Pluralism and Life Together: On the Relationship between Religion, Culture, and Democracy

The nineteenth-century economist Alfred Marshall once observed that “the two great forming agencies of the world’s history have been the religious and the economic” (1890, 1). If we were to take Marshall’s invocation of the “economic” as roughly equivalent to what could be termed “cultural,” we might only add that the political dimension of human history must be given its due alongside the economic and religious. This new scholarly journal is devoted to exploring questions of such historically formative phenomena: religion, culture, and democracy.

To know where we are headed we must know where we have come from and where we are. The goal of this journal is to come to a better understanding of each one of these. While we are devoted to the highest standards of interdisciplinary scholarship, we do not confuse these practices with a renunciation of moral principle. Indeed, the editorial vision of the Journal of Religion, Culture & Democracy is informed by a deeply value-laden perspective on the origin, nature, and telos of the human person and human society.

This does not mean that the scholarship that appears in this journal is bounded by an imposed univocity. We are, in fact, committed to what has been called principled pluralism, a perspective that does not seek uniformity of thought and expression but which rather welcomes and respects diverse worldviews and commitments that arise out of deeply held and sincere convictions. Describing what he calls “confident pluralism,” John Inazu writes that such an approach “allows genuine difference to exist without suppressing or minimizing our firmly held convictions. We can embrace pluralism precisely because we are confident in our own beliefs, and in the groups and institutions that sustain them” (2016, 7).

This essay is an attempt to articulate the animating spirit of the Journal of Religion, Culture & Democracy by way of introduction to it as a venture and by way of invitation to those who are interested in contributing to this scholarly enterprise. Each one of these key elements of study are occasions for deep difference as well as discovery.

Religion

Humans have long recognized that transcendent reality has some overriding claims on our existence. A classic ancient summary captures this well: “There is a true law, a right reason, conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil.” This perspective includes various dimensions and features of this law, but interestingly also attributes its origin to the divine. Thus, we read, “God himself is its author,—its promulgator,—its enforcer.” The law is likewise connected to human nature itself: “He who obeys it not, flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man” (Cicero 1841, 1:270).

Piety, understood as the duty of human beings to the divine, has likewise long been seen as the first and fundamental virtue enjoined by this “true law.” The first table of the Decalogue, having to do with duties toward God, precedes the second table, which governs human interrelationships (Exod. 20:1–17; Deut. 5:4–21). The “first and greatest commandment” as taught by Jesus is “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” while another “is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’” (Matt. 22:37–39 NIV).

The Roman philosopher Cicero bequeathed to us a classical definition of religion, understood as derived from the Latin relegere, “to retrace or re-read,” as distinguished from superstition. The truly religious are those “who carefully reviewed and so to speak retraced all the lore of ritual.” Attending to what worship of the gods requires is seen as constitutive of what it means to be rightly religious: “The best and also the purest, holiest and most pious way of worshipping the gods is ever to venerate them with purity, sincerity and innocence both of thought and of speech” (Cicero 1967, 193).

For his part the church father Augustine identified religion with religere (to bind again), in the sense that true worship reunites us with God, a relationship that had been corrupted in the fall into sin. “Being attached to Him, or rather let me say, re-attached,—for we had detached ourselves and lost hold of Him,—being, I say, re-attached to Him,” writes Augustine, “we tend towards Him by love, that we may rest in Him, and find our blessedness by attaining that end” (1887, 182). In these two definitions we see the twin dynamics of religion corresponding to an emphasis either on human or divine agency. On the one side, there is an emphasis on the careful devotion that is required on the part of humans and due toward the divine. On the other is the relationship between the two which stands in need of repair, and which, from Augustine’s perspective, depends on the priority of divine action to correct.

