Do Democracy and Religion Need Each Other?

Religion seems to be divorcing democracy. Not that the relationship has ever been easy or straightforward, but two challenges to the relationship appear to have arrived at the same time—a decline in the public influence of politically liberalizing religion and a rise in influence of forms of religion that are hostile to democracy, or at least have less stake in advancing a climate of democracy.[1] This comes with extremist rhetoric, disproportionate support for candidates with autocratic aspirations, and deep suspicion of pluralism. And it is directed not just toward democratic procedures (fair elections, peaceful transfer of power, protection of minority rights, and such), but also toward the norms of tolerance, truth-telling, deliberation, and mutual respect that shape a democratic ethos. This isn’t to say that those norms have ever held full sway in any democracy, but in many religious spaces they are increasingly not even aspired to. Witness this in U.S., Israel, parts of Europe, Turkey, India, Russia, and elsewhere.

Religion can still open individuals and communities to traces of genuine transcendence by inviting us to inhabit space and time via shared liturgies, arts, prayer, study, social critique, informed action, and related practices. It can challenge unsustainable assumptions and aspirations around which we organize our social and economic lives. 

I think we need a better conversation about how religion influences not just our positions on public policies, but faith’s relationship to contemporary democracy as such—as a form of governance, a set of social norms, and an ethos (or culture). And we need a parallel conversation about how dynamics within contemporary democracy are distorting religion.

The Water We’re Swimming In

Pondering all of this, I was recently given a small book by the influential German sociologist Hartmut Rosa. It’s plainly titled: Democracy Needs Religion (Polity, 2024). I wondered what this critical theorist, influenced by the Marxian impulses of the Frankfurt School, might have to say about this. The book is a published lecture, so it’s brief. It was also delivered to an ecclesial audience, and though it was expanded for its English edition, it keeps a Christian orientation. It might need to be nuanced in other settings, but I found the book an awfully good opening word for a revived conversation here.[2] It describes social realities that affect or shape both religion and democracy, suggesting that if we want a productive conversation about faith and democracy we should take a step back and look at the water they’re both swimming in. 

In brief, Rosa says democracy needs religion not primarily because of some moral code that religion teaches or social service that religion provides, but because of the unique role religion can play in cultivating ways of being that shape democratic culture. Not that religious institutions are procedurally democratic themselves, but no matter how religious institutions are themselves governed they have the potential to till the cultural seedbed for democracy in a broad sense—in ways we abandon to our peril. And societies appear to be incapable of fully tilling that soil without religion. To understand this claim free of any social conservatism that it might seem to echo, it helps to understand a bit about Rosa’s critical theory in general, where the dynamics affecting both democracy and religion come into view.

Dubious Pyramid Schemes

Rosa suggests that late-modern societies are sort of like giant pyramid schemes, funded by a set of fragile promises.[3] The biggest of those fragile promises parodies what religion has historically called the remedy (remedium) or mending (tikkun) of our personal and social ills through rituals of access to a transcendent realm. That work of remediation in the modern period has been given over to human ingenuity largely free of transcendent reference, within what philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “immanent frame.”[4] This means an ever accelerating and expanding effort to make the world knowable and controllable via discovery, prediction, innovation, commodification, autonomy, and self-expression. Even spirituality is drawn into this reduction, as if a snake were eating its tail. 

As Rosa sees it, this promise of accelerating control is not simply a characteristic of these societies; it’s their essence. It’s what makes a society modern, sustaining and stabilizing it, shaping its common sense. We absorb an idea that to be human is to strive, and to strive is to seek to control the uncontrollable. This requires accelerating innovation, accumulation, accommodation, dynamism, and growth (growth of, growth in, and growth toward). “If we’re not growing, we’re dying,” as the saying goes. If we’re not moving we’re falling back. If there is no pressure there is no equilibrium. If we are not increasing our share we’re losing our place. We lean forward so we’re not blown over by the wind, forgetting that we’re creating the very winds that are blowing us over. 

Within all of this, we’ve made a series of unsustainable sub-wagers. These leave us bound to cycles of irreconcilable conflicts, reactions and counterreactions, as well as personal, social, and economic demands that are out of proportion with both the natural world and human capacity. The requirements of contemporary life risks stretching our bodies, minds, emotions, relationships, and communities beyond their limits. The facts of aging and suffering, the long-suffering qualities of love, and the kinds of listening that make it possible to live nonviolently as we jostle against each other bring a different experience of time, a different kind of patience, a different sense of power, possession, and control than what modern life promises us (and demands of us). Our capacities for what Rosa calls “resonance” with the world, with ambiguity, with intuitions about how to relate to each other, are distorted. The result is new forms of inequality, restlessness, failure, and alienation—the unintended yet not unpredictable consequences of modern ideology.

Porous to Possibilities 

These gambles on accelerated control are inimical to the kind of social life required to sustain the norms and ethos of democracy—or what some theologians call the common good. The ethos that democracy requires includes cultivated practices of committed patience, or what the Bible calls “a listening heart” (1 Kings 3:9).[5] It requires a shared imagination that is porous to possibilities, humbled by limits (of both human community and the natural world), and capable of self-correction. 

