Faith in Politics: Religion and Liberal Democracy
Bryan T. McGraw
Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2010 (320
pages)
While theorists and scholars come at liberal democracy from a
variety of angles, it is a rare work that brings many of these disparate
points of view into conversation with one another. That he has succeeded
in doing so would be reason enough to be grateful to Bryan T. McGraw,
Assistant Professor of Politics and International Relations at Wheaton
College.
McGraw magisterially weaves together a variety of strands of
thought and scholarship, beginning with the work of the late John Rawls
and his commentators and critics, perhaps the dominant voices in
Anglo-American liberal political theory. The book also features careful
engagements with proponents of "deliberative democracy" (most
prominently Jurgen Habermas), neo-Calvinist political theory (e.g.,
Jonathan Chaplin), and empirical scholarship on consociationalism and
Christian Democracy in Europe.
The focal point of McGraw's investigation is the ways in which
liberal democratic theory can and cannot accommodate religious groups
whose members wish to organize their lives in "illiberal"
ways. Believing as they do that God's sovereignty extends to all
spheres of human existence, these "religious integrationists"
pose a challenge to the "liberal consensus," which insists
both upon the reformation of religious belief to cohere with concepts of
individual autonomy and upon the predominance of "public
reason" (as opposed to faith-based argumentation) in the public
square.
McGraw is not the first to find fault with this liberal consensus,
but he is perhaps one of its most thorough and perspicacious critics.
While it is impossible in a brief review to do justice to the lines of
reasoning he develops at great length, it is possible to offer a couple
of examples of how he argues. Much of John Rawls's Political
Liberalism is devoted to developing the argument on behalf of an
overlapping consensus of "political, not metaphysical"
principles, while McGraw contends that we should rest satisfied with a
more modest "constitutional consensus," in which citizens
"maintain a sincere commitment to constitutional democracy"
(141) based, not on "political reasons," but rather on, say, a
comprehensive religious concept of personhood. Rawls would regard such a
consensus as dangerously unstable, but McGraw argues that, on the
contrary, any insistence that religious believers abandon their core
commitments when it comes to politics runs the risk of provoking a
reaction against constitutional democracy tout court. In other words, if
the stability of democratic republicanism is a principal concern of
those contemporary liberal theorists who address the role of religious
integrationists in our society, this issue may be better resolved by
leaving them free to bear witness to their faith in the public square,
especially if they are embedded in comprehensive religious institutions
that help them defend their distinctive ways of life.
Similarly, McGraw takes on those liberal theorists who argue that
some sort of comprehensive autonomy is ultimately required for decent
liberal citizenship. He suggests that, instead, a more modest
"political autonomy" or "independence" may serve the
interests of liberal democracy equally well. Religious integrationists
indeed do not cultivate and celebrate the capacity simply to choose
freely without any preconditions, but they are certainly capable, McGraw
argues, of "a workable sort of independence, at least enough to
make consent ... work and be part of a flourishing human life"
(190).
Implicit in these arguments and explicit in McGraw's book as a
whole is the example of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian
Democracy in Europe--above all, in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany,
and Austria. From these cases, McGraw gleans a model of religious
integrationist engagement in pluralistic politics. Embedded in a
comprehensive set of religious, social, and political institutions,
religious integrationists who seek to defend their way of life--and not,
importantly, coercively to impose it on others--can act as responsible
citizens without being remade in the image either of autonomous liberal
individualism or of democratic civic devotion.
Of course, there are plenty of reasons to question whether this old
model of religious integrationist engagement is adequate to the
accommodation of religious groups in contemporary democratic republics.
First, given that the trajectory of Christian Europe seems to have been
a long-term decline into secularization, it is not clear whether these
models of protecting religious integrationism and accommodating religion
offer long-term hope to those who sympathize with these religious
groups. To be sure, there are many ways in which conditions in late
nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Europe are different from those
faced, for example, by American Christians in the early twenty-first
century, but if the model McGraw proffers is just a matter of slightly
slowing the path toward decline, few religious integrationists will be
attracted to it. Of course, if his purpose is to persuade liberal
secularists that religious integrationists are not a threat to the
political arrangements they hold dear, then this is less of an immediate
concern.
