So let’s start with a basic idea of what people mean by “democracy”. Worldwide surveys find that, when they say democracy, people mean “rights that give people choices in governing their personal lives, and a voice and vote to shape public life”.

Democracy means that “the people rule”. Individuals govern their own lives. Together, citizens shape the state that makes certain decisions to be binding on all. Underpinning all this is a set of “rights”. The crucial ones link the two levels – the private and the public. These are the right to communicate – sometimes called “freedom of speech” – and the right to associate, to form groups that will organize to achieve shared aims.

It is not surprising that all this makes  (in David Held's words) “a remarkably difficult form of government to create and sustain” . It gives rise to questions like: What is the limit of individual self-government? When do rights of free speech threaten the safety of others? How far may we let freedom of association exclude other people? How, and how far, can “voice and vote … shape public life”? These debates are both searches for truth and struggles for power. But the answers are always contested, never conclusive. These disputes are part of democracy. But neither the presence of these disputes, nor their results, are enough to define democracy.

So what is democracy? One way to start the examination is to consider where democracy began. Often this begins with ancient Athens. It is true that we owe the Greeks the word: demos-cratos, the people rule. But this was nothing like what we know today. In Athens, all the free men of the Athenian-descended racial elite shared the task of making laws and governing, with office holders chosen by lottery – so-called “lottocracy”.

Later “Democracy” meant “majority rule” where the “greater part of the people have authority to command …the minority of the people as a body”.

Neither of these corresponds to the modern idea of “democracy”.

So where did it come from? A common view, in many textbooks, sees it as an “evolved gift”. The Enlightenment freed people to think for themselves. Capitalism freed people from their assigned status in the traditional economy. Industrialisation transformed the mass of the population into the working class. The working class demanded freedom and a say in government. Democracy results. This version is not useless. But it leaves us short of tools to rescue democracy when the next stage of “evolution” comes along, and appears to be to abolish democracy itself.

Almost all books on democracy overlook the actual moment of its modern invention.  We can pinpoint this to May, 1647, when the newly-recognized American “plantation” in Rhode Island concluded a long deliberation on its form of government. It declared itself a “democracy”. This did not mean lottery rule or majoritarianism. The Providence settlers offered a new definition of democracy, based on legitimacy by consent, diversity of conscience, and “quiet enjoyment” of “lawfull right and Libertie”. Here, in rudimentary form, was the first liberal  democracy.

This breakthrough arose from the exchange of people and ideas between England and America. The English civil war became a war for religious freedom,  England's American settlements fostered experiment in government, and ideas flowed back and forth across the Atlantic to drive innovation in the homeland.

No single mind is responsible. But we can identify the key thinker in both Providence and London. His name was Roger Williams. Among modern scholars, only Theresa Bejan sees his importance. She places him alongside Hobbes and Locke among leading thinkers in seventeenth century political philosophy.

Today, almost nobody has heard of Roger Williams. This ignorance is recent. In the 1850s Bancroft’s great history of the rise of the United States identified Williams as “the first person … to establish civil government on liberty of conscience, the equality of opinion before the law”. In 1927 a prize-winning history found Williams to be a political philosopher “sent to earth before his time.”

Opinion changed after the 1950s, when historians realized that Williams was a passionate, evangelical Puritan. Such a person could not (they thought) have devised liberal democracy, which belonged to the Enlightenment.

But the fact is that the first modern democracy was developed by Christians. They needed a new kind of state to replace Christendom. Under Christendom, all citizens had to be Christian, and this meant that the state had to define the form of Christianity that qualified for political rights. This link between political and faith had to be broken if Christians were to be free. “Democracy” was the way to do it: a system based on equal rights for all, regardless of faith. This was the beginning of modern democracy. It was Democracy After Christendom.

Outline of “Democracy after Christendom”

In a prologue, I explain my childhood story and why democracy’s survival matters to me. The Introduction outlines my main arguments. How does “after Christendom” offer a new and useful perspective on the question of democracy today? The first two chapters explain the rise and fall of Christendom and the invention of Democracy to replace it. The next three consider the deep roots of the USA’s “culture war” – not to take a side but to understand what is going on and what this means for democracy. Democracy is a political  idea - what does this mean? Chapter six aims for clarity about what we mean by “politics” and the “state”, and what Christians can usefully think about these. Chapters seven consider the many definitions of “democracy” and how “wrong ideas” are making “democracy go wrong”. Chapter eight considers democracy’s crisis in the USA and the UK and what the solutions might be. The final chapter looks at religious freedom.
 

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