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Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy
Author examines increasing intertwining of religion, politics
Originally published in The Journal Gazette, June 20, 2021.
Fear, not hope, presently lives closer to the surface for people across almost any definable social spectrum.
Political conservatives and liberals, rich and poor, urban and rural: Regardless of how people understand themselves, the hope that once defined democracy for them is now eclipsed by a spirit dividing neighbors and even family members.
Polls conducted in the wake of recent elections found that what unites people is not so much a perception of common belief, but perception of a common enemy. One’s vote in the case of the recent presidential election, for example, may have more to do with disdain than appreciation for Joe Biden or Donald Trump.
Common opposition parades as common conviction, only proving to be poison.
In “Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy,” David M. Elcott (with C. Colt Anderson, Tobias Cremer, and Volker Haarman), details how the tempting qualities of that poison came to appeal to members of religious communities. Elcott, the Taub professor of the practice of public service and leadership at New York University, and his colleagues seek to lay bare those qualities as a defense of “liberal democracy [and do so] as people of faith.”
Even for readers with a passing interest, the efforts by Elcott and his colleagues to lay bare those qualities are noteworthy and merit great consideration. Their task, as they see it, “is to explore what constitutes a constructive religious voice in the political arena, even in nurturing patriotism and democracy, and what undermines and threatens liberal democracies.”
In the introduction and in Chapter 1, Elcott and his colleagues focus on how fear makes religious traditions such as Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism vulnerable to being subsumed by nationalism.
While adherents to those traditions may appear fervent in their conviction, part of the irony Elcott and his colleagues expose is that an unacknowledged secularism often fuels that vulnerability.
Part of what then makes their work unique is their intentional focus on the role of religion. Previous works such as Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized” and Anne Applebaum’s “Twilight of Democracy” address the role of religion but, at best, at a passing level. While Elcott and his colleagues believe a misappropriation of religion fuels nationalism, they also believe a proper appropriation is an antidote to the hostility and cruelty that “have resulted when religious zealotry and state power combine.”
For readers with an abiding interest in this topic, the details Elcott and his colleagues present in the next two sections will prove just as compelling. That first section, Chapters 2 and 3, offers examples concerning what the combination of religious zealotry and state power looks like on both sides of the north Atlantic. Chapter 2 focuses on the rise of populism in various European nations, while Chapter 3 focuses on that dilemma in the Unites States. That second section, Chapters 4, 5 and 6, then explores comparable questions but does so, respectively, in relation to the religious traditions of Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism.
Again, part of what makes their work valuable is that Elcott and his colleagues not only see religion and its vulnerability to nationalism as part of the problem, but religion, when properly practiced, as critical to the solution. As a result, Chapters 4, 5 and 6 also point to thought and practices critical to such an end.
For example, when seeking to unpack a Protestant theology of political engagement, Elcott and his colleagues turn to the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In resistance to the oppression wielded by the Third Reich and the manner in which it subsumed religion in the service of nationalism, Bonhoeffer cultivated a theology of civic engagement as Christian discipleship. Bonhoeffer, along with a host of Catholic and Jewish theologians, provides Elcott and his colleagues with not only theological models but hopeful forms of lived expression.
Regardless of whether one possesses a passing or abiding interest in this topic, “Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy” proves worthwhile.
In the end, Elcott and his colleagues are to be commended for lobbying that religion, when properly practiced, exposes “divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ ” not as appeals to purity but exercises in apostasy. Hope, not fear, thus paves the way forward.
Todd C. Ream serves on the higher education and honors faculties at Taylor University, as a fellow with the Lumen Research Institute and as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review. He is the author, most recently, of “Hesburgh of Notre Dame: The Church’s Public Intellectual” (Paulist Press).