The Christian Case for Liberal Democracy

Liberal Democracy as a Risky Project

Should Christians support a type of government that may potentially turn them into an “immoral minority”?

The risk of democracy is that people who do not support your views and values may be elected to public office.

The risk of liberalism is that people may grant liberties to things that you think should be prohibited.

Democracies are not perfect. Socrates was executed by the Athenian democracy. Britain began as a very imperial democracy with limited suffrage. The American democracy was formed principally to defend slave-holding states and expansionist landowners from royal interference in their slaving and expansion.

Liberalism means accepting your inability to prohibit beliefs, speech, practices, habits, values that you find not only annoying, but offensive, and perhaps even exploitive: porn, drag queen story time, comedians mocking Jesus, etc.

Also, liberal democracies tend to be conflictual, fractious, and partisan. Far from bringing us together, they often serve only to rip us apart!

As it goes, I would argue that both democracy and liberalism are under threat from the progressive left and the Christian right!

The Threat to Democracy

I am a dual British-Australian citizen. During the early BREXIT debate, I was an adamant “remainer” not a “leaver.” Despite some reservations about the European Union (EU), I thought the UK was better off in Europe. So I was shocked and a bit disappointed when the “leave” campaign won.

However, the behaviour of the Remain campaign and the EU before and after the vote turned me into a die-hard Euro-sceptic. The EU did everything to scuttle BREXIT … even to the point of trying to reignite tensions in Northern Ireland. The EU pushed the idea that leaving the EU meant hatred for Europe. The EU wants people to be loyal to Europe in general but to nowhere in particular. The EU has a parliament but it is not truly a democracy and its apparatus is basically a retirement scheme for have-been politicians.

The EU is somewhere between the Habsburg Empire 2.0 and a shell company for a James Bond villain. There were benefits from Britain being in the EU, however, those benefits accrue mostly to the political and upper-middle-class not to the working class. The Remain campaign did not accept the result and instead blamed BREXIT on racist old-people rather than seeing the vote as a working-class revolt against the elites. The EU/Remain campaign were among the most anti-democratic forces in Europe.

Now I know I’m gonna get into trouble for saying this, but the Democrats and Republicans have both engaged in democracy denialism in the last 8 eight years.

When Donald Trump was elected, Democrat senators tried to get then-VP Joe Biden not to certify the election (watch this from CNN). Then we had two and half years of Russia hacked/stole the election. Yes, Russia interfered, they released Clinton’s emails and had pro-Trump twitter-bots, but Russia is not the reason Trump won and Clinton lost. The main reason Clinton lost is because she alienated the white working class in Blue States.

But then, the Trump MAGA crowd did the same thing, but ten times worse. They engaged in a conspiracy to overturn the election, launched an insurrection at the Capitol, and threatened VP Mike Pence if he did certify the election. I know many of my American friends won’t like hearing it, but Dems and GOP both had a case of democracy denialism and the difference is that the Dems had conspiratorial fantasies about Russia to illegitimate the election, while the GOP engaged in an actual conspiracy to overturn the election.

Democracy only works if you have the consent of the loser. If we accept that we don’t always win. Instead, we live in an age, due to tribalism and partisanship, some people really do want one-party rule with a thin veneer of democracy.

If you look around the world, one-party states never perform well when it comes to government integrity, accountability, transparency, separation of powers, suffrage, and civil rights.

Christians should support an inclusive democracy for two reasons.

First, it leads to transparent, effective, and limited government.

Second, government works best with the consent of the governed.

The Threat to Liberalism

What about liberalism?

Again, we have a double pincer movement from the left and the right against it.

On the left, you have progressives who want to punish lesbians for refusing to date or have sex with trans-women (yes, this is a thing). Also, governments in Australia seizing faith-based hospitals because they won’t perform abortions or euthanasia. Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has exchanged equality before the law for a hierarchy of identities, creating a kind of “woke dystopia” which Canadian journalist Rupa Subramanya calls “dark and illiberal.”

Then on the right, you have places like Hungary championing “illiberal democracy” based on Magyar ethnic identity and the Christian religion as opposed to the EU’s technocratic secular multi-culturalism. To be honest, I have a little sympathy for Hungary and Poland against the EU, but anything deliberately illiberal and mono-ethnic is going to run into some civil liberty and racial problems somewhere down the track.

In the USA, political philosopher Patrick Deneen argues that liberalism, with its stress on personal autonomy, has led to the erosion of community, environmental catastrophe, and the rise of a technocratic elite. He argues that liberalism has failed to deliver on its promises of equality and justice, and instead it has created a society that is fragmented, hedonistic, consumerist, and short-sighted. Now, I’d grant some truth to his criticism, but what is the alternative to liberalism? I’d prefer a chastened liberalism to illiberalism or Christian nationalism.

Liberalism is good because it is based on the idea that people have the right to freedom and to be different without fear of gangs or government reprisal.

Liberalism means, within certain limits, people are allowed to be “other,” to be other than us, to think differently to us, and to choose their own happiness.

Liberal Democracy as a Christian Project

Why do I believe in a liberal democracy? Well, for one, it is explicitly Christian.

I’d contend that liberal democracy is simply Christendom 2.0.

Liberal democracies emerged, and are the strongest, in countries shaped generally by the Christian tradition and specifically by missionary Protestantism. Liberal democracy is a type of Christian society that attempts to prune itself from the evils and excesses of Christian monarchies.

While other parts of the world, like Turkey and India, might have Muslim and Hindu democracies, they are not liberal democracies. They do not have a political settlement that believes the highest good is to give individuals the freedom to chose the way, the truth, and the life of their free volition. They do not have a public ethic which has been shaped by Leviticus 19:18, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”

James Simpons’ book Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism argues that the British Enlightenment, from being driven by a new strain of secular philosophy, is a story of transformation and reversal of the Protestant tradition from within. The gains of liberalism were the unintended results of the violent early Reformation. He laments, however, that today those gains are increasingly under threat, in part because liberals do not understand their own history. They fail to grasp that liberalism is less the secular opponent of religious fundamentalism than its dissident younger sibling, uncertain how to confront its older evangelical competitor.

Liberal democracy is the political expression of the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

That’s why I support it as a matter of Christian principle.

What about you, what do you think?