Review of David Gushee's Defending Democracy from its Christian Enemies

Part Two

David P. Gushee
Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2023.

This is the second of a two-part review of Gushee’s book on evangelicals and authoritarian reactionary Christianity (ARC).

Popular Sovereignty Good, but Populism Bad?

Gushee rightly prosecutes a case against despotic demagogues who seduce the masses by playing on prejudices. Even so, Gushee has not reconciled his affirmation of “popular sovereignty” with his rejection of “populism.”

Gushee is very quick to make a connection between populism and authoritarianism. This is a valid observation if one considers the rhetoric and illiberal ethos of Donald Trump (USA), Viktor Orbán (Hungary), Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), and now Javier Milei (Argentina). Indeed, “Peronism,” the technical term for populism, is alive and well and Gushee is right to critique it, but two things stick out.

(1) There is the danger that “populism” is simply the card played by aggrieved progressives to discredit the electoral victories of conservatives. Progressive victories are grass-roots triumphs, while conservative victories are post-fascist populism. It needs to be said: winning the popular vote by popular policies does not a fascist make.[1]

Gushee’s critique of populism can easily morph into anti-democratic rhetoric epitomized by Bertolt Brecht’s satirical poem The Solution (Die Lösung). In the poem, it is stated that the people had squandered the confidence of the government so a secretary asks whether it would be “simpler for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?” Gushee wants popular sovereignty without populism, which can ironically lend itself to its own kind of anti-democratic ethos.

(2) Gushee complains about right-wing narratives which set the people against the “corrupt elite.”[2] But the people versus a corrupt and affluent elite can be expressed on any political spectrum.

This betrays something of Gushee’s own brand of progressivism. He castigates the Christian right for their militant rejection of the politics of identity, but his own brand of progressivism has abandoned class warfare, which is the ultimate battle against an elite class. Gushee sees ARC advocates reacting to “certain cultural, moral, political, or legal developments” but rarely gets into economics.[3] Gushee does not countenance the desperate survival instincts of the “precariat” against the woke-capitalism of the “bohemian bourgeoise.”[4]

What Gushee ignores is how the populism of Trump, BREXIT, and others is not simply about the disappearance of Christian civil religion, or even a trenchant xenophobia, as much as it is also an economic protest against a system that makes the poor poorer and the rich richer. Progressive elites (by “elites” I mean political donors, media, intelligentsia, activist bureaucrats, influencers, lobbyists, and political apparatiks) have largely discarded the working class for rainbow flags and net zero. The elite class regards the working poor as les déplorables for clinging to family solidarity over the gender revolution and prizing their own economic security over open borders, globalisation, and green initiatives.[5]

It is progressive contempt for the working class which explains why good-natured people will indulge Trump’s xenophobia if it protects US jobs and the US healthcare system. The reason Argentinians elected Javier Milei as president in 2023 was not because of his chainsaw-waving antics, but because inflation was running at 140%. Those who feel disempowered and economically distressed will always gravitate towards the promise of a re-ordering of power, whether at a Donald Trump event or at a Bernie Sanders rally.

As David Brooks wrote in 2017: “The alienated long for something that will smash the system or change their situation.”[6]

Thus, sticking it to the “elites” is rooted in economic deprivation and transcends the left-right divide. (Note, I just watched an interesting video by Lutheran theologian Jordan Cooper on populism).

Secular Revolution Meets the Religious Resistance?

I remain unpersuaded that Christian Nationalism should be understood along the lines of Michael Walzer’s theory of secular revolution and religious counter-revolution.[7] To be fair, I concur that Christian Nationalists in the USA are indeed reactionary, filled with grievances for the loss of Christian hegemony, and couching their grievances in apocalyptic narratives of good versus evil. However, before we claim that the Moral Majority is to Woodstock what the Thermidorian Reaction was to Robespierre, we need to keep something in mind.

