The GOP’s presidential primary is functionally finished, even before Super Tuesday arrives this week, and the 2024 general election is all but underway. Christian voters are once more faced with a pressing query of easy methods to “vote our values” in an increasingly secular and hostile public square.
Unfortunately, many outstanding Christian voices offer little help. Their focus tends to be an ill-defined Christian nationalism and/or narrow policy issues. They sound uncertain, if not obtuse, about what Christian political motion in America should appear like. Sometimes they even appear to suggest—perhaps inadvertently—that Christian political engagement itself, not only Christian nationalism, is a threat to our country, or that there’s no obligatory relationship between Christianity and democracy.
These pundits and public intellectuals can have good intentions. But their advice doesn’t answer the questions of individuals within the pews who’re viscerally experiencing a decline of Christian influence in America. Rather, the overarching message to evangelical voters is that they’re incorrect about their political theology and there’s little to nothing to fret about in American democracy—or, a minimum of, nothing Christian engagement with politics could improve.
We are evangelical political scientists at Biola University, and we consider such misguided pondering insults lay evangelicals’ intelligence and fails to deal with their real and essential concerns. In fact, the common evangelical voter’s intuition is correct: American democracy is in trouble; it does need an engaged Christian church to correct course; and there is ample evidence to support that claim.
To be clear: We aren’t advocating for a longtime church, a government directed by the institutional church, or any encroachment on non-Christians’ religious liberty. But we do consider, consonant with the most effective episodes in American history, that a vibrant and culturally influential Christianity is important to preserving the United States as a free and democratic society.
Our constitutional system and political culture wouldn’t exist without Christian ideas, nor will they be intelligible or sustainable in the long term if meaningful, orthodox Christian influence disappears. Christianity provided the vision of creation, knowledge, and humanity that made liberal democracy possible. Indeed, any society by which democracy flourishes is drawing water from wells that Christianity dug.
Our history tells us as much. There were many profound disagreements among the many Founding Fathers, but they nearly all agreed that a virtuous citizenry was essential to a well-functioning democracy—and that a virtuous citizenry required religion, which in that context meant Christianity. “Our Constitution was made just for an ethical and spiritual People,” wrote John Adams in perhaps the best-known quote to this effect. “It is wholly inadequate to the federal government of every other.”
Mere procedural democracy is definitely attainable without such a non secular grounding, as demonstrated by European countries which have maintained democratic processes whilst they secularized, or through constitutional design influenced by other, more Christian societies (e.g., Japan).
But at its best, America has boasted greater than procedural democracy. Indeed, mere proceduralism—as Abraham Lincoln argued in his debates with Stephen Douglas over slavery and the character of human rights—saps the moral legitimacy of a real democracy. That is, a society that votes for a representative government but has no deeper grounding in Christianity-derived ideas about liberty and individual rights may technically be democratic, but it can not have the culture of freedom, congeniality, and open debate to which we’ve historically aspired in America.
It is Christianity that provided a secure moral foundation for these cultural elements of American democracy, and our polity continues to want Christianity to secure these principles, constitutional structures, and social norms. So well understood was the Christianity-democracy connection within the founding era that French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville called religion America’s first political institution because “it doesn’t give [Americans] a taste for freedom [but] singularly facilitates their use of it.”
As our culture secularizes, then, the vitality and viability of American democracy are anything but guaranteed. Plenty of secular scholars affirm human dignity and rights, but once they achieve this from premises inconsistent with Christianity or the transcendent moral grounds it provides, the logic becomes shaky and infrequently incoherent. Beyond that bellwether in academia, it’s in no way a settled query whether a society charging toward secular horizons can maintain a healthy democratic order long-term.
Evangelical voters will not be precisely articulating this query because the source of their concern. But we consider that is the uncertainty within the minds and hearts of our brothers and sisters that an excessive amount of writing on Christian political motion fails to deal with—and that it’s a legitimate concern. We consider a good or true democracy needs Christianity, and that a powerful symbiotic relationship between the 2 is useful to the common good.
