From “Defending Democracy from its Christian Enemies” by David P. Gushee
France’s long, difficult struggle with democracy, and with the relationship between democracy and Christianity, is instructive on many levels and for many other contexts. We learn that given the right conditions, profoundly antidemocratic energies can emerge even in long-standing democracies. Where Christianity is involved, especially official church hierarchies that had once been aligned with the state, these antidemocratic energies come far more often from the right than from the left, and they tend to align with other reactionary forces in society. Nostalgia for the medieval world, for a lost Christendom, for authoritarian rule, for the marriage of throne and altar, for cultural uniformity grounded in shared Christian beliefs and values is a very powerful force.
But it is a force that is bad for both the state and church. As French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion has recently written, “When a religious community dies, it is almost always precisely because it committed the folly of letting itself be identified with a state, for states are mortal.”
Reactionary Christianity tends to harden where oppositional cultural voices seem most resolutely secular and anti-Christian in belief and in practice. France is one such example. The United States today seems like another. In such contexts, it becomes difficult for mediating Christian theological and ethical voices to craft a path of conscientious partial accommodation to the modern world, a path that is both meaningfully Christian and meaningfully connected to today’s world. This is what I am trying to do in this book. Likewise, it seems more difficult for mediating voices from the secular side to craft a path of respectful engagement with their deeply religious fellow citizens. I honor those who attempt to do so.
When such divides deepen, Christian leaders easily revert to a winner-take-all posture rather than being voices for civil peace through dialogue in the presence of profound differences.