From either perspective, however, religion is not merely a matter of personal opinion or a private affair. Piety and impiety have social consequences. What a person and a people believe about their history, their calling, and their destiny influences how they live their lives and the kinds of things they say and do. No less a critic of magisterial religious claims than Jürgen Habermas has acknowledged the historical salience of this in his evaluation of the roots of contemporary Western societies:

Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk. (Habermas 2002, 149)

Culture

The religious cultus is directly formative of the culture. Understood in this sense culture is not reducible to the artistic expressions of leisure, although it certainly includes them. Neither is it simply about the higher spiritual or immaterial aspects of human existence and society, although it includes them as well. Culture in its broadest and most comprehensive sense includes everything resulting from human action in the world. This involves both material artifacts and nonmaterial realities and institutions, and includes what we might identify as “economic” as well as other aspects of human existence. We might say that culture refers to “everything whereby man develops and perfects his many bodily and spiritual qualities; he strives by his knowledge and his labor, to bring the world itself under his control. He renders social life more human both in the family and the civic community, through improvement of customs and institutions. Throughout the course of time he expresses, communicates and conserves in his works, great spiritual experiences and desires, that they might be of advantage to the progress of many, even of the whole human family” (Paul VI 1965, §53). Roman Catholic social teaching has expounded a holistic understanding of culture, focusing on the interrelationships between humanity and the rest of creation, including the physical environment and the natural world, as well as the “integral ecology” within which humanity and all of creation flourishes (Francis 2015, §§137–62).

The Reformed tradition within Christianity develops a similarly comprehensive understanding of culture. As Henry Van Til explicates it, culture is “that activity of man, the image-bearer of God, by which he fulfills the creation mandate to cultivate the earth, to have dominion over it and to subdue it. The term is also applied to the result of such activity, namely, the secondary environment which has been superimposed upon nature by man’s creative effort.” In this way, culture “is an expression of man’s essential being as created in the image of God, and since man is essentially a religious being, it is expressive of his relationship to God, that is, of his religion” (Van Til 1959, xvii).

Culture includes the arenas of art, economics, work, politics, education, technology, family, worship, and more. It refers to the human response to the divine cultural mandate identified in the scriptural call to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28 NIV). Culture has to do with material creations, like buildings and cell phones, as well as immaterial institutions. Culture thus includes “the institutional or systemic patterns of thought, behavior, and relationship that govern our lives and the spiritual realm that animates them” (Hunter 2010, 157). These are in part encoded in laws and constitutions as well as habituated in customs and mores.

Religion and culture understood in this way are intimately connected. Culture flows from one’s understanding of transcendent obligations and duties. Different religions therefore tend to manifest in different cultures with different characteristic emphases, values, and norms.

Speaking particularly of Christianity, the Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck observed the close connection between religion and its social and cultural expression. From a narrowly religious perspective, he writes, “The significance of the gospel does not depend on its influence on culture, its usefulness for life today; it is a treasure in itself, a pearl of great value, even if it might not be a leaven.” And, he concedes, “Although the worth of Christianity is certainly not only, not exclusively, and not even in the first place determined by its influence on civilization, it nevertheless is undeniable that Christianity indeed exerts such influence.” Returning to the biblical images again, he continues, “The kingdom of heaven is not only a pearl; it is a leaven as well. Whoever seeks it is offered all kinds of other things. Godliness has a promise for the future, yet also for life today. In keeping God’s commandments, there is great reward. In its long and rich history, Christianity has borne much valuable fruit for all of society in all its relationships, in spite of the unfaithfulness of its confessors” (Bavinck 2008, 141).

The church understood primarily in its institutional expression corresponds to the gospel understood as a pearl of great price, proclaiming as it is called to do, “that heavenly, spiritual matters, that the kingdom of God and his righteousness in Christ, are a tangible, completely trustworthy reality and that their value infinitely exceeds all visible and temporal things.” The gospel understood as a leavening and reforming power in society and culture, however, comes to expression through the life and work of Christians in the world. The gospel “creates the greatest reformation by setting people free from guilt, renewing the heart, and thus in principle restoring the right relationship of man to God. And so from this center it influences all earthly relationships in a reforming and renewing way” (Bavinck 2008, 142).^[1]

Democracy

This organic perspective on the relationship between religion and culture captures an important element of the ways in which societies might be renewed. Cultures result from human convictions about reality and what is due to and demanded of human beings. But cultural institutions, including legal forms and political institutions, in turn form and inform the worldviews of people living in a particular polity.

