“Christianity and Democracy: A Theology for a Just World Order”
By John W. de Gruchy
Cambridge University Press
307 pp.; $59.95, hardcover; $17.95, paper
“Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy”
By Robert H. Wiebe
University of Chicago Press
321 pp.; $25.95
Come November, millions of American citizens will file dutifully into polling places located in schools, churches, and other spaces set apart for performing the civic ritual of voting. The outcomes we suppose will have significant consequences, from the local school board all the way to the White House. We call this democracy, and we celebrate it.
Still, a sense of foreboding hangs heavy in the democratic air. We are daily informed that the American people are frustrated, angry, alienated, cut off from their government. In a sentiment widely shared by political scientists and journalists, Lance Bennett in his text “Governing Crisis” writes of how “most Americans today experience elections as empty rituals that offer little hope for political dialogue, genuine glimpses of candidate character, or the emergence of a binding consensus on where the nation is going and how it ought to get there.”
As we approach our appointed task and duty, what is the Christian to make of the state of democracy? If it is gut-check time for the Christian citizen, where can she go for enlightenment? If she takes her cues from the two books here under discussion, I would not be surprised should she express some confusion. While both John de Gruchy (professor of Christian studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa) and Robert Wiebe (professor of history at Northwestern University) tell the democratic story, their accounts vary widely.
The Theologian situates the American moment in the broader context of the general democratization of the world, most vividly captured in our day by the fall of the wall in Berlin and of apartheid in South Africa. The American Christian trying to sort through her own situation will find scant material here for practical guidance for November, but plenty of reason for comfort and consolation with respect to the big picture. “Christianity and Democracy” is full of hope, redemption, and the possibility of the democratic transformation of the world, with churches playing a critical part in the process. It is perhaps fitting that the Theologian should be the dispenser of such hope.
But such is not the message of the Historian. Wiebe’s book tells a local story. He writes of democracy, American style, defined as the practice of popular self-government with individual self-determination: its origins, its spread, and its uncertain prospects. Eschewing the kind of globalist reach undertaken by the Theologian, the Historian characterizes his own work as carried out in “the spirit of an interpretive essay, not the comprehensive synthesis.” Unfortunately for our troubled citizen pondering the November event, Wiebe’s interpretation of what has transpired since democracy’s full establishment in America in the 1820s can be read as a lament for the passing away of a grand experiment in which politics and self-rule were carried out by the people, only to be eclipsed and ultimately replaced by the individual and the state.
What passes for democracy in our day is a thin and watery relic of a more robust and healthy democratic way of life. This is not a happy story. It is agonistic, full of conflict; the outcome is in doubt. In fact, the sober Historian concludes, “No general renewal of democracy will occur, the record indicates, without a breakdown of the structure.” It is not hope the Historian offers but a gamble, and a dangerous one at that.
I have stylized the authors as the Theologian and the Historian because I sense that there is something in the very disciplines from which they write that inclines them to tell the story as they do. De Gruchy’s theology is all of a package. The reader cannot fail to recognize how a transformationist Reformed theological perspective drives his interpretation of the biblical and historical materials, setting the agenda for his political prescriptions. Meanwhile, Wiebe adopts the attitude of the sober, cautious, and indeed skeptical style of history writing as it has been practiced from the time of Thucydides. Where modern theologians aspire to the seamless narrative, to holism, to continuities and stories well ended, historians revel in the messiness of counterexamples, of the unlooked-for and the unexpected, of historical projects derailed, or, as Wiebe and pragmatist philosophers like Richard Rorty prefer to say, the contingent. Just how can our troubled Christian make sense from the different reads of democracy given by the Theologian and the Historian?
In his wide-ranging analysis, de Gruchy argues that what Christians require at the present moment is a proper understanding of the relationship between Christianity and democracy. To this end he makes a distinction between the democratic system of government and what he calls the democratic vision.
By system, he refers to the practical institutions and processes that democratic regimes throughout history have instituted. He sums these as including universal adult suffrage, free and fair elections, majority rule with minority rights, the separation of church and state, and so on. Ancient Athens stands as “the symbolic birthplace of the democratic system.”
But the Theologian wants to focus instead on the democratic vision. This he defines as that hope for a society in which all people are truly equal and yet where difference is respected; a society in which all people are truly free, yet where social responsibility rather than individual self-interest prevails; and a society that is truly just, and therefore one in which the vast gulf between rich and poor has been overcome.
