Democracy vs. Theocracy
Photo by MIKE STOLL on Unsplash
Recently I had a Twitter kerfuffle with youngish academically credentialed Calvinists active in conservative evangelicalism who advocated taking away the vote from women. In civil society, households rather than individuals should be represented, as they largely were before America ratified the 19th amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. The heads of households are typically the husbands and fathers. One of these Calvinists also advocated a state church, to be determined by the local religious majority. Like others of this perspective, he denied that he is a theonomist but is simply a “magisterial Protestant.” Others claim they are simply articulating “classical Protestant” teaching. After all, didn’t the Protestant Reformers advocate for state churches and insist that civil magistrates must privilege and uphold Christian doctrine?
For these so-called “magisterial Protestants,” modernity is corrupt and the aberrant exception to the human story. A return to “traditional” societies, in which humanity was supposedly wiser and perhaps even less sinful, is urgently needed. Whatever their claims, they echo the old Christian Reconstructionism, advocating a return to Old Testament law, that occupied a subculture in the 1970s and 1980s but whose main thinkers, such as R. J. Rushdoony, died years ago. But there is no new thing under the sun, and bad ideas rarely fade forever. They regurgitate.
You might think that such reactionary voices are fringe and inconsequential, and maybe they are. But I’m not so sure. Integralism, a Catholic school of thought advocating the paramountcy of Roman Catholicism in civil society and law, is a growing movement especially amongst youngish Catholic intellectuals who often receive major media attention. These integralists and their allies have influence within the New Right. A Protestant version of integralism was inevitable and naturally flows from the growing currents of “post-liberalism,” which is largely post-democratic. It will be interesting to see if theocratic Calvinist and Catholic anti-democrats will collaborate. My guess is that they will coalesce about as well as they did during the French Wars of Religion. In fairness, these persons are understandably frustrated with postmodern decadence, materialism and aggressive secularism. They typically disdain “liberal” democracy as a failed experiment. Sometimes they, especially the Catholic integralists, see America’s Founding as built on false premises. They believe that rights-based individualism and pluralism lead to hedonism.
Democracy and pluralism are in retreat globally and, arguably, even in America. The far-left pushes identity politics that consign individual persons to categories of victim and oppressor, whose conflict is insoluble. It demagogically assails freedom of speech and religious freedom as legacies of Western colonialism, racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity. It insists voices opposing the woke zeitgeist must be silenced. Part of the right has responded in kind with its own illiberalism portraying historic liberties and free debate as open windows for postmodern nihilism. They yearn for a traditional society in which the state coercively imposes their principles for a good society, if even at the cost of liberty. Big Brother knows best, if he is rightly chosen.
Integralists both Catholic and Protestant align with the New Right in their disdain for liberal democracy and pluralism. They believe the age of classical liberalism, dating to John Locke in the 1600s, failed and is now closing, unable any longer to harmonize its contradictions. Now there are opportunities to restore Western Civilization to a more systematic Christendom in which the state partners with the church to uphold Christianity, suppressing vice and heresy, and enforcing the superior standards of traditional, pre-modern society. To most Americans, including Christians, such a scenario may sound extraordinary. But we are living in exceptional times in which some believe revolutionary measures are needed to politically redeem a depraved society.
Methodists should lead in pouring ice cold water on these revolutionary, extremist and theocratic ambitions. First, Methodism historically and attitudinally is skeptical about ambitious, sweeping social change and political revolutions. Wesley’s quiet but steady evangelistic social renewal of 18th-century Britain, contrasting with the more abrupt change in France, is a model. As Billy Abraham noted, Wesley himself was Burkean, not Robespierrean. We Methodists generally believe in reforming what already exists, not smashing it in favor of some new imagined perfect order.
We Methodists are also skeptical of deriding the individual. Human institutions, such as government, the church, and the family, are ordained by God to advance His will for human flourishing on earth. But it’s individuals who distinctly bear His image, are responsible for their own sins, are judged and redeemed. Individuals cannot be subsumed into larger collectives in ways that diminish their dignity and God-given purposes. The Calvinist “magisterial Protestants” who assert women should be politically subordinated to male heads of households, with households prioritized over persons, deny this reality. It’s no accident that wherever the Gospel has spread, the rights and dignity of women have advanced, especially under Methodism.