The relationship between religion and politics is often antagonistic. As Richard John Neuhaus put it, “Religion and politics are today engaged in a struggle over culture definition and culture formation” (1986, 132). Martin Luther King Jr.’s perspective on the battle for civil rights in the United States illuminates this dialectic of law and morality: “Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless. The law cannot make an employer love an employee, but it can prevent him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin. The habits, if not the hearts, of people have been and are being altered every day by legislative acts, judicial decisions, and executive orders” (King 2012, 29–30). King continues, however, noting that “we must admit that the ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable…. Desegregation will break down the legal barriers and bring men together physically, but something must touch the hearts and souls of men so that they will come together spiritually because it is natural and right” (30).

The American founders were cognizant of this dynamic between positive law and moral culture. Modern political revolutions, such as the American and French revolutions, are complex phenomena, but in part they turn on an understanding of the rights of citizens to some degree of self-determination—or at least representation. This is what modern democratic regimes aim to embody, understood in their most benign sense. It matters a great deal, however, whether the claims of legitimate popular sovereignty are rooted in deeper ontological affirmations and even religious worldviews or whether these claims represent merely the immanent frame within which all political expression finds legitimacy.

One way of coming to grips with the secularization thesis and its variants that came to the fore in the twentieth century is to recognize that human beings are, in fact, naturally and fundamentally religious. Where humans do not worship God or some other conception of a transcendent reality, that veneration will inevitably revert to something else: an ideology, a modus vivendi, a charismatic leader, or some combination of these. Political identity, particularly as connected to the nation-state, is a leading contender for human loyalty and reverence (we might recall here “the virtue of patriotism,” which Cicero invokes in the opening of his De republica). Like any good thing, however, the tendency of national identities—including democratic regimes—to become idols and even demonic, must be reckoned with (Legutko 2016).

One of the celebrated theorists of modernity once contended that “it is impossible to live in peace with people one believes to be damned” (Rousseau 1997, 151). Whether democratic regimes today can prove Rousseau wrong remains perhaps the great existential challenge of the age.

The Dignity of Difference

The interrelationship between religion, culture, and democratic institutions is complex. As Neuhaus has summarized it, “Religion would appear to be the ground or the depth-level of culture. Or, as it has sometimes been proposed, religion is the heart of culture and culture is the form of religion. On this view, then, politics is a function of culture and culture, in turn, is reflective of (if not a function of) religion” (1986, 132).

Formally and theoretically speaking this all might be straightforward enough. But these theoretical complexities become exponentially more difficult (and intriguing) as they come to concrete expression. The sociologist Peter Berger, himself a one-time exponent of the secularization thesis, concludes that “modernity does not necessarily secularize. What modernity necessarily does is pluralize.” By this he means that “all the basic forces of modernization bring about a situation where most people constantly encounter beliefs, values and lifestyles different from the ones in which they were originally raised” (Berger 2011, 12). Or as Rousseau could put it, the modern world continues to bring people into contact who believe the other to be damned—or if not damned, at least deplorable.

This perhaps is the acid test of our world today at the intersection of religion, culture, and democracy: How do people behave toward those who differ from one another in significant—even perhaps the most meaningful—ways? How are those who are the most conspicuously different from the dominant culture treated? Ruth Wisse notes that the very existence of minority communities that are rooted in transcendent claims about reality and truth threaten majority groups who cannot abide the existence of deep difference (Wisse 1992).

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts the challenge in clear terms as he explores the virulence of antisemitism and its mutable expressions over the centuries. “Antisemitism,” he observes, “is the world’s most reliable early warning sign of a major threat to freedom, humanity and the dignity of difference” (Sacks 2017). Is the scapegoating of others unavoidable? Or can we somehow find a way to do justice to our shared human nature even as we respect the profound differences in moral and religious commitments?

The ability to sustain life together in which deep difference can be respected and dignified is under significant strain. The Journal of Religion, Culture & Democracy is devoted to the principled and scholarly investigation of these challenges.