Such a vision is not to be located in pagan Athens. Rather, the democratic vision has emerged historically from out of “the message of the ancient prophets of Israel, and especially in their messianic hope for a society in which the reign of God’s shalom would become a reality.” Christianity has been the historical carrier of the democratic vision, though modern versions of it have become much more secularized and even revolutionary.
In order to establish this connection, de Gruchy has to deal with the messiness of Christian history. As he readily concedes, compatibility between the faith and democracy has not always been self-evident. Following the work of Walter Brueggemann, de Gruchy points to two different political trajectories that exist within the Hebrew Old Testament: the prophetic (beginning with Moses) and the royal (beginning with David). These traditions exist “in critical tension with each other.”
Following a particular line of New Testament scholarship, de Gruchy positions what some scholars call “the Jesus movement” clearly in line with the prophetic tradition and its emphasis upon the shalom of God, the full healing and wholeness of the human and cosmological condition. The gospel message possesses rich political implications–good news indeed for the poor and oppressed. It extols “the emancipatory values of truth, freedom and justice.”
Unfortunately, with the conversion of Constantine, this emancipatory message was forced underground or to the margins of Christian political consciousness. Parallel to the Old Testament critical tension between the prophetic and royal tradition, there emerged in Christian practice and thought a tension between the democratic vision of the gospel (i.e., the prophetic) and an imperial political theology fitted for the now-Christian imperial state.
In a long and complex chapter, de Gruchy attempts to show how these two political trajectories within Christian thought have contributed to the paradoxical situation in which Christianity has been claimed by some to be antithetical to democracy but by others to be essential to democracy’s full flowering.
De Gruchy’s historical claim is quite clear, however. The time is at hand, the paradox now resolved. For Christian political commitment, this century’s experience of national socialism and Stalinist totalitarianism has driven home the lesson: “Christianity . . . now appears to be irrevocably committed to the retrieval of democracy as essential to its vision of a just world order.”
At the end of his historical sketch, the author reaffirms that the contemporary ecumenical church “regards the democratic vision as consonant with, even if not identical to, that of the prophets of ancient Israel and its own vision of a just world order, [and] that the democratic system provides the best available way for embodying that vision within political structures amidst historical realities.” We are all democrats now. But democrats to what end?
De Gruchy’s historical retrieval of the democratic vision serves as a warm-up to his call for political action. Since the political vision of Christianity is the democratic vision, and, since the world is undergoing a global democratic transformation, Christians (through their churches and in their public activities) should be making the world safe for democracy. And, according to de Gruchy, this is just what they have been doing.
Showing how churches have been at the forefront of recent democratic movements around the world, he traces this theme across his account of the civil-rights movement in the American South, the struggle for liberation in Nicaragua, and the postcolonial struggle for democracy in sub-Saharan Africa. In the final chapter of this section, he analyzes the role of the churches in the Berlin and South African moments of liberation.
But it is not yet time to sing “the strife is o’er, the battle won.” For the churches, having delivered the nations from the kingdom of darkness, now face a new and daunting responsibility: “The struggle is no longer to be understood primarily in terms of resistance and liberation, but in terms of reconstruction and transformation.” Required for this new task of empire building is what de Gruchy seeks to provide in his last chapter, “a theology for a just democratic world order.” In this emerging new world, Christian churches should think of themselves as “instruments enabling the process to take place, and as nurturers of a culture of democratic moral value.”
A theological reorientation is needed for such a task, and now more than ever. As de Gruchy puts it, “If [the church] is to participate in critical solidarity in the process of global democratization, it is unsatisfactory, even dangerous, for the church to become involved unless it understands why, and in what way, this is consonant with its faith and integral to its mission in the world.”
Key to such a theological reorientation is the recovery of the original self-understanding of the primitive ecclesia.
“Those early Christians were a small minority, often situated on the periphery of public life, but they did not regard their mission as a private affair–it had to do with the transformation of the world. . . . From the beginning of Christianity, then, a connection was made between the life and the structure of the church, and God’s will and purpose for the world.”
