Democracy without Religion Is Dead: Part II
Editors’ note: This is Part II of a two-part essay. Part I can be found here.
Individualism is intrinsic to democracy, and therefore, has a political nature. It eventually leads to the isolation of citizens. If individualism is an error in reason, we can trace it back to the intellectual error of equating freedom with autonomy, or the severance of nature from grace and reason from revelation. (See, for example, Tracey Rowland’s book Beyond Kant and Nietzsche: The Munich Defence of Christian Humanism, where she skillfully excavates the thought of six German Catholic scholars who worked against German Idealism during the inter-war and post Second World War period.)
Tocqueville writes that “individualism at first dries up only the source of public virtue; but in the long term it attacks and destroys all the others and will finally be absorbed in selfishness.” This is because democracy is not a fixed system of government, but an evolving way of looking at the world. Its principles may, at first glance, look fixed. One may even bullet-point them: equality before the law, the rule of law, individual freedom, civil rights, and so on. But beneath this is a view of the human person as autonomous. Equality and individualism are not static elements—they evolve over time, growing insatiable, and ultimately, leading to moral degeneration in society.
Unless checked and balanced by a human and/or divine force outside itself, democracy will evolve as the individual’s appetites evolve in response to social and technological developments. In democracy, that check—that boundary—is religion, which guides man’s reason, appetites, and duties. Once the boundary of religion is breached, there is no stop—his reason disconnected from a regulating principle will be able to “rationalize” anything. (See the discussion of the slave trade, social evils, and totalitarian ideologies in Pope Benedict XVI’s 2010 Address at Westminster Hall.) Man’s fallen appetitive nature will drive him to feed his appetites—for the appetite of man there is never an “enough.” The more freedom he gains, the more he wants; the more equality he gains, the more he wants. As individualism feeds the desire for equality, that equality, in turn, demands more freedom. What is interesting, however, is that Tocqueville observes that love of extreme equality leads to delirium.
I think that democratic peoples have a natural taste for freedom; left to themselves they seek it, they love it, and they will see themselves parted from it only with sorrow. But for equality they have an ardent, insatiable, eternal, invincible passion; they want equality in freedom, and, if they cannot get it, they still want it in slavery. They will tolerate, poverty, enslavement, barbarism, but they will not tolerate aristocracy.
This kind of headlong obsession for equality leads to severe consequences. Secularization theories abound, but what is secularization but the evolution of democracy, or put differently—the unraveling of faith from reason. (In Przywara’s reading of the Reformation it can be traced back to the concepts of sin alone and conscience alone.) The theories of secularization, its origins and progress, are another name for what I am identifying as the evolution of democracy. As democracy evolves, unchecked by religion, it starts to wither, morphing into totalitarianism. As Pope John Paul II wrote in Centesimus Annus:
Authentic democracy is possible only in a State ruled by law and on the basis of a correct conception of the human person. . . . Nowadays there is a tendency to claim that agnosticism and skeptical relativism are the philosophy and the basic attitude which correspond to democratic forms of political life. Those who are convinced that they know the truth and firmly adhere to it are considered unreliable from a democratic point of view, since they do not accept that truth is determined by the majority, or that it is subject to variation according to different political trends. It must be observed in this regard that if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism. (Emphasis mine.)
In our late-stage democracy we already see the roots of totalitarianism, a system that destroyed the dignity of every human living under it. Pope John Paul II wrote that the “root of modern totalitarianism is to be found in the denial of the transcendent dignity of the human person.” Where do we get this understanding, of the dignity of the human person? From religion, from Christianity in particular. Even the idea of the equal dignity of every person comes from Christianity. There are no political principles or forms of government that can guarantee human dignity on their own without the regulating principle of religion.
Sliding into Totalitarianism
The twentieth century saw the rise of totalitarian systems that had not previously been known in human history. Here I focus only on how our current condition in America can lead to a totalitarian movement. Totalitarianism is total domination; we are so conditioned to think of it in terms of Nazism or Stalinism, that only with difficulty can we imagine what form it can take in today’s world, and within our own culture. The fact that totalitarian government “rests on mass support is very disquieting,” as Hannah Arendt remarks in The Origins of Totalitarianism.
The four essential conditions of totalitarianism, as outlined by Arendt, are isolation, loneliness, uprootedness, and superfluousness. These are pre-totalitarian conditions, and so how we arrive at these conditions as a democratic nation will look different from how Germany and Russia ended up in this state. Echoing Arendt’s conditions, Tracey Rowland writes that all “agree that two widespread problems in the years of the Weimar Republic and its Nazi successor were despair and depression.”
According to Tocqueville, extreme equality and radical individualism—two marks of democracy that we have allowed to go unchecked—lead to political and social isolation and loneliness. Americans’ pursuit of material well-being, coupled with their restive spirit, led to the sickness of uprootedness (See Tocqueville’s discussion on democratic peoples falling into melancholy and madness.) “Uprootedness can be the preliminary condition for superfluousness,” wrote Arendt as she described what it means to feel superfluousness in the world. Who in America today does not see that we have already arrived at these conditions? We are very vulnerable and I think we all sense it. This is probably why we are so politically agitated.
It’s never too late to make good decisions; it’s never too late to make a better choice. We must open a dialogue between democracy and religion, between faith and politics. Pope Benedict said, “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.”
Democracy in Dialogue with Religion
After the horrors of the two world wars, many people tried to understand how such atrocities could have happened. The philosophies of the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries—at least to some—were to be blamed for these horrors. For others it was evident that religion somehow played a role; after all, didn’t the Nazis claim to be Christian?
