Abstract
This book is a welcome addition to the relatively recent renewal of attention among political theologians to a normative vision of democratic political institutions. Some may be surprised at the suggestion that this attention is ‘relatively recent’, so let me begin by putting this book in a wider context.
The last thirty years have witnessed an explosion of scholarly interest in the relationship between religion and democracy as a result of the ‘global resurgence of public religion’, as international relations specialists put it. A fair amount of this attention has focused on the specific contribution of Christianity to processes of democratisation in some Latin American, African, European and Asian countries. Most of this scholarly work has been done by social and political scientists and has thus been largely empirical in nature. Political theologians have also made their own contributions to the interpretation and justification of these developments, presenting various theological arguments for, or critiques of, ‘democracy’. In contrast to the social science literature, however, these contributions have tended to be both sporadic and generic – the latter in the sense that treatments of democracy in the specifically political sense (democratic structures and processes, or democratic citizenship) have appeared as secondary and sometimes fragmentary elements within wider accounts of political justice, liberation, human rights and so forth. Such treatments have tended to offer little by way of specific normative guidance on the institutions and processes that might realise those larger goals.
The last notable burst of intellectual creativity on such matters occurred in the 1940s and early 1950s in response to the collapse of democracies in Europe—among the best known fruits of which were Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (Scribner’s, 1944), Jacques Maritain’s Christianity and Democracy (Geoffrey Bles, 1945) and Yves Simon’s The Philosophy of Democratic Government (University of Chicago Press, 1951). (For a historical survey from this period, see also James Hastings Nichols, Democracy and the Churches, Westminster Press, 1951.) Since then the field (in English-speaking scholarship) has been sparse.
Since the early 1990s, however, political theologians have begun to remedy that deficit. Not surprisingly, two contributions came from South Africa. In A Theology of Reconstruction: Nation-building and Human Rights (Cambridge University Press, 1992), Charles Villa-Vicencio offered an account of democracy which, untypically for a liberationist, also treated the fundamental place of the rule of law. John W. de Gruchy’s Christianity and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 1995) surveyed historical and contemporary contributions of Christianity to democracy and concluded with a 50-page chapter offering a ‘theology for a just democratic world order’, which gave at least some attention to institutions and processes. Oliver O’Donovan’s The Ways of Judgment (Eerdmans, 2005) presented a novel theology of ‘representation’ that justified an active role for the people within political institutions, directed to the realisation of ‘public judgment’. Emile Perreau-Saussine’s Catholicism and Democracy: An Essay in the History of Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2012) addresses the modern Catholic Church’s attitudes to democratic institutions, albeit mainly in the context of its response to liberalism and changing church-state relations. In 2019, Luke Bretherton produced a wide-ranging account of participatory ‘democratic politics’ in Christ and the Common Life: Political Theology and the Case for Democracy (Eerdmans), building on his Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship and the Politics of a Common Life (Cambridge University Press, 2015). To use de Gruchy’s own distinction, political theologians have thus begun to move beyond mere statements of a broad ‘democratic vision’ of society, for example a just, equal or sustainable society, and are now addressing the institutional components of the ‘democratic system’.
Democracy and the Christian Churches is written by an historian of Christianity, not a political theologian but one who is interested less in documenting the practical impact of Christian churches on democratisation than in extracting the theological arguments that have been mounted in favour of democracy in the specifically political sense. Accessibly (and at times anecdotally) written, it seeks to relate the historical ideas therein explored to the contemporary assaults on democracy from populist movements in the USA and the UK. While the author does not build towards the kind of systematic theological justification of democracy offered by de Gruchy (to whom he acknowledges a significant debt), he does present a valuable, wide-ranging survey of the kinds and sources of such arguments in the two traditions in which they have appeared in most advanced form, namely the Reformed tradition (Norwood’s own) and Roman Catholicism. Its nearest equivalent is Graham Maddox, Religion and the Rise of Democracy (Routledge, 1996), which also devotes substantial attention to the Reformed tradition.
The book devotes as much time to examining the presence (or absence) of democracy within the churches as within the polity. Indeed, one of its central arguments is that, while Christianity has built up impressive resources in favour of political democracy, churches could better realize their democratising aspirations for wider society if they more fully exemplified democratic processes in their internal practices. The author does not, however, address fully enough whether ‘democratic’ norms such as consent and participation might take on a quite different shape when applied in churches as distinct to states (or, for that matter, businesses, trades unions, schools, etc.), such that the undifferentiated term ‘democracy’ might gloss over importantly different institutional needs.
