Christian Civilization or Liberal Democracy?

Is liberal democracy our crown jewel? The proof that Christianity is coextensive with principles of justice and reason? Or is it just a way of governing ourselves, one of many reasonable ones, and appropriate only in particular circumstances. DanieL Larison has an interesting article that questions the very mode of argumentation advanced by moderns, who think that the justice (and implicitly the truth) of Christianity and Christian civilization hinge upon its conformity to liberal and democratic norms. He writes:

But what frequently puzzles me about these sorts of arguments is why anyone, Christian or non-Christian, should care to defend or approve of Christianity because it helped pave the way in the some sense for these political developments rather than because it is the heart of our civilisation, the source of all our meaningful cultural accomplishments and, well, the True Faith. It may be interesting to note how certain forms of Christianity facilitated the rise of this kind of government in a very few countries, whence it has since spread, but surely it is relevant that in most Christian societies this form of government has arisen through the efforts of people starkly opposed to Christian tradition and Christian authorities.

Liberal revolutions in Protestant countries, and I am principally thinking of England, have typically taken on a less overtly, simply anti-Christian colour, because there is much less in the way of institutional and social Christianity that impedes the liberal political vision and because historically the revolutions often take on a confessional tinge of defending “the true protestant religion,” as Sydney put it, against the innovations of crypto- and not-so-crypto-Catholics. Protestant Roundheads and Whigs could always take out their revolutionary hostility on High Church Anglicans and Catholics, rather than focus it on Christianity as a whole. In every Catholic and Orthodox country where liberalism has arrived its rise has been much more hard-fought and adversarial because the churches in these countries have typically been opposed to liberal ideas–more readily recognising them as being basically incompatible with Christian teaching in many respects–and because liberals have viewed both the institutional and social roles of the churches as barriers to the different kinds of emancipation they want to usher in.

Today this previous opposition to liberalism among the Catholics and Orthodox is supposed to be embarrassing to their modern brethren (as if Bossuet is more embarrassing than Voltaire), but I am increasingly of the opinion that many of these Christians did well not to fall for the siren song of liberalism. Therefore I am also frequently puzzled by the need of some Christians to justify their religion in the strangest terms, as if to try to make people who are otherwise indifferent or hostile to the Faith appreciative that, but for Christianity, they would not be able to vote! This is, of course, not really true, and the contortions into which some people must put themselves to make the arguments at one and the same time for orthodox Christianity and the role of Christianity in spurring on liberalism (even though the Christianity of political liberals through the ages has not always been exactly orthodox) are really quite remarkable.

This is all such a complicated topic. I wrote a bit about it here and here (suggesting our liberal belief system will lead to failure in Iraq).

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