Democracy without Religion is Dead
Editors’ note: This is Part I of a two-part essay.
In his article “We’re All Soviets Now,” Niall Ferguson marshals economic and social facts to claim that modern America resembles the latter days of the Soviet Union. This kicked off several weeks of contention, on and off social media, about whether Ferguson and company are mere doomsayers misreading the times. In 2017, The Washington Post unveiled its slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” to signal what its editors believe to be a time of political darkness, mostly due—in their view—to the election of Donald Trump.
Eventually, there arose the oft-repeated line that President Trump is a threat to democracy. This line—a threat to democracy—whether in reference to Trump or some other point at issue, is repeated with such vitriol that often it sends the claimant into what can only be described as an unhinged state. As immigrants, my family and I are dumbstruck at times to see how undemocratic, in fact, is this response, and how far America has succumbed to libertinism as dogma—we are told that this is the only way to “save” America. The America we are experiencing today is not the America to which we immigrated.
There is a certain arrogance in Western democratic countries, especially in America, regarding our form of government. Whenever things go wrong in other systems of government—say Communist China or Russia, the dictatorships of a variety of nations in South America or the Middle East—we are quick to point out that it is intrinsic to that form. But when things go wrong for us, we tend to think of it as an anomaly, an aberration we can overcome, as if there is nothing intrinsic to democracy that can degrade and destroy it.
Before any of the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century, a French aristocrat traveling America in 1830 sounded a warning. Alexis de Tocqueville ended by saying he is full of both fear and hope; he sees that good can come from a democratic nation, but only if that nation can govern its ardent love of equality. Left unchecked, that ardent love of equality will lead the people to servitude, barbarism, and misery. Despotism is the ultimate end of a nation that gives itself over to what Tocqueville calls extreme equality.
Tocqueville was by no means calling for a return to aristocracy. Rather, he wrote that “there is no question of reconstructing an aristocratic society, but of making freedom issue from the bosom of the democratic society in which God makes us live.” For Tocqueville, the only element that can guard against the destructive impulses that lie within democracy is religion; it was Christianity, in particular, that he believed could prevent a collapse of democracy into some form of despotism. “Despotism can do without faith,” he writes, “but freedom cannot.”
In other words, without religion, democracy dies.
The crisis of our democracy is a crisis of religion and reason. We are where we are today because reason has bowed down to ideology and religion has been marginalized, privatized, and forbidden from being a regulating principle in the life of our society. As Pope Benedict XVI asked his audience in his address at Westminster Hall in 2010: “Where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found?” Like reason, democracy cannot stand alone; it needs a foundation. It needs a conscience to direct it. The role of religion is “to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles.” Religion purifies and structures reason, and reason purifies and structures religion; “It is a two-way process,” Pope Benedict XVI said in that same address. Or as Tocqueville put it, it is mores, by which he meant “the whole moral and intellectual state of a people,” that made American democracy “more or less regulated and prosperous.”
For the sake of argument, “democracy” can stand in the place of “reason.” This does not mean that every citizen must become a Christian, nor does it mean that Christianity must become the state religion. As Tocqueville notes, “when a religion wishes to be supported by the interests of this world, it becomes almost as fragile as all the powers on earth. Alone, it can hope for immortality; bound to ephemeral powers, it follows their fortune and often falls with the passions of a day that sustain them.” The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops echoes this view.
What the bishops and lay Catholics do advocate, however, are political choices made with an eye toward justice and the common good. That means that Christian anthropology and the Christian ethos should inform the decisions we make in our society. Again, Pope Benedict XVI at the Westminster address:
Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person. Such misuse of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century.
The Holy Father goes on to say that this “is why I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith—the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief—need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization.” Faith and reason, he urges, should always be considered in cooperation with one another.
Equality and Individualism
Tocqueville warned that extreme equality and individualism, when coupled with America’s restive spirit and pursuit of material well-being, can create a perfect storm for an unraveling of society that will leave the citizens of America open to totalitarian influences. How can extreme equality possibly lead to any form of totalitarianism? To understand this, we need to identify that impulse for extreme equality.
In traditional societies, people are linked by the metaphysical bonds of love, honor, loyalty, and obligation—that is, unchosen bonds come before chosen bonds; people depend on one another. Roles are expected and respected. Unchosen organic relationships check individual choice and self-centeredness. In a traditional society they engender loyalty and obligations: villages, cities, and countries were also unchosen relationships that engendered devotion, loyalty, and obligation to the people of that place. Because of this loyalty and obligation—offered sometimes not out of personal choice but out of duty to something (or someone) outside the self—the people of this society tend to resist mobility. They settle in, or near, the place where they were raised. Extending their roots, they give the next generation a deeper sense of who they are and to whom and where they belong. Consider Vice President J. D. Vance’s example of his family’s history around Appalachia.
Because of reliance and connection, the people are bound to each other—they are conscious of their ancestors and descendants. A sense of duty permeates this society, manifesting itself in the decisions the people make, where very few can afford to think and live primarily for their own benefit or chase after their self-interest. They sacrifice their desires and sometimes their happiness “for beings who no longer exist or who do not yet exist.” In a traditional society, “a man almost always knows his ancestors and respects them; he believes he already perceives his great-grandsons and he loves them.” That kind of vision affects a person’s actions in the moment.
In a traditional society people are bound, as if by a chain, but democracy breaks the chain, delinking all from all. The tight bonds in traditional societies attach and oblige men to a variety of people and institutions outside of themselves, turning them outward toward others and toward the society around them. By focusing on others, man can avoid being self-obsessed.
Such traditions thwart the democratic man, who is not habituated to living checked by forces outside himself, be they human or divine. In this type of society man becomes self-obsessed. By excessive egotism man makes himself unmoored, isolated, and lonely, untethered from his past, and (barring some personal choices) unconcerned for his progeny. Tocqueville tells us that “amidst the continual movement that reigns in the heart of a democratic society, the bond that unites generations is relaxed or broken; each man easily loses track of the ideas of his ancestors or scarcely worries about them.”
Tocqueville tells us that there are two primary driving forces that untether kinsman bonds and the bonds between citizens in a democratic society: equality and individualism. Equality makes each man look to himself and believe only in himself. While individualism makes a man seek his own well-being, his feelings and his thoughts are centered on himself. These are driven by an unchecked democratic spirit that sets the locus of authority to decide what is true or not true, in the individual human person, rather than an authority outside the self. Thus the locus of all authority rests in the self.
Contrasting individualism with plain old selfishness, Tocqueville writes that “individualism is a recent expression arising from a new idea. Our fathers knew only selfishness . . . Individualism proceeds from an erroneous judgment rather than a depraved sentiment. It has its source in the defects of the mind.” Selfishness is an old vice that runs through all societies; it is an exaggerated love of self that drives man to prefer himself over everything and anybody else, thus it is a moral failing.
Individualism is an error in reason, while selfishness is an error in morality. I will return to this to show that late-stage democracy has made itself vulnerable to totalitarianism due to this error in reason.
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