It certainly took me a long time, but I finally finished reading Jeffrey Stout’s political, theological, and philosophical tome, Democracy and Tradition. In the work, Stout sets out to defend a pragmatic approach to building a democratic society that takes seriously each citizen’s right to reach decisions via whatever means or commitments they deem important as well as all citizens’ responsibility to offer reasons to others for their conclusions. Democracy happens in the confluence of peoples’ beliefs and reason-giving. For Stout, democratic pragmatism is not merely a label that best describes how we interact with people who hold different ideals and beliefs than us, but it is a tradition in and of itself that deserves thought, defense, and promotion. America is in danger, he warns us, if the citizens of the United States do not take seriously the fact that we are all in this thing called democracy together. Stout, a self-labeled atheist, shows great appreciation for religions and religious people and articulately defends their right to use religious reasoning to shape their beliefs and ethics. (I reflected on some of the book earlier here.)
Stout critically engages liberal secularists like John Rawls on the one hand and the New Traditionalists within Christianity like Stanley Hauerwas and Alistair MacIntyre on the other as holding positions that do not help democracy. Though his two main interlocutors see each other as opposites, Stout points out that they actually share very similar views of what democracy actually is. His main argument against the liberal secularists is that we cannot guard the public square with rigid demands of what counts as reasonable data for democratic decision-making. The social contract theory of Rawls does not accurately describe how democracy has functioned, nor does it offer a hopeful vision for a pluralistic society in that it seeks to keep religious reasoning either out of the discussion altogether, or to be seen as weaker evidence. For those who say religion should not be involved in democratic reasoning, Stout not only says that ideal is unrealistic given the passion people have for their religions—how does one cast aside their deepest commitments that shape their ethics and values?—but he also says it is inherently undemocratic to do so. American democracy has benefited largely from religious reasoning—he cites the abolitionist sermons of the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and Martin Luther King’s speeches and sermons as high points in both religious and democratic thinking in America.
As seen above, Stout agrees with many of the New Traditionalists’ critiques of the social contract theory. He thinks, however, that the New Traditionalists have bought the line that this theory encapsulates modernity, pluaralism, secularism, and democracy. The New Traditionalists see democracy as a child of modernity that emphasized the individual over and often against community. They do not see how this system can engender virtues or community and thus it can hardly be described as a tradition in a classical sense. By its nature, democracy leads us towards an atomized society, they argue. They wonder if it is in their tradition’s (i.e., Christianity’s) best interest to continue to participate in democracy given the negative affects that system has had on their community (i.e., the Church). Stout pushes back against the New Traditionalists by saying democracy, which for better or worse, is our society’s system of organization, is not made better when groups of its citizens, whether they are Christians or Black Nationalists, decide to remove themselves from it. Nor are those other traditions improved by interacting only with others in their enclave. Again, he cites the religious reasoning of Lincoln, King, and the abolitionists to show religion’s positive impact on democratic thinking.
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