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Christianity and Democracy: Repairing the Intellectual Deficit
Jonathan Chaplin, Cambridge University
January 22, 2025 @ 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm
University Court Room and on MS Teams
After centuries of official indifference or resistance, the theological legitimacy of democracy came to be widely recognised in Protestantism and Catholicism by the mid-twentieth century. Yet today, millions of professing Christians in several nations are being lured into supporting authoritarian political projects and seem willing to subordinate democratic norms and processes to other goals, notably the promotion of a ‘Christian nation’. This substantial popular Christian retreat from democracy only contributes to its wider global undermining (occurring for multiple reasons). At a time when renewed Christian intellectual defences of democracy are urgently required, however, such defences are thin on the ground. This paper suggests resources to repair this deficit, drawing from stands of pre-modern, Reformation and modern theological reflection. It identifies and explores the grounding and relationship between three principal families of theological justification for (what the paper will define as) ‘constitutional democracy’: consent theories, participatory theories, and defensive theories. Suitably combined and applied to contemporary political realities, they offer a robust Christian defence of democracy that might help intellectual and practical leaders to reverse the retreat.
