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Protestant Perspectives on Church and State
| Article
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19104 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
11,088 Words |
| Author
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Dean M. Kelley
Dean M. Kelley is counselor on religious liberty at the
National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United
States, a position he has held since 1960. He is the author of
Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (1972) and Why Churches
Should Not Pay Taxes (1977). He is now completing a five-
volume work titled The Law of Church and State in America:
Sourcebook and Analysis. |
One of the favorite indoor sports in scholarly circles is to claim for a particular historical movement, school or event the credit for initiating or enabling the development of modern democracy, and students of various religious traditions are not slow to join in this engagement. A signal contribution to this genre was initiated by a prominent group of American church leaders--including John R. Mott and Henry Sloane Coffin--in the 1940s; a group who formed the Committee on Religious Tolerance, later related to the Federal Council of Churches. The churchmen commissioned James Hastings Nichols of the University of Chicago to develop a historical analysis of the role of religious movements in the formation of democracy, which was published in 1951 under the title Democracy and the Churches.
The first chapter of Nichols' study finds the religious origins of liberal democracy in one particular strand of Protestantism:
Most Americans [have] been quite unaware of the fact that the moral dynamic of their democracy was the creation of one very specific Protestant ethical tradition, and that, with a few minor exceptions, it was the peculiar product of that single tradition. And without such roots the cut flowers of democratic parliaments, ballots, constitutions and the rest did not seem destined to bloom long in Germany or Japan or such lands as Latin America.
This generalization may have seemed more obvious just after the close of World War II, but in the long sweep of history it can still be said that "liberal democracy" has had its shaky moments. In many parts of the world, it has been tried in fitful spasms, even as it is struggling to come into being in others that have little experiential preparation for it.
Nichols did not see the cradle of liberal democracy in Lutheranism or high Anglicanism. In his view, "The characteristic political expression of other Reformation and Counter-Reformation was absolute monarchy." Neither did he see it in Roman Catholicism.
Nichols quotes Harold Laski's dictum that "the Reformation was the real starting point of democratic ideas" but makes clear that it was not in the mini-monarchies of Lutheranism that democracy took form but in the strongholds of Calvinism:
For amid the great sweep toward absolutism, which dominated Roman Catholic and Lutheran societies up to the nineteenth century, a contrary current
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