Wishful Thinking: An Exchange with Alan Johnson and Michael Walzer

Johnson/Wal-zer: Religion & Democracy

MICHAEL WALZER’S “invitation to anxiety” about events in the Middle East and North Africa is timely. His urgent call that we find our allies and make solidarity with them—i.e., that we do what parts of the Left refused to do in Iraq, to their undying shame—is important.

I am in fundamental solidarity with Michael’s argument, but there are a couple of points of analysis on which I do not fully agree, or would pose things differently.

What Is Our Task?
First, I’d say something a little different than Michael about the nature of the support we owe to those fighting for freedom. Michael says we should “make contact with them, ask what kind of help they think they need, and then try to provide it,” adding, “we also need their political analyses.” This is all true and important. We should indeed set up solidarity committees (though the U.S. Left seems particularly poor at creating solidarity committees that are not infested by authoritarians: just kick them out). And yes, once they form, we should support their fledgling political parties. And of course we should listen to our allies—every revolution is a school, as Rosa put it, and this one will have as many lessons as any other.

But I think we have a responsibility to speak, not just to listen. On a bitterly contested political terrain, competing programs and forces are going to wage an intense framing contest. Delineating where “we” stand, as an intellectual journal and a broad political tradition, and articulating the identity and relevance of that tradition to our allies, is also part of our responsibility. Others can take the lead in fundraising, organizing trade-union support, and so on. Our task is really to create the widest possible layer of Dissent readers and writers among the rebels, to discuss, and to blend our respective kinds of expertise to create the most intellectually powerful and compelling account of these unfolding events and a viable strategy for shaping them. We should be that ambitious.

But to begin that work, we should say more than, “How can we help you?” Our allies need to hear us talking—about what happened to the East European overturns for one thing, and what we have learned about when and why elite-capture of revolutions takes place, and how it can be resisted. And about how to take the political fight to the Islamists, about which, actually, we in the West now have quite a bit to say.

Democracy and Religion
The second thing I’d take issue with Michael about is the way he poses the relation of democracy and religion. These might be misunderstandings, but to start a discussion, here are some points of demurral.

First, Michael tends to treat religions as interchangeable, which is as unhelpful as treating political parties as interchangeable, I think.

Second, Michael seems to treat “secular” and “non-believing” as synonyms, when they are not. This can cause us to miss the very different relationships that can exist between faith and democracy. History is bracketed, and the potential for change along with it. For example, we fail to see the shifting Catholic attitude to democracy, summed up by one theologian in these terms: the hostility of Gregory XVI, the toleration of Leo XIII, the admiration of John XXIII, the endorsement of John Paul II, and the internal critique of Benedict XVI.

Third, Michael says, “All the great democratic revolutions took place in a time of religious decline.” The English revolutionaries of the seventeenth century marched into battle singing hymns, praying to God but keeping their powder dry. Michael says Protestant dissent was the “functional equivalent of secularism.” Perhaps, but it also was a case of religion inspiring people to fight for freedom and democracy against human aristocratism and kingly power. The American Revolution may have been a secular event, but it was not an impious one (as the visceral reaction to Paine’s The Age of Reason showed). And what about Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, and all those Christians who created the revolution that was the civil rights movement? Or for that matter William Wilberforce, the Abolitionists, and the anti-slavery movement? And what about 1989? What about that priest holding mass inside the occupied Gdansk shipyard? What about the role of Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church? And what about all those Lutherans in East Germany?

Fourth, Michael says that “any Christian, Jewish, or Muslim revivalist movement would, almost certainly, be hostile to democracy.” I’m not sure it can be posed that baldly. There has been a Catholic human rights revolution. Christianity has played a positive role in a series of recent democratic overturns (in El Salvador, Chile, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Poland, the Philippines, South Korea, and sub-Saharan Africa). And it would be interesting to know what America’s most prominent social democratic philosopher thinks about the recent concerns of Europe’s most prominent social democratic philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, that the decline of religion is eroding the basis of civil society and social reproduction, undermining the pre-political foundations of democratic social and political life.

Fifth, Michael’s linking of Christian evangelicals in the USA with the thug-misogynists of the Taliban and the Iraqi “resistance” was, I think, a case of what Jean Bethke Elshtain calls false equivalencing. The blurring of the difference between fascists and their enemies is typical of the indecent not the decent Left.

