In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville suggested that religion was one of many possible guards that could help keep democratic societies running on their rails. Religion, Tocqueville saw, would offer ethical boundaries to potentially amoral democracies. Religion would ensure that democratic citizens were trained in a disciplined life, that their hearts and values were directed towards something other than self-interested material gain. In general, religion would contribute to the formation of good democratic citizens.
Tocqueville, of course, wrote at a time when Christian language was commonplace. A pervasive, if ill-defined theism explicitly shaped both legislation and public talk. Few democratic thinkers argued that the republic would be better off if stripped of its religious patina. Even fewer Christians argued that the churches would be better off if they withdrew from the political sphere (though Tocqueville thought otherwise).
Assumptions have changed. Many contemporary thinkers have challenged the relationship Tocqueville put forth between religion and democracy. Secular philosophers like Richard Rorty have insisted that theism is bad for democracy. With them, some Christian theologians have insisted that democracy is bad for theism.
If religious language still pervades democratic conversations, its authority, and even its propriety, is strongly contested. In recent years, pundits of all stripes have been debating the place of Christian claims in civic life. What role—if any—do religious people and their religious commitments have in the public square?
This conversation, it must be admitted, occasionally gets boring. But it is a necessary conversation, one essential to sustaining democratic culture. The question of how, without surrendering your particularities, to speak in a democracy to people with different particularities is in some ways America’s founding question, and recent debates over the public meaning of marriage (not to mention Howard Dean’s mealy-mouthed attempts to position himself as religious by locating Job in the New Testament) suggest its perennial urgency. We have more particularities to keep track of now than we did when Tocqueville toured America.
Enter Jeffrey Stout, religion professor at Princeton University and author of Democracy and Tradition, an elegant and artful new book that reinvigorates the conversation about religion and the public square. Stout is not a Christian, but neither is he a rabid secularist. To the contrary, Stout wants religion to be included in public democratic conversations. Democracy must include deep moral commitments, and religious people can usefully contribute to the articulation of those commitments. If for no other reason, says Stout, all citizens would benefit from a “lengthy, even leisurely unfolding” of our philosophical and ideological commitments, secular and religious alike. Such an “unfolding” would allow us to understand both ourselves and our neighbors better.
The “place at the table” metaphor is much overused—Christians are always insisting that they want a place at the table where they can speak, muse, and chew as Christians. But here the metaphor is apt, because Stout’s undeniable accomplishment in Democracy and Tradition is to have modeled an etiquette under which Christians and non-Christians can speak to one another about matters of the common good. Democracy and Tradition is a manual of sorts for speaking across the divide: we Americans must realize that some of our neighbors possess very different commitments from our own. Stout asks people to hold on to their commitments—if perhaps sometimes a little more loosely than some are prepared to do.
So one might expect Stout’s chief interlocutor to be, say, Katha Pollitt—a brilliant critic whose dogmatic secularism often prevents her from engaging the concerns and arguments of religious folk. To ensure religion’s role in public conversation, we might need to convince Katha that Christians aren’t stupid.
And Democracy and Tradition does promise to persuade secularists that their secularism is much closer than they might think to the philosophical architecture of religion. For the democracy that Stout sketches is shot through with what he terms piety—”not … primarily a feeling, expressed in acts of devotion, but rather as a virtue, a morally excellent aspect of character [which] consists in just or appropriate response to the sources of one’s existence and progress through life. Family, political community, the natural world, and God are all said to be sources on which we depend, sources to be acknowledged appropriately.” If the makers of America’s democratic tradition have often disagreed about “how the sources should be conceived” and what proper acknowledgement of them looks like, there is nonetheless a consensus among them that piety is “a crucial virtue.”
The prophets and poets of that tradition are many and varied—Stout offers subtle readings of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, John Dewey, and Henry Thoreau. These democrats drew on, and evoked, a religious idiom; they knew something about finitude and hope. (And if Stout’s canon doesn’t include any 19th-century evangelicals, that’s an odd oversight. Imagine the American democratic tradition without, say, Harriet Beecher Stowe.)
In tracing this Whitmanesque democracy, Stout undoes the secularist’s own insistence that the democratic state is not bounded by tradition. When next the irreligious democrat steps into the ring with a Christian, she will perhaps understand that she is tousling with someone with whom she shares a great deal.