There is ample evidence for this belief. Empirically, the widely used Freedom House rankings of governments worldwide show democracy and Christianity aren’t at all times found together. But the rankings also suggest that democracy is most robust, classically liberal, and sturdy in predominantly Christian societies. The non-Christian democracies of today too often turn into the authoritarian dictatorships and illiberal democracies of tomorrow. India and Turkey are excellent current examples of such “democratic backsliding.”
The historical record is more complicated: Democracy originated in pre-Christian Greece; Christianity predated the post-Enlightenment era by which democratic governance became the Western norm; and plenty of pre-Reformation Christians were skeptical of democracy as a sound form of presidency. In a strictly chronological sense, then, it’s true that a minimum of procedural democracy can exist with no Christian context—though it’s also true that modern democracy grew out of the uniquely Christian culture of Western Europe, and that Protestant missionary efforts greatly, if not directly, contributed to democracy’s spread across the globe.
But the theological case for Christianity’s unique value to democracy is ancient and compelling. Great minds of Christianity from Peter and Augustine to Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin all believed that a people faithful to the revealed will of God were critical to the peaceful stability and flourishing of any society. This shouldn’t be controversial for Christians: If we consider that God created and ordered the morality of our world, then we must always understand that following God’s commands will generally foster domestic tranquility and peaceful relations between neighbors and nations.
While many civic virtues conducive to a free society are also discussed in Islamic, Chinese, and classical Western philosophy, as Christians, we after all consider God’s moral law is present in its fullest sense within the Christian tradition. (Even many skeptics and atheists will concede Christianity literally remade the world, and in its flowering seeded modern democracy.) Here within the States, the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” because the Declaration of Independence so eloquently says, fundamentally inform the American political order. Respecting them will probably be essential to sustaining that order in years to return.
A Christian foundation for democracy isn’t more vital than in moments, like ours, of enormous societal upheaval and intense political animosity. Christianity provides a transcendent moral framework. It makes claims—concerning the nature of humanity, our world, and our responsibilities to God and neighbor—that supersede the authority of the state and so limit it to certain legitimate ends. It is that this moral transcendence that establishes a critical foundation for a healthy democracy that effectively limits the totalitarian impulses of factions of which James Madison famously warned.
Without anything like a state church, Christianity’s influence can shape a government’s institutions and practices. It can provide a permanent basis for human rights, dignity, and freedom that doesn’t depend on the mercurial and capricious dictates of human rule. In this sense, Christianity serves as a critical check on the ever-present tendency of the state to expand its power on the expense of human liberty.
This isn’t only true on the grand scale—in academic philosophy or in some abstract sense. It is the institution of the local church, animated by an ethos of servant leadership and brotherly love, that lays this critical foundation. The local church is (or needs to be) the cornerstone of civil society, publicly and vocally holding residents and state alike to a transcendent moral standard.
For American evangelicals who feel the danger to democracy that our post-Christian culture entails, this role of the local church is sweet news. If you intuit, rightly, that the soul of America isn’t well because its moral foundation is dangerously eroded and that this poses a big threat to American democracy, the local church is where the work of rebuilding that foundation starts.
And it must be rebuilt, if the broader structure of democracy is to endure within the United States. A substantive Christian presence is obligatory for a democracy worthy of the name—a society free in practice, not only on paper. Society is greater than the state, and it’s churches that may hold the polity together by providing transcendent support and limits for democracy itself.
As it’s, we aren’t sanguine about our democracy’s future if churches and Christian leaders neglect (or undermine) their civic role, and that future isn’t abstract for us. It is the longer term into which we send our students. It is the longer term we’re raising our youngsters to inherit. It is the longer term that, should the Lord tarry, it’s our Christian duty to steward well—one by which “we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness” (2 Tim. 2:2).
Now and in that future, Christianity doesn’t need democracy, but an excellent and just democracy most definitely needs Christianity.
Scott Waller, Darren Patrick Guerra, and Tim Milosch all teach within the political science department at Biola University.