Part 1, ‘Reformed and Catholic Convictions about Democracy’, does what it says on the tin. Chapter 1 presents an overview of a roster of voices on democracy in the Reformed tradition. Since this is also my own tradition I was delighted (if a little embarrassed) to come across a few I barely knew. In discussing Calvin and early Calvinism, the author introduces us to the intriguing Jean Morély who tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Calvin and Beza to allow greater lay participation in church governance. The figures treated here include familiar leading names such as Althusius, the Levellers, Barth and Niebuhr, but also less familiar ones such as the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century figures Nathaniel Micklem and Peter Taylor Forsyth. Norwood also puts back on the map some writers often ignored by political theologians today but who made noteworthy, theologically-informed contributions in their day, such as the mid-twentieth-century political theorists Ernest Barker (who wrote an essay ‘The Huguenot Theory of Politics’, in Church, State and Study, Methuen & Co., 1930) and A.D. Lindsay (who wrote I Believe in Democracy, Oxford University Press, 1940). Norwood completes the story with brief accounts of Ellul (another neglected figure), Moltmann and de Gruchy. The author shows how egalitarian and participatory ecclesiologies—and behind them pneumatologies—have frequently informed Reformed reflections on political democracy.
Chapter 2 charts the uneasy journey towards the embrace of democracy by the Roman Catholic Church. It summarises some strategically important official declarations since the late nineteenth century that began to lend support towards democracy, before focusing especially on Vatican II when that support became much more explicit, while being hedged around with qualifications as to the need for a transcendent moral and spiritual foundation for a democratic state. The author also notes, and affirms, the reading of Vatican II both as an example of an unprecedented degree of magisterial collegiality in decision-making and as ‘an event in the ecumenical movement’ (p. 76). De Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century account of the contrast between ‘democracy in America’ and its absence in the Europe of the (Catholic) ancient regime is usefully included in a discussion which then widens out to encompass a range of modern lay, and at times dissenting, Catholic voices including Maritain, Murray, Boff, Schüssler Fiorenza, Ruether and Cavanaugh. The chapter concludes with a brief survey of key arguments deployed in favour of the internal democratisation of the Catholic Church. He might, perhaps, have noted here that Catholic contributions to democratisation in places such as Argentina, the Philippines and Poland took place while the Catholic Church in those countries remained (and remains today) essentially hierarchical.
The title of Part II, ‘Ecumenism and the Politics of Belief’, does not quite do what it says on the tin but nonetheless contains three substantial chapters (3, 4 and 6) bringing theology to bear on diverse aspects of democracy. It also includes a very short interlude (chapter 5) on ‘Democracy and Religious Pluralism’ which, perhaps, would have been better absorbed into chapter 6, ‘Church and Theology in the Public Square’. The latter addresses such issues as politics after Christendom, theocracy versus democracy, religion and public reason, and the merits or otherwise of formal ecclesial statements on politics. It might serve as an introductory (if somewhat eclectic) orientation for the non-specialist but covers ground that will be mostly familiar to readers of this journal. Chapter 4, ‘Democracy, Women, Church and the Bible’, will, again, be familiar to those versed in feminist theology but offers a valuable corrective to theological accounts of democracy—within and beyond the churches—that neglect the inescapably gendered nature of political institutions. A central figure considered here is the nineteenth-century American theologian and women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The chapter assesses the positive and negative roles played by churches in various campaigns for women’s suffrage, shows how theological arguments for women’s equality inevitably carried implications for their role both in the church and in democracy, and critically assesses the extent to which key issues in the church affecting women (such as Humanae Vitae, or the place of women within the World Council of Churches) modelled ‘democracy’ or not.
Material covered in chapter 3, under the heading ‘Accountability and Other Issues’, may be less familiar. The chapter is ‘more ecumenical and practical’ (p. 109), and identifies and expands on some of the key democratic concerns, both in church and polity, arising from the discussions of theologians and political theorists in the two chapters preceding it. The concerns addressed are: accountability (‘personal’, ‘official’, ‘mutual’, i.e., ecumenical; pp. 9–13); the biblical basis and limits of political authority; consensus decision-making; debate; equality; law and democracy; referendums; and subsidiarity. The discussions are mostly brief and (again) somewhat eclectic. It would also have been useful for the author to have attempted a more integrated account of these themes (and others treated earlier, such as consent or participation), identifying which are conceptually fundamental (such as authority, law, equality) and which are more derivative (such as accountability, consensus, subsidiarity) or applied (such as referendums). But the author has instructive and wise things to say on all these ideas.
This book will serve both as a useful guide to the history of the debates in which such ideas were first forged (often at great cost) and as a salutary reminder of the demanding agenda to which contemporary political theologians must address themselves if they are to develop robust and rounded accounts of democracy, its institutions and processes, and the challenges of democratic citizenship. At a time when democracy is facing its biggest threats for a generation, we urgently need more such work.