit in the 1830s, are enduringly relevant. No foreigner understood better the inseparable link between faith and freedom in the American experiment. “The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other,” he wrote. “If any hold that the religious spirit which I admire is the very thing most amiss in America. . . . I can only reply that those who hold this language have never been in America and that they have never seen a religious or a free nation.”

European distaste for American religion might be excused as ignorance of the facts on the ground. But American intellectuals and others who abhor the nation’s “religious spirit” do not have that excuse. What they have instead, it seems, is a chronic disposition to doubt—not to mention a studied disregard for the lessons of history. Whether American democracy can sustain itself in the grip of such doubt and disregard is an open question.

Joseph Loconte is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. He also serves as a monthly commentator on religion for National Public Radio. His latest book is The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm (Rowman & Littlefield).

Features, Public Square, Religious Liberty, Mon 13 Mar 2006