Can Christianity Survive Democracy?

The term “democracy” is often liberally thrown about, and can serve as a shorthand for the people’s will in action. At its best, democracy amplifies individual voices, but at its worst it can turn the individual into God, and in our secular age, it often looks like the latter. When God is removed as the transcendent reference point of the system, the system does not end up with no god, but with a new one: people seeking individual self-gratification as its ideal. Though Christianity may endure democracy, how could democracy hope to survive without Christianity?

Further, what does democracy produce inside the walls of the church? If total democracy is the triumph of the individual will, can Christianity survive the cultural democracy that has pushed its way into our pews and pulpits? Cultural values are often adopted by the church, and Christians often incorporate the dynamics of their host culture within their religious practices. As such, many churches have structures that simply reflect the corporate structures they see in their workplaces. But this becomes dangerous when Christians regard their participation in the church as a sort of autonomous democratic endeavor. 

We can recognize the fruit of such democratic Christianity when church discipline is devalued, when the creeds and confessions of the faith are spurned, and when the final arbiter of biblical truth is the individual Christian. God, as the transcendent reference point, has effectively been replaced by the individual as the immanent reference point. Here, the Christian acts as Socrates’ “democratic man,” celebrating freedom and equality while rejecting any restraint or instruction. Socrates famously likened such raw democracy to a mutinous ship, a vessel piloted without regard to sailing expertise and ultimately destined for ruin. 

Whilst we don't want to see democracies degrade into tyranny as Socrates envisioned, we must recognize that autonomous democracy within Christianity is a degrading and destructive trend. And yet this unchecked democracy is often the norm for American Christians: what we feel is our standard for what we believe is objectively true, and there is a visceral aversion to any outside authority standard. There is a reason that the Nicaean Creed is quite foreign to many churches, and the cause is not difficult to deduce. 

How can Christianity flourish as Christians attempt to democratize the faith? The church becomes democratized when the will and desire of the people becomes the guiding authority. Such an approach certainly seems historically novel and biblically untenable. Doctrine becomes democratized whenevery ‘free-thinking’ individual is encouraged to arrive at their own meaning and truth, as opposed to drawing from the historic creeds and confessions of the church. Church practice then becomes democratized when the liturgy, practices, and structure of the church reflect the collective preferences of the people as the guiding authority. When democracy takes the place of God, concepts such as law, rights, authority, and justice are left up to the individual’s definition. Unfortunately, this is the norm in our day. It is little wonder that charismatic personalities devoid of biblical qualification are able to flourish in such an environment. Socrates observed that such degrading democracies often overlook leaders of virtue and qualification, instead flocking to showmen who can appeal to (and ultimately manipulate) the masses. In the same way that Taylor Swift is predicted to sway one-fifth of the popular vote in the next U.S. presidential election, the church is often exploited by those with effective marketing and popular appeal. Christians are called as a people with delegated authorities, yet democratization makes us quite vulnerable to a variety of threats and dangers. 

People who consider themselves to be totally autonomous individuals want a faith that allows them to pick and choose between what they like and what they don’t, and such people will ultimately treat the Scriptures in exactly that way. In other words, when democratic impulses shape the way Christians understand Scripture, they will limit or exclude any spheres of authority from being over them in this regard. This is why the enemy of democracy is the conviction that, though the creeds of the Christian church do not have authority over Scripture, they certainly have authority over the individual – or creedalism, as it is otherwise known. The “no creed but the Bible” slogan may have its roots in the Stone-Campbellite movement, but its influence certainly did not remain there. American culture quite tangibly venerates the autonomous human will, the idol our culture has chosen to worship with a fiercely affectionate fidelity. But should such voluntarism and self-rule find its home within the church?

Many Christians have become vulnerable to slogans such as “love is love” precisely because we have, for decades, accepted “I feel” as the indisputable standard of truth. We learn and know truth as individuals, and we value the delegated authority of the church and its officers only insofar as they agree with us. But when we reject any human authorities, we are truly only replacing them with ourselves. Rejecting the Christian creeds only leads to our supplanting them with our own. There is a reason very few naval ships practice democracy. 

Carl Henry identified liberalism as not just a perversion of the Christian faith, but as an entirely new religion altogether. Similarly, autonomous democracy produces a god of its own making, one which venerates the will of the sovereign individual. Though our world may imagine it has disposed of God, it in fact has merely embraced a new one. Whether Dēmos of the Greeks or Roma of the Romans, there is a persistent false god that emerges when we exalt the sovereign will of the people. We seek our own autonomy, but only to our own peril.

But despite their promises, false gods never truly liberate. They only enslave. As Socrates is credited to have said, “the excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.” Democracy does not complement Christianity—it is a reef that threatens it. The path for preserving Christian orthodoxy is not found by baptizing the radically autonomous democracy that pervades our secular culture. Instead, we may champion the historic creeds and confessions of our orthodox faith as biblically-faithful standards for the church, retrieve biblical models of authority within the church and society, and preserve the communal and historic quality of our faith.