Religion and Democracy

Submitted by Peter Herz (United States), Feb 11, 2011 at 19:26

With all due respect to Dr. Pipes, Christianity did not "evolve" to democracy. The democratic/republican experiment found a seedbed in certain portions of the Reformation. Even before the Reformation, Roman Catholicism had a sense of the political supremacy of law (which reappeared in Calvinism in a more thorough form) and a distinction between (rather than a separation of) church and state. The root of the natural law idea can even be found in Romans 2:14-15--and Alasdair MacIntyre isn't the only scholar to note how Hume's version of "natural law" smacks of Calvinism; Diderot's of Catholicism; and Kant's of the more Pietistic strain of Lutheranism. Rule of law and government as compact have roots in Christian theology which they do not appear to have in Islam.

Further, much of the Islamic world's openness to 20th century totalitarianism seems to me to be a reaction against classical liberal ideals introduced by British and French colonialists. It must seem to many serious Muslims that the classical liberal doctrines of limited government, political compact, and the like are "Christian products", and hence to be rejected. Certainly Seyyid Qutb and Maulana Maududi seemed to think so; and given the role of the Ikhwan in Egypt's unrest, we'll probably be hearing more of the former's ideology in the not-too-distant future.

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