And so back to religion. Certainly in the American experience, religion can succumb to the logic of acceleration and commodification—with belief becoming another kind of marketed consumer product and religious institutions becoming little more than interest groups looking for leverage in an ever expanding social and political marketplace. We can claim success by innovating religious experience as an efficient enhancer of daily life—promising immediate satisfaction, friendship, personal peace, and security at low cost, all designed to help us cope. Certification programs can train pastors to be CEOs, marketing professionals, organizational psychologists, counselors, innovators of ministry technique. This can look winsome to the privileged assumptions of our time, but it coincides with a diminished emphasis on practices that nurture imagination, trust, and the rough ground of human community that give texture to a democratic ethos. The problem is intensified by religious institutions that embark on more aggressive paths that create spaces of strange nostalgia, abusive control, or militant fervor—directly challenging democratic norms for the sake of perceived righteous ends.

Traces of Transcendence

Yet all is not lost, and the divorce is not final. Something in religion can still till the rough ground. Rosa describes a kind of pre-modern sensibility in religious practice that at its best is not retrograde nostalgia, blind traditionalism, or a tool of control but a positive disposition toward ways of living that don’t participate in the logic of constant acceleration. I would describe this by saying religion can still open individuals and communities to traces of genuine transcendence by inviting us to inhabit space and time via shared liturgies, arts, prayer, study, social critique, informed action, and related practices. It can challenge unsustainable assumptions and aspirations around which we organize our social and economic lives. 

Faith communities that cultivate this alternative disposition offer openness to benign mystery as an antidote to fear, sacrifice for the good as an antidote to aggression, resonance as an antidote to alienation, conversation with the past (rather than a rejection or repetition of it) as an antidote to hopelessness. There remains within religious institutions a capacity to make an approach to otherness and difference that acknowledges the unknowable and encourages wonder, that cultivates community (however imperfectly) through patience, through care and advocacy for the vulnerable, and by insisting that a common good can coexist with competing interests. The religious life reminds us that works of charity and social reform connect us and can grow persons who are responsive to the call of love for others before they’re consumers and connoisseurs of their own desires. This sensibility can be embodied in liturgies of grace, spiritual renewal, and acts of forgiveness, reconciliation, and compassion—funded differently than by promises of acceleration.    

Religion that Resonates

And so back to democracy. In all of this there is a counter-wager for democracy: that a thriving religious life can positively texture politics without controlling politics. The effect can be salutary, even when the relentless cycles of a frenetic culture seem to put religion and politics into a kind of death spiral. The texturing can be seen in faith-shaped moments of shared experience, reflection, retrieval, and re-imagination—similar to what Rosa himself calls “resonance.”[6] These are moments we undergo without losing agency, where we feel our influence or take our place without demanding control or doing harm, when we find ourselves in relationship with others, connecting conviction with courage, and sensing both creation and community to be scenes of divine mystery and hope, without rush. This interrupts the spiral of alienation engulfing both religion and politics in our time. 

Creating religious conditions for resonance, including resonance with the divine, might involve a few moves. Like letting worship take precedence over strategy in congregational life, or letting shared study and patient conversation take precedence over pre-packaged programming, or allowing the effort of welcoming relationships take precedence over organized projects with measurable outcomes, or taking courage in listening to strangers in their sufferings and their joys. It might mean pondering religion through the primacy of prayer. It might also mean breaking down walls between religion and public life—not in order to help a religious lobby control policy or party but in the hope that across our many differences we might shape a common life of respectful engagement and shared sacrifice for values outside the perceived interests of one group or another.  

A Different Kind of Future

This might sound overly poetic in the face of reality. But I still want to say that despite the conflicts driving this late stage of modern life, always nearing the edge of collapse, there is always something other than mere process, procedure, or control that we can cultivate. And that something else isn’t, first, concerned with politics at all, but is about enjoying humble, hopeful, resonant ways of living that open us to each other, to the world, to transcendence, and to forms of love that can bind even strangers together. These are ways around which religious life can gather itself. And the hope is that these ways of living can in turn strengthen our politics and stir our imaginations for a different kind of future. 

In short, religious leaders have a choice. We may capitulate and seek relevance by accepting the alienating logics that undergird modern life. We may also retreat into resentment and anger at society’s excesses and seek a regressive kind of control. Or, we may respond to the moment with a dialogic sensibility: seeking new voices in conversation, a new complexity in practice, and a new sense of how we remember time and space in cultures of acceleration and purposeless reproduction. For the sake of both religion and democracy, let’s have this conversation.

The Rev. Wes Avram is senior pastor emeritus at Pinnacle Presbyterian Church in Scottsdale, Ariz., and formerly Clement-Muehl Assistant Professor of Communication at YDS. He is the author of Where the Light Shines Through: Discerning God in Everyday Life (Brazos, 2005) and the editor of Anxious About Empire: Theological Essays on the New Global Realities (Brazos, 2004). This essay was made possible in part by a Lilly Endowment Grant called Relevance to Resonance: Exploring The Practices of Transcendence in Ministry and Congregational Life, in association with Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn.