It was at the end of the nineteenth century that Friedrich Nietzsche denounced the “flatheads” who imagined they could preserve morality without God. Nietzsche didn’t think much of the Western ethical tradition, but he sensed that it needed the continuing presence of religion: The culture that loses God will eventually lose the concept of good and evil.
Here at the end of the twentieth century, we can begin to see just how right Nietzsche was, at least on this one point. Over the last twenty years, the intellectual and cultural life of America seems to have grown increasingly divided between two camps: those willing to sacrifice the last vestiges of traditional morality, and those open to bringing back God.
Among the latter, a major effort is underway to articulate a public theology — capable of reassuring believers that political life doesn’t require them to abandon their religious principles, and capable of reassuring everyone else that those believers don’t want to establish a theocracy. In recent years, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish writers alike have been casting back through their traditions, seeking thinkers who examined the role of religion in democracy.
Such rediscovered figures were often liberals in their own day, because they set themselves the task of explaining to their brethren why the health of religion in the modern world depends on accepting the principles of democracy. But they appear profoundly conservative today, because they managed to explain along the way why the health of democracy depends on religion.
The subjects of the following essays are the Dutch Calvinist statesman Abraham Kuyper, the Jesuit priest John Courtney Murray, and the Jewish activist theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel. These three figures from the last hundred years have achieved new prominence thanks to our pressing need to find a public theology fit for liberal democracy — and a liberal democracy fit for public theology.
J. Bottum
