Christianity & Democracy

Modern democracy has its roots deep in religion. But religion is not necessarily a force for democracy; organized Christianity, in fact, has spent a good deal of time and energy on the opposite side of the fence.

To investigate this relationship between faith and politics, a small group of Protestant churchmen met at the close of World War II under the leadership of Methodist Dr. John R. Mott and Presbyterian Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin. They decided to begin by commissioning a history of the subject, to be prepared by Church Historian James Hastings Nichols, associate professor of the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago and author of Primer for Protestants. The result, just published as Democracy and the Churches (Westminster Press; $4.50), turns over many a fertile furrow for both churchman and statesman.

Democratic Puritans. Author Nichols sees the Protestant Reformation as the "watershed" where the political differences of contemporary Christians had their origins. As the medieval system began to give way to the new idea of political sovereignty, he says, two divergent streams of religious thought swept forward into the 19th Century. One was represented by the Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans, who "taught generally the 'divine right of kings,' with the correlative denial of the right of resistance by subjects." The other stream was represented by the Calvinist churches, also known as Reformed or Presbyterian.

The Calvinist tradition, even when far from democracy as the world knows it today, stood for limitation of the monarchy, the mutual obligations of the ruler and the ruled, and the duty of the individual to resist any interference by state or hierarchy between him and his God. Calvinism's left wing, says Nichols, helped build the "Puritan Protestantism" which contributed more to democratic ways & means than any other Christian strain.

No Longer There? For the most part, Roman Catholicism stood against the democratic tide, according to Author Nichols. He quotes Catholic Historian Christopher Dawson: "Against the Liberal doctrines of the divine right of majorities and the unrestricted freedom of opinion, the Church has always maintained the principles of authority and hierarchy."

Nevertheless, Author Nichols now finds the old Puritan tradition doing poorly in the U.S. compared to a vigorous, transplanted Roman Catholicism. In law, education, labor unionism, social service and foreign policy, he writes, the influence of the Protestant majority shows signs of going down by default before the positive, well-organized programs of U.S. Roman Catholicism.

"The Protestant constituency in America was twice as large as the Roman Catholic, yet by 1940, in terms of the conversion and shaping of society, State and culture, Roman Catholicism may have been exerting more influence in American life than all Protestantism . . . What was left of Protestant discipline was democratic, but some [Protestants] had so long avoided measuring their decisions in prayer and discussion together, under the judgment of the living God, that there was fear that in putting their professed faith to the test, they would discover that it was no longer there."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.