According to Pope Benedict in Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections, (the Regensburg Lecture) modernity began with the de-Hellenization of Christianity started by Martin Luther in the sixteenth century and proceeded in three stages. This is the severance of Greek philosophy from the Christian scriptures—what is known as the Greco-Christian synthesis, or the synthesis of Jerusalem-Athens-Rome; “genuine enlightenment and religion.” He further writes: “Although interconnected [the stages of de-Hellenization], they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.”
The first part of the first stage was Luther’s attempt to “purify” the Christian Bible and the Christian religion from Greek philosophy. The second step of the first stage was the continuation of de-Hellenization carried forward by Immanuel Kant as he attempted to “purify” reason from religion, separating faith and reason and reducing Christianity to morality.
The second stage of the de-Hellenization process occurred during the rise of liberal theology in the nineteenth century. The representative of this stage is Adolf von Harnack, who wanted to return to the simple message of the man Jesus who was, according to Benedict, “presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message,” thus “purifying” the moral message from philosophy and theology. Harnack saw the historical-critical method as a way of restoring theology back to the sciences. By this time, Immanuel Kant’s “Critiques,” developed further by the progress in the natural sciences, had radically narrowed the field of what was considered science and reason.
The third stage of the de-Hellenization process, which Benedict believed came out of liberation theology and an anti-European stance, is that the Hellenization of the early Church was an inculturation that no longer applies given our current plurality. The claim is that in today’s world, the simple message of Jesus needs to be adapted to the local milieu. This thinking narrows the field even further by ejecting from the Christian religion any theological developments from the past two thousand years, including, says Tracey Rowland, those of the Councils of Nicaea and Chalcedon. This reduces the Christian religion to an anti-intellectual, purely subjective moral message.
This kind of critique, ushered in by postmodern thinking, is the result of the philosophy of Critical Theory that came out of the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Attempting to make sense of the brutality of the two world wars, Marxist philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their Dialectic of Enlightenment, cast a great cloud of suspicion over reason, and expounded on its self-destructiveness. For this first generation of the Frankfurt School, the best that reason can do is to be as self-reflective as possible and through this process they hoped a certain emancipation would come. “Scholars such as Ratzinger who wish to affirm an intrinsic relationship between faith and reason,” Rowland writes, “now find themselves fighting a battle on two fronts. Against the moderns they defend the claims of revelation. Against the postmoderns they defend reason, truth, and the powers of the human intellect.”
Not until we get to the mature work of Jürgen Habermas, the best known of the second-generation Frankfurt School philosophers, do we see a development in their thinking of the relationship between religion and reason. There seems to be a new openness for religion to be a more participatory presence in the political, philosophical, and social sphere.
Let us now turn to democracy and allow it to stand in the place of reason. Democracy developed from two different foundations and proceeded along two paths: in the Anglosphere democracy developed with a pragmatic Christian consensus on the basis of natural law. The second foundation was in the thought of Rouseau, in which “democracy is employed to attack Christian tradition, and he stands at the head of a stream of thought that tends to conceive of democracy as antithetical to Christianity.” (From Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s piece “What Is Truth? The Significance of Religious and Ethical Values in a Pluralistic Society” in Values in a Time of Upheaval).
One cannot with intellectual honesty then say that American democracy started from anti-Christian philosophy. An honest reading of the Founding Fathers is one in line with the English tradition. Here is Ratzinger in “A Christian Orientation in a Pluralistic Democracy? On the Indispensability of Christianity in the Modern World”:
The fact remains that this democracy is a product of the fusion of the Greek and Christian heritage [think of the synthesis of religion and reason discussed above] and therefore can survive only in this foundational connection. If we do not recognize this again and accordingly learn to live democracy with a view to Christianity and Christianity with a view to the free democratic state, we will surely gamble away democracy.
However, over time, and more-so after the World Wars, we see cross pollination with Continental philosophical ideas in the main. Arendt in On Revolution points out that “before American common philosophy fell prey to Rousseauan notions . . . American faith was not at all based on a semi-religious trust in human nature, but on the contrary, on the possibility of checking human nature in its singularity by virtue of common bonds and mutual promises.”
Unfortunately, one of the threats to democracy is, in the words of Ratzinger, a “disgust with the status quo . . . and a delight in anarchy, based on the conviction that there must be a good world somewhere after all.” This is that same belief in the perfectibility of man, and the inability to accept the realistic imperfections of our world. Imperfect man, in his freedom, can make gravely immoral choices that can give rise to injustice and suffering. The philosophical belief in the perfectibility of man, and the intolerance of injustice and suffering, give rise to the creation of structures from which it is hoped freedom, justice, and a better world will come. When these inevitably fail to materialize, this disgust can turn into violence. We must see the reality of things. We have seen the pathologies of religion and the pathologies of reason; neither is perfect and neither on its own will usher in a perfectly just world. (See the Habermas-Ratzinger dialogue The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion.) Ratzinger writes: “It does not exist. Constantly expecting it, playing with the possibility and proximity of it, is the most serious threat to our politics and our society, because anarchical fanaticism necessarily proceeds from it.”
“The future of democracy will be Christian or it will not be at all,” wrote Carl Muth (See Tracey Rowland’s chapter on Muth in Beyond Kant and Nietzsche.) Ratzinger poses this question in Church, Ecumenism and Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology: “How can Christianity become a positive force in politics without being exploited politically and, conversely, without usurping the political sphere?”
The most important benefits the Christian religion can give to democracy is the awakening of conscience, the substance of ethics, and the rehumanization of society. It gives human freedom guidance, and the human spirit of toleration and forbearance. And it is the Christian religion that teaches a true equality—that of human dignity, on which an imperfect yet a more just society can be built.
Image licensed via Adobe Stock.