Christianity and Democracy

This ongoing project excavates and critically examines historical and contemporary articulations of the relationship between Christianity and democracy, both in theory and practice.

The connection between Christianity and democracy is that democracy enables humans to realize their true natures as those created in the image of God. Democracy in all its forms is premised on several shared assumptions: the need to respect the equality and dignity of each individual; the importance of dialogue and debate as a means of resolving conflicts and solving shared problems (rather than killing, coercing, or persecuting those we disagree with); and that people should have a say in decisions that affect them. Democratic politics thereby also entails a commitment to environments in which shared worlds of meaning and action can be created and sustained. By contrast, the proactive use of physical violence – beatings, kidnapping, torture, bombing, and the like – by state and nonstate actors represents the destruction of the institutions and customs through which communication and relationship between friends, strangers, and enemies are made possible.

The theological commitment of Christianity is that each person has an intrinsic dignity that must be honoured and that everyone matters equally, no matter their station, situation, identity, or ideological commitment. Democracy is taken to be the form of politics that best honours the dignity of each person whilst also seeking to ensure, as far as is possible, that everyone can participate in forming a common life and so fulfil their personhood. Rather than be acted on and have their world determined and controlled by the one or the few, all can have agency in cultivating and contributing to shared worlds of meaning and action. Democracy thereby provides the conditions and means through which human personhood is actualized in and through free and mutually responsible relationships with and for others. Central to this is making provision for each person to have a hand in shaping and benefitting from the material and social conditions under which they live and work (hence, for example, it generates active support for trade unions and community organizing). Other political systems inherently inhibit such participation and thereby prohibit the full realization of each person as free and equal in and through relation to others.

Christian moral and political thought and practice are a consistent point of reference at various moments of political crisis. Central to these responses was the refusal of Manichean frames of reference and the advocacy of democratic means of addressing shared problems. This is witnessed in the work of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement in the 1930s as they sought an alternative to militarism and dehumanising forms of industrial capitalism; theologians and philosophers such as Jacques Maritain, Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth, and Archbishop William Temple writing defences of democracy in response to the rise of fascist and communist totalitarianism in the 1940s; Léopold Sédar Senghor’s critique of colonialism and advocacy of African self-determination in the 1950s; Dorothy Cotton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s vision of beloved community as the alternative to white supremacy and Jim Crow laws in the 1960s; Latin American liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutiérrez struggles against dictatorships and exploitative forms of political economy in the 1970s; Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s account of ubuntu as the basis for a democratic political order in the context of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa in the 1980s and 90s; and Pope Francis’s restatement of Catholic social teaching in response to climate change and mass migration today.

Outputs to date include a series of conference, the Listen, Organize, Act! Podcast, and a book: Luke Bretherton, Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2019).

Next Conference: Political Theologies of a Democratic Common Life, 24th – 26th March 2025, New College, Oxford

Recent publication: Luke Bretherton, ‘Christianity and Democracy,’ St Andrews Encyclopedia of Theology, on-line (2024) https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/Democracy