Religious Enemies of Liberalism and Christian Realist Defense: The Battle for the Soul of American Democracy
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.
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.
Gushee, David P. Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2023.
Herrmann, Andrew F. “Purity, Nationalism, and Whiteness: The Fracturing of Fundamentalist Evangelicalism.” International Review of Qualitative Research 13, no. 4 (2021): 414-432. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940844720937813
Holder, R. Ward. “Reinhold Niebuhr, Virtue and Political Society: A Key to the Christian Character of Christian Realism.” In Paradoxical Virtue: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Virtue Tradition, edited by Kevin Carnahan and David True. New York: Routledge, 2020.
Hunter, James Davison. “Religion and Political Civility: The Coming Generation of American Evangelicals.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 23, no. 4 (1984): 364–80. https://doi.org/10.2307/1385725
Josephson, Peter, and R. Ward Holder. Reinhold Niebuhr in Theory and Practice: Christian Realism and Democracy in America in the Twenty-First Century. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018.
Lovin, Robin W. “Christian Realism for the Twenty-First Century.” Journal of Religious Ethics 37, no. 4 (2009): 669-682. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9795.2009.00407
Paipais, Vassilios. “Reinhold Niebuhr and the Christian Realist Pendulum.” Journal of International Political Theory 17, no. 2 (2020): 185-202. https://doi.org/10.1177/1755088220979001
Zhou, Shaoqing. “American Evangelical Nationalism: History, Status Quo, and Outlook.” International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology 7, no. 22 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41257-023-00101-3
On June 30, 2024, NPR published an article concerning a new Louisiana law that requires the Ten Commandments to be displayed in all public classrooms. The law is part of a more significant movement of conservative Christians to incorporate religion into schools. The law has been challenged and brought to court, but if it stands, teachers will be required by law to post the Ten Commandments in their classrooms. However, the punishment for not doing so remains unknown. The source of the funds for the Ten Commandments displays remains undetermined, with some lawmakers saying donations will fund them. However, the law also leaves room for government funding. This case in Louisiana offers a glimpse into the threat religious nationalism poses to democracy, as exemplified by their attempts to impose their religious beliefs on secular and non-Christian groups and their willingness to disregard religious tolerance in a country where religious freedom is paramount. Holder’s lunch colloquium will unpack the problem that white Christian Nationalism poses to democracy.