Religious Enemies of Liberalism and Christian Realist Defense: The Battle for the Soul of American Democracy
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R. Ward Holder
St. Anselm College
Date: Monday, September 30, 2024
Time: 12 - 1pm
Location: 24 Quincy Road, Conference Room
In 2023, David P. Gushee published Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies. Gushee’s diagnosis was familiar – that conservative and fundamentalist White Christian movements in America and abroad threatened democracy. Gushee termed this movement “authoritarian reactionary Christianity.” Gushee’s solution, however, is politically problematic. Gushee finds the solution in renewing the democratic covenant, a process that would draw on the Baptist democratic tradition and the Black Christian democratic tradition in the United States. Both of these offer significant flaws.
A different solution comes from Reinhold Niebuhr in his The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In that work, Niebuhr sought to craft an argument about two ways of being in the world, two human paths. That different diagnosis, Holder will argue, allows for a different proposed resolution that is more politically realistic. He wrote, “…some of the greatest perils to democracy arise from the fanaticism of moral idealists who are not conscious of the corruption of self-interest in their professed ideals. Democracy therefore requires something more than a religious devotion to moral ideals. It requires religious humility.” Niebuhr’s religious and democratic humility, sometimes called his two-fold test of tolerance, provides a far more practicable solution.
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R. Ward Holder is professor of theology and politics at Saint Anselm College, and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Public Life at the college. Among his other works, he has authored John Calvin and the Grounding of Interpretation: Calvin’s First Commentaries, Brill, 2006; Crisis and Renewal: The Era of the Reformations, Westminster John Knox, 2009; and has edited A Companion to Paul in the Reformation, Brill, 2009; and John Calvin in Context, Cambridge University Press, 2019. Among his political theological studies he has co-authored The Irony of Barack Obama: Barack Obama, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Problem of Christian Statecraft, Ashgate, 2012; and Reinhold Niebuhr in Theory and Practice: Christian Realism and Democracy in America in the Twenty-First Century, Lexington, 2019. His essays have appeared in Christian Century, Church History, Politics and Religion, and Society. His latest book is John Calvin and the Christian Tradition: Scripture, Memory, and the Western Mind, Cambridge, 2022.