Here is food for thought – what is the relationship between democracy and religiosity? The gut response from many atheists might be that the more democratic a country is, the less religious. My guess would be that this is due, at least in part, to the impression of religion and religious institutions as encouraging hierarchy and authoritarianism, and discouraging the open-ended process of debate about ideas that democracy requires. And certainly religion has often been hostile to the public sphere and the egalitarianism that democracy often inspires.
However, American history also tells a story of a positive relationship between religion and democracy. Turning our attention from the eighteenth-century First Great Awakening, which was mostly Calvinist, to the nineteenth-century Second Great Awakening, which was mostly post-Calvinist, America experienced an explosion of church founding and growth. This coincided with the first few decades following the ratification of the Constitution, occurring side-by-side with the blossoming of Jacksonian democracy. Many historians have debated about what really lay behind the Second Great Awakening, from Paul E. Johnson’s thesis that it was an attempt by the socially mobile middle-class to deal with the erosion of traditional class relations, to Nathan O. Hatch’s emphasis on the revivals as the product of the common people of America taking advantage of their new democracy. However, the fact that American religion and American democracy grew up together is clear. Furthermore, the emergence of a politically active Religious Right since the 1960s was fueled by, and still depends on, grassroots activity. It would seem, therefore, that there is no inherent relationship between free thought and free elections.
But maybe not. Perhaps these trends have more to do with the particular nature of the American people interacting with a specific set of historical conditions. It does seem to suggest, however, that democracy itself is not enough to encourage the type of critical thinking most atheists would like to see more of; unless, it is the shoddy condition of American democracy itself that is to blame. I’m not sure. What do you think?
[...] a recent blog post a fellow contributor posed the question: “what is the relationship between democracy and [...]