Sixth, in that region, a liberal democratic progressivism that is hostile to faith “ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow,” to steal a phrase. The success of freedom and democracy will involve a reformed Islam at ease with plurality and political modernity, not an exit from Islam. I worry that Michael’s formulations risk missing that overarching fact, as I see it, directing us away from the need for the Left to “do” theology.

Alan Johnson is a member of Dissent’s editorial board.

Reply to Alan Johnson

I am grateful for Alan Johnson’s wise response. He makes important points, and he has given me a chance to enlarge on what I said, much too briefly, about religion and politics.

With regard to his first point, I agree entirely—well, almost entirely. We should not be passive in our relations with friends and comrades in the Arab world. We have political commitments to explain and defend. We have stories to tell and arguments to make, especially about how to recognize and resist authoritarian tendencies in revolutionary movements. Still, or also, committed internationalists need to learn to listen.

But Alan and I may have different views (though maybe not) about the revolutionary role of religion. I did not mean to deny that religiously serious people have been important supporters of democratic transformations in many parts of the world. Alan’s list of examples is a good one, except for the English revolution of the 1640s—which actually illustrates the point I was trying to make. The Puritans, or many of them, were religious zealots, participants in a politicized revivalism that was hostile to any kind, including very modest kinds, of democratic politics. In England, their efforts were aimed at a “holy commonwealth,” the rule of the saints over everyone else, and they culminated in a dictatorship. Cromwell may well have been the best of the saints (though the Irish have good reason to deny that), but he was not a democratic ruler. Years ago, I wrote a book about the Puritan revolution, and of course this example has been in my head as I watched Islamists at work in Iran and Afghanistan.

Religious revivalism of this sort was not a factor in Hungary in 1956, or in Czechoslovakia in 1968, or in Poland during the Solidarity years, and I don’t believe it was a factor in any of the struggles for democracy in Latin America. Reading the liberation theologians who supported those struggles, I couldn’t help thinking that they were more influenced by Marx than by Catholic theology; in any case, they did not lead a religious revival. Wherever revivalism appears, it is likely to be a force working against democratic transformation and in favor of the rule of a religious elite, whose members know the word of God. That is probably true in Egypt and Tunisia today and more clearly true in Yemen and Jordan.

I agree with Alan, and with Jürgen Habermas, that the secular democratic Left has failed to engage creatively with religious believers. Consider the cases of India, Israel, and Algeria. Three left-liberationist movements, the Indian National Congress, the Labor Zionists, and the Algerian FLN, succeeded in creating three secular states, in 1947-48 in India and Israel, and less than a decade later in Algeria. And then in each of these countries, on roughly the same time schedule, there appeared a fiercely anti-secular, highly politicized religious movement. It was wrong of me to add Christian fundamentalists in the United States to this list; I don’t usually succumb to political correctness; I should just have referred to the Crusades and the Inquisition to make the point that all religions are capable of producing this kind of zealotry.

The religious revivals in India, Israel, and Algeria were not identical in their hostility to democracy or their readiness for violence—but, still, despite the fact that religions are not interchangeable, they were remarkably similar in their opposition to liberalism, pluralism, and any separation of religion and politics. Most important for us is the fact that in each of these cases, though the story isn’t over in any of them, the culture of the Left was too thin to sustain a strong resistance to the religious revival. We need to do better, and in order to do better, we need to engage with these religions in a way that secularists have in the past refused to do. But this engagement must be critical—not antagonistic, not averse to dialogue, without the arrogance of people who think that they alone have triumphed over superstition, but critical of what are, after all, the standard attitudes of orthodox (unreformed) religions toward heretics and unbelievers.

I know, of course, that secular ideologues have also, often, been zealous in attacking their own heretics and seeking to dominate the mass of unbelievers. But religions have greater staying power, and they are also capable of revival, again and again, as I suspect ideologies are not. Fascist and communist revivalists live on the margins of their societies; Islamists today live at the center of theirs. I don’t think that there has ever been a democratic revolution that took place alongside a religious revival of the kind I have been trying to describe. So Alan is certainly right to say that a radical secularism “ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow” in the Middle East today. Secular liberals and democrats have to hope for and then work with what he calls “a reformed Islam at ease with plurality and political modernity.” From Alan’s mouth to God’s ear. I just wanted to say that while we hope and work, we also need to worry.

Michael Walzer is the co-editor of Dissent.