As Tom Holland has argued, the west’s left-right division over laws and values is very much an intra-Christian affair based on critiquing one set of Christian ideas with other Christian ideas.[8] A woman’s right over her body as well defending the voiceless and vulnerable in utero, or care for marginalized gay teenagers and upholding the sanctity of marriage, all of these have roots in the Christian tradition. The problem is that only one side of the culture wars is aware that its argument functions within Christian grammar or trades in Christian currency. I’d aver, following Oliver O’Donovan, that the pulpit-pounding preacher in Atlanta and the social justice warrior in Boston are both attempting to tune their moral compasses after crawling out of a crater created by Jesus and his gospel.[9]

Yes, there have been various economic, scientific, and cultural revolutions since 1776 that disrupted our world,[10] but even “secularism” is a Christian invention, born from the reformatio of the twelfth century and the Peace of Westphalia in the seventeenth century.

Our culture wars are not an expression of Marxist theories of history with revolution and counter-revolution, but internecine debates over Jesus’s moral discourse.

Verdict: Commendable, but Flawed

In sum, Gushee offers a neo-Niebuhrian defense of democracy using tools from the Christian tradition. He decries white supremacy and nationalism as anti-democratic and unchristian. His model is one that seeks the “path of conscientious partial accommodation to the modern world, a path that is both meaningfully Christian and meaningfully connected to today’s world” that supports a modus vivendi allied with “mediating voices from the secular left” while standing up to resolutely scornful “secular forces.”[11]

Gushee gives due caution about “nostalgia for a 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” as they are “bad for both the state and the church.”[12] I’d contend that Christendom was a mixed bag rather than an unmitigated disaster and I’d argue that the American notion of a wall of separation between church and state is not the only game in town for liberal democracies.[13]

Those misgivings aside, Gushee offers a robust critique of authoritarian reactionary Christianity with salient warnings about the church aligning itself with politicians who are pro-Christian in principle but post-Christian in practice, and he nobly warns of a Christianity syncretized with hyper-masculinity and militant nationalism.[14]

My gut feeling is that Gushee attacks the right target, he lands some good blows, but his arguments are sometimes blunted by his parochialities and partisanship.

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[1] Gushee, Defending Democracy, pp. 39-40, 44. Gushee refers to Luke Bretherton’s notion of a benign populism, but does not fully appreciate it for my mind (p. 39 n. 21).

[2] Gushee, Defending Democracy, p. 39.

[3] Gushee, Defending Democracy, pp. 49-50. Gushee refers in passing to Marcia Pally’s reference to evangelical populism as partly rooted in economic issues, but otherwise ignores issues of class, economics, cost of living, and financial pressures (pp. 55-56).

[4] See Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: I.B. Tauris, 2021); David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

[5] See Paul Embery, Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class (Cambridge: Polity, 2020).

[6] David Brooks, ‘Opinion: The Alienated Mind’, New York Times, 23 May 2017, nytimes.com/2017/05/23/opinion/alienated-mind-trump-supporters.html. accessed 12 September 2023.

[7] Gushee, Defending Democracy, pp. 59-60, 70-71.

[8] Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian revolution remade the world (New York: Basic, 2019).

[9] Oliver O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the roots of political theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 212.

[10] Cf. Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2023).

[11] Gushee, Defending Democracy, p. 83.

[12] Gushee, Defending Democracy, p. 82.

[13] Gushee would do well to read O’Donovan, The Desire of the Nations. Gushee opposes establishment churches, like the Church of England, but I would like to gleefully and giddily point out that as of 2023 the United Kingdom has a Christian king, a Hindu prime minister, an atheist opposition leader, and a Muslim first minister of Scotland. The United Kingdom, with established churches in England and Scotland, comprises a far more peaceful, pluralistic, and participationist democracy than the fragmented and fratricidal American republic with its wall of separation between church and state.

[14] Gushee, Defending Democracy, pp. 80, 94-95.