I REMEMBER THE EXACT DAY I discovered that some conservative Christians are not all that into democracy. It was 20 years ago. My daughter asked me for help with her social studies homework. I discovered that her Christian school taught a neo-Puritan civics curriculum, which proclaimed that God’s design for human government is rule by “godly Christian men” applying scripture under the sovereignty of God. I was shocked.
In the Trump era, we again witness a conservative Christian flirtation with authoritarianism. These conservative Christians compare Donald Trump to Cyrus of Persia—both authoritarian rulers, both “friendly” to but not part of God’s people, both supposedly used by God—and Trump is lauded as the president of divine providence in shlock films such as Liberty U.’s The Trump Prophecy.
Meanwhile, a quote attributed to Russian Orthodox priest and monarchist St. John of Kronstadt that “in hell there is democracy, in heaven there is a kingdom” is making the rounds on social media, occasioning much comment leaning in the direction of authoritarian rule. John of Kronstadt died in 1908 before the Russian revolution and likely associated democratic tendencies with atheism.
Why are some of our far-right U.S. Christian brothers and sisters headed in this direction? At one level, having already made the basic policy decision to support Trump in 2016, they consider any ex post facto rationalization to be fair game. Their hero is an autocrat with little interest in democracy, ergo, they now support autocracy and are reconsidering their support for democracy. Trump continues to have an amazing ability to make seemingly sensible people lose their bearings.
But don’t miss a Russia connection that goes beyond St. John of Kronstadt.
Russia has never managed democracy, swinging from Orthodox czarism to Soviet communism to post-communist chaos and now to Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism with strong support from the Moscow patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. Putin positions himself and Russia as defenders of Christian civilization against the decadent West. This despite the murderous and kleptocratic nature of Putin’s rule.
It is easy to see a convergence between Russia’s Orthodox-authoritarian-defense-of-Christian-civilization tendencies and the U.S. version of the same. The Trump-Christian Right-Russia connection, then, is not only tactical. At the church-state level, there is real ideological convergence. Both involve anti-democratic authoritarians garnering Christian support with promises to defend a “threatened” Christian civilization.
You might say that West is yielding to East. What we used to understand as “Western civilization”—which featured the long, slow development of Western European liberal democracies out of the ashes of Western Christendom—is now challenged by an embrace of the very different Eastern European trajectory, one that moved from the Byzantine Roman East forward through 20th-century communism to today’s Orthodox authoritarianism, most notably in Russia.
Since democracy is being attacked in the name of Christianity, it can be helpful to remember the Christian roots of the early American experiment in democracy. What was born in Philadelphia in 1776 can be seen as a Western European-Christian-Enlightenment goulash, combining a friendliness toward religion with the disestablishment of any particular version of it, the founders having learned the hard lessons of European Christendom.
That new democracy was nourished deeply by Christian scripture, but not from any paradigm of government found in those sacred pages. America would not be a Mosaic theocracy, nor a divinely sanctioned monarchy, nor anything resembling a Roman empire. Nor would the U.S. government reflect the top-down theology of government that Paul articulates in Romans 13.
But Americans would create a government in which realistic biblical understandings both of human worth and human sinfulness would be wired into the structure of our institutions. For example, because people have inherent dignity, are capable of self-government, and have basic rights that must be honored and protected, they can and must create inclusive democracies. These are derived from a Christian theological perception. But because humans are sinners (also a basic Christian understanding), power must be diffused rather than concentrated, a free press must be protected, and the rule of law must prevail rather than the tyrant.
Nobody ever guaranteed that our constitutional democracy would survive in perpetuity. Our generation must decide, again, whether we will continue the flawed but extraordinary experiment in self-government begun in 1776.
David P. Gushee, a Sojourners contributing editor, is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta.
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