IT WILL have escaped no one’s attention that democracy is in recession. By most measures, the number of fully functioning democracies and the percentage of people living in them have been on the slide for years. Whether this is a tactical retreat or a terminal decline remains to be seen.
At the same time, Christianity is forecast to grow in numbers (if not proportionally) around the world, and even the anomalously irreligious West is showing hints of “revival” as well as, less happily, signs of Christian nationalism. These are, in short, “interesting times” for both democracy and Christianity.
All this cries out for careful academic interrogation, which is what one would hope for from a book of this title published by Routledge. It is almost what readers get, but not quite. The book is impressively broad in scope, with chapters on the United States, Europe, China, South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Russia-Ukraine. The authors know their patch well, and the text is clearly written, with ample bibliographies that will inform and entice even the best-informed reader.
The book engages with some important and live issues. Pavlo Smytsnyuk’s chapter on why the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox Churches have come to differ on the question of democracy is thoughtful and well-informed. Fuk-tsang Ying’s chapter on China contains some fascinating material on how a number of Chinese scholars turned explicitly to Christian thought in the 1980s and ’90s to explain the rise of the West and to argue for China’s democratisation.
Paul Silas Peterson has an impressively comprehensive chapter (given the space available) on the different ways in which democratic culture is used and abused across Europe, stretching from the German Churches’ comfortable accommodation after the disaster of the 20th century to the Serbian Orthodox Church’s rather less encouraging “ethnoreligiosity”.
And yet, the problem is that the title gives the authors so much scope that the book never really coheres and remains stubbornly less than the sum of its parts. The contributions originated at a symposium in 2022, which went under the same name as the published book. But “perspectives” is a vague and capacious term for two entities — “Christianity” and “democracy” — that are pretty much about everything. The reader — or this reader, at least — yearns for a clearer focus, better attuned to our “interesting” political moment, and, in particular, on how and why different Churches are either retarding or catalysing the democratic recession, and what theological resources can be brought to bear on this moment.
Reviews that criticise books for not being other books never go down well with authors (I can testify), and I don’t want to leave the impression that there is no good material in this one. But for a book on this subject, published at this moment, and costing this much (the hardback price works out at about a pound a page), most readers would justifiably hope for a bit more than just “perspectives”.
Nick Spencer is Senior Fellow at Theos.
Christianity and Democracy Today: International perspectives
David P. Gushee and Paul Silas Peterson, editors
Routledge £145
(978-1-032-96576-5)
Church Times Bookshop £130.50