Such a retrieval of the “concrete utopia” of primitive Christianity places the Christian at the vanguard of the new world, making her a vital contributor to redemptive history. In a statement certain to brighten the countenance of our bewildered and beleaguered Christian citizen as she ponders November, de Gruchy claims that “it is impossible to conceive of the mission of the church apart from the struggle for a just world order, or to consider the role of the church except in relation to the needs and concerns for humanity and creation as a whole. This is, indeed, the vision of the prophets and the hope of the world.” Come November, then, our troubled voter can take comfort: she is a world democrat.
But from the Historian comes a different take on the matter. Wiebe identifies his work as a response to more than 60 studies of democracy that have emerged in the past quarter-century, from philosophers, social scientists, and political journalists. At the outset, Wiebe locates himself as joining “a gathering of people who in recent years have been separating democracy out for rigorous examination in its own right.”
This “gathering” is truly impressive. His appended list of “special debts and suggested readings” includes nearly every major work in the fields of scholarly and journalistic endeavor. However, in his conclusion, Wiebe gently chides this body of work: “What this impressive analysis lacks . . . is historical awareness, a sense of the particular experiences that particular people have had during a particular span of time.” The author makes up for this lack with his own impressive account of American democracy’s establishment and subsequent transformation.
While the relationship between American democracy and American Christianity does not serve as the object of his focus (for such, one should consult Nathan Hatch’s “The Democratization of American Christianity”), Wiebe’s treatment of how “new relations between work and authority have framed the major changes in American democracy” provides a cautionary tale for all would-be democratic reformers in our day. He demonstrates how an increasingly complex late-nineteenth-century political economy frustrated and redirected the original democratic dynamic–“lodge democracy,” as Wiebe calls it.
Early-nineteenth-century democracy, Wiebe reminds us, was rooted in local communities. Democratic energies were developed by the rise of innumerable small, voluntary, civic, fraternal groups, whereby the free white man, cut adrift from the traditional moorings of family and place, was transformed from isolated individual to member, brother, and friend. Such democracy was local, face-to-face, and personalistic.
Wiebe acknowledges how exclusive this “lodge democracy” was–especially in terms of gender and race–but he insists that it rested on the key democratic principles of individual self-determination and egalitarian self-government. Thus, while read one way, lodge democracy represented all that was worst in early to midnineteenth-century America, “viewed another way, it formed widening circles of connection that linked citizens over vast distances, invited collaboration across class and ethnic divides, and served as a beacon of self-respect for millions here and abroad.”
But then the nature of work changed, and so the egalitarian structure of American political society became increasingly vulnerable. Thus, by the 1920s, following a shift that began in the 1890s, America’s modern three-class system was in place. Even as democracy spread out to include the older disenfranchised groups, new hierarchies were arising that would frustrate the democratic promise of individual self-mastery and egalitarian self-rule.
Wiebe’s seventh chapter, “Dissolving the People,” chronicles the deformation of American democracy by the rise of major corporations and the modern bureaucratic state. Tracing the systemic problems of American democracy back prior to those objects of complaints common among conservatives (who blame America’s ills on FDR’s New Deal or LBJ’s Great Society programs, or both) and liberals (who fault Richard Nixon, Reaganomics, the rise of the Christian Right, or all of the above), Wiebe identifies two great constraints on modern democracy: centralization and hierarchy.
In the final section of “Self-Rule,” Wiebe provides what he calls “the democrat’s brief,” combining a critique of contemporary American democracy with a call for particular kinds of political action. Wiebe’s democrat practices “guerrilla politics,” an agenda of “pulling down and pulling apart,” repositioning power and decision making to levels closer at hand to the everyday life of citizens. The object of political action is thus the “large structures” where public and private (economic) power is concentrated: “The democrat pulls down the large structures so that ordinary citizens can move in and participate. The historical record and contemporary experience alike are eloquent in expressing how closely a rise in participatory energy correlates with a faith in local self-rule.”
All politics is local. Small is beautiful. Thus, should she follow the Historian, our November citizen will still think of herself as a democrat, but now a guerrilla democrat.
So we slouch toward November. Democracy is what we think we are all about. The Theologian bids us come and be a part of global democratic transformation. The Historian warns us of the pathologies that afflict modern democracies. Who are we to be, world democrats or guerrilla democrats? I must confess that my own reading of history, theology, and the politics of the present moment inclines me to prefer the way of the guerrilla. Democratic Constantinianism is Constantinianism nonetheless, and what we set out to police has a nasty way of policing us. Small is beautiful.
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS & CULTURE
May/June 1996, Vol. 2, No. 3, Page 24
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