Religious Enemies of Liberalism and Christian Realist Defense: The Battle for the Soul of American Democracy

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.