But Stout’s primary interest is not the domestication of the unsympathetic secularist, and Democracy and Tradition‘s significance lies not chiefly in Stout’s reminder that religious people are worthy conversation partners. Instead, Stout principally engages Christians themselves—at least, a certain subset of Christians, the post-liberals who have eschewed robust participation in democratic polity in favor of the cultivation of a church comprising “resident aliens.” For shorthand, we can call this interlocutor Stanley Hauerwas.
Hauerwas—the Duke University scholar who recently gave the prestigious Gifford lectures and, not least, graced the pages of Time magazine as America’s most influential theologian—has often been called a sectarian. Hauerwas is concerned with the formation, inculcation, and transmission of Christian virtue, and he sees democratic liberalism as a threat, as something that eats away at that virtue. He has taken the church to task for (as he put it in A Community of Character) “imitat[ing] in its own social life the politics of liberalism,” and he frequently reminds the church that in order to develop “skills of interpretation and discrimination sufficient to help us recognize the possibilities and limits of our society … the church and Christians must be uninvolved in the politics of our society and involved in the polity that is the church.” Hauerwas has disavowed “sectarianism,” but it’s no surprise that the label’s stuck.
If, for both Stout and Hauerwas, liberalism as theory is flawed, the point of disagreement is whether democracy erodes virtues in practice, and how one responds to that erosion. Stout aims to show Christians like Hauerwas that sustained Christian engagement with democracy is possible, even desirable (indeed, on Stout’s reading, the Gospel might require it). Stout sketches Whitman’s democracy not simply to remind secular democrats that they, too, are bounded by tradition, but also to rebut Hauerwas—to show a democratic America in which virtue is salient and sustainable, to sketch a democracy that is “hard to absorb into” the Hauerwasian pessimistic account.
Stout’s critique of Hauerwas is generous. He more or less leaps into the conversation on Hauerwas’ terms, determining to show that democracy is a tradition in the way that religions are traditions. (Indeed, Stout might do well to more fiercely criticize Hauerwas’ insistence on the complete inviolability of particularism, a notion that can’t sit well in either Stout’s democratic republic or his philosophical universe.) In this sense, Democracy and Tradition can be seen as the symphony to which Stout’s 1988 book, Ethics After Babel, was overture. In Ethics, he took on Alasdair MacIntyre’s suggestion that there are no traditions in democratic culture. In Democracy and Tradition, Stout more fully substantiates the claim that democracy itself is a tradition: Democracy “inculcates certain habits of reasoning, certain attitudes toward deference and authority … and love for certain goods and virtues, as well as a disposition to respond to certain types of actions, events, or persons with admiration, pity, or horror.” As such, “commit- ment to democracy does not entail the rejection of tradition. It requires jointly taking responsibility for the criticism and renewal of tradition and for the justice of our social and political arrangements.”
This vision of democracy is compelling, simultaneously inspiring and comforting. Stout speaks to us as citizens, asks us to read him as citizens, and encourages us to reflect on what sorts of citizens our theologies invite us to be. (One occasionally wishes that Stout would engage not just the Hauerwasians but also the rest of American Christians—who are, Time magazine’s honorifics not withstanding, very much enamored of democracy and wouldn’t recognize a resident alien if one bit them on the leg.) In an age that sometimes seems debauched, Stout insists that virtue is a salient category for all of us. And he usefully cautions that the public square is a metaphor, “not a place. One is addressing the public whenever one addresses people as citizens. In a modern democracy, this is not something one does in one place or all at once.” This is a salutary reminder, which Stout gives poetic and frankly biblical overtones: “Whenever two or three citizens are gathered whom one might address as citizens, as persons jointly responsible for the common good, one is potentially in a public setting.”
The problem is that establishing that democracy is a “tradition” is not enough. We could just as plainly state that market capitalism is a tradition, but it does not follow that robust participation in market capitalism is conducive to the proclamation of the Gospel or the formation of Christian virtue. Hauerwas and Co.’s criticisms of liberal democracy are not that democracy is not a tradition nor that democracy fosters no virtues and forms no character. Hauerwas is not interested in whether democracy can sustain Whitman’s epiphany at the Brooklyn Bridge, but whether it can sustain worshipping communities that organize their communal and individual selves at the foot of the cross. American democracy may or may not erode Whitman’s virtue; it certainly seems to erode Christian virtue. And to argue about that erosion, one needs not Whitman but Augustine, for it was Augustine who understood that the citizens of the City of God are the very best citizens of the City of Man.
Lauren F. Winner is the author most recently of Mudhouse Sabbath (Paraclete Press).
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