Second, while in most nineteenth-century European countries there
were a small number of relatively well-organized Christian denominations
(e.g., Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Dutch Reformed), the twenty-first
century American situation is much more pluralistic, much more
individualistic, and much harder to organize in any sort of coherent
fashion. Yes, there are "Christian" institutions that parallel
their secular counterparts--above all, elementary and secondary schools
and universities, as well as welfare organizations--but they are for the
most part loosely connected with their sponsoring denominations (if any)
and, as they are to some degree in competition with one another, they
cannot present any sort of consistently integrated united front
vis-a-vis "public" institutions. For all the agreements
regarding the battle lines of the "culture wars," for example,
people in the Reformed tradition remain suspicious of their charismatic
brethren, let alone Mormons and Catholics. Then there are the Baptists,
always prone to separate from one another. While McGraw's European
examples are (or were) promising, their success depended on responsible
leadership that could speak for (and to some degree discipline) the rank
and file. Given the American religious marketplace, it is much less
obvious that such an arrangement would be possible here.
Finally, leaving aside for the moment Christians, who have
doctrinal reasons for eschewing the use of coercion in matters of
religion and for whom respect for those created in God's image is
paramount, there are Muslim religious integrationists. While the former
have their own reasons for living peacefully with their fellows in a
secular pluralistic order, this is somewhat less clear for the latter.
McGraw's answer is twofold. Conceding that "theocratic"
Islamist parties are, to put it mildly, problematical, he argues, first,
that in almost every conceivable liberal democratic (Anglo-American or
continental European) context, a Muslim community would be a relatively
small minority. One might surmise that their best prospect is to join in
a coalition with non-Islamic parties. In addition, the fact that Islam
as a whole is not centralized and hierarchical cuts both ways. While
there are no structures of authority to integrate communities and
marginalize extremists, there is also no "monolithic" Islamist
threat.
McGraw's second response is to point to the example of Turkey,
which he acknowledges also cuts both ways:
In the end, McGraw relies very heavily on the ways in which the cut
and thrust of engagement in democratic political life can have a
transformative effect on participants. On this view, what is required is
not so much adherence to a particular theoretically justified way of
making one's arguments or conceiving one's self but, rather,
time spent in the crucible of political conflict and compromise. This is
a problem, he argues, for contemporary American religious
integrationists because "the lack of structurally pluralist options
... leaves ... partisans without an institutional framework in which
they can learn effectively to distinguish well the sorts of goods and
ends proper to democratic politics" (291). More precisely, it
seems, they will have to learn it on their own, rather than from
responsible leaders who can speak authoritatively to and for them.
McGraw is surely correct that when a secularist liberal tells a
religious integrationist that he or she needs to behave, the appeal or
command is likely to provoke a vigorous reaction. We certainly do not
need more theory, at least not more theory of that sort. However, I
cannot imagine the emergence of an American Christian Democratic party,
with its attendant array of social institutions, which seems to be
McGraw's preferred alternative. We may have to rest satisfied with
the more modest process, which we currently have, in which people engage
as individuals and as parts of small, often contingent groups, in
electoral politics and issue advocacy. They will inevitably learn what
works, will be sometimes inspired, and often chastened. What will enable
them to resist the supposed theocratic temptation is, in the end, their
recognition of their fellows as image bearers of God and the distinction
between the City of God and the City of Man.
If McGraw succeeds in persuading liberal democratic theorists that
their concerns about religious integrationists are misplaced, he will
have done both groups an immense service. He will have left the
political process free to do the kind of work it does best, with or
without the assistance of the kind of comprehensive religious, social,
and partisan institutions he favors. From that process, everyone can
learn and everyone can benefit.
--Joseph M. Knippenberg
Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Georgia
It may very well be the case ... that the AKP's leaders are playing
a kind of double game, professing their democratic bona fides while
waiting for the moment to impose an undemocratic Islamist polity.
But even if that is the case, we should not be surprised if such
intentions, should they exist, never come to fruition.... [T]he
logic of electoral competition and the requirements of
parliamentary and democratic government can exert a powerful pull
and reshape intentions, sometimes in ways that surprise the most
reflective of political agents (278-79).