No less importantly, our Methodist social outlook intrinsically cherishes a wide understanding of religious freedom in which the state and civil society protect free speech and conscience rights for all persons and groups. Early Methodism in America supported disestablishing the old state churches still existing in some colonies and fully exploited the opportunities for unfettered religious dissemination. Wherever Methodism has spread around the world, its spirit has been quietly corrosive to authoritarian structures that restrict political and religious freedom. Methodist political theology assumes that each individual, Christian and non-Christian, carries the political image of God and is a figurative viceroy of divine authority, responsible for good governance of justice and mercy for all. Coercive regimes contravene the Methodist vision of divine grace working through willing individuals to achieve God’s purposes on earth. No human institution can rightfully deprive the God-imaged individual of their inherent rights and duties, especially regarding each person’s freely chosen stance towards his or her Creator.
Mid-20th-century British historian and Methodist layman Herbert Butterfield, a Cambridge professor best known for his 1931 The Whig Interpretation of History, articulates this Wesleyan perspective in his 1951 History and Human Relations. He wrote that Christian-influenced civilization must move towards greater respect for individual people and their options, as the element of voluntariness in society is an “important factor in a religion so personal and intimate.” He wrote:
A Christian civilization, precisely because it must embrace so high a conception of personality, must move towards what Christians themselves may regard as its own undoing – towards freedom of conscience instead of greater solidarity in the faith. A world in which personality and conscience are respected, so that men may choose the god they will worship and the moral end they will serve – this, and only this, is a Christian civilization when human development has reached a certain point…Since it cannot be argued that unregenerate man is naturally Christian, it is bad tactics as well as bad ethics for Christians to dwell too greatly on the advantages of uniformity as such. Uniformity would only be too likely to come at their expense – the unbeliever treating them to those severities which, so long as they had the power to do so, they meted out to him. It is legitimate then, for Christians to hope to convert as many people as possible, but not to translate this hope into a dream of terrestrial power, or to expect from Providence that the dice shall be loaded in their favor and the forces of the world itself ranged on their side. We must first praise God for the human intellect and the freedom of the mind, and only after that is it legitimate to pray that men – as free men – may come into some degree of unison. Christians are strongest if, regarding themselves as the servants rather than the masters of men, they claim no peculiar rights against society as such. They must claim the right to worship the God in Whom they believe, and they have no justification for regretting that others should have the same freedom in the matters that most highly concern human beings. This tolerance is the minimum that we must have to make a Christian civilization.
Methodism has been central to creating and sustaining the American branch of Christian civilization, and its theme across the centuries has been, however haphazardly, responsible liberty for all. This understanding is increasingly international, although always challenged. A free society that protects religious freedom and does not privilege any sect is one in which the Gospel can best operate and better reflects God’s desire for willing hearts. The integralists, Catholic and Protestant, nostalgically romanticize an ideal past where societies were legally Christian. As Butterfield noted, they imagine a “happy agreement about fundamentals [but] close their eyes to the ugliness of the methods by which such a system has to be achieved.”
Unlike the integralists, and other aspiring theocrats, Methodism does not close its eyes and romanticize the past, when humanity was as fallen as it is now, and often living in even more ungodly circumstances. Nor does Methodism grimly assume that God’s best acts are over and that he is now receding. Instead, Methodism sees God fully redeeming the world, with his greatest triumphs yet ahead. We don’t look back but forward, hopeful and confident that as the Gospel spreads, so too will civilization move forward with jumps and starts, by divine grace, despite human cupidity and failure.
Civilizational advance entails dignity for all, in which each person, bearing God’s political image, chooses his or her path. Amid those choices there is Christ, who across the ages declares: “Come whosoever will.” Methodists and others in the days ahead, amid rising challenges to democracy and to religious freedom, must make the spiritual case for government by consent and not by coercion.
Mark Tooley is the President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, DC.