Christian political discourse.

Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World, by Robert P. Kraynak, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001. 334 pp.

FIFTY YEARS AGO, Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon, and John Courtney Murray had reputations as being non-traditional, even somewhat progressive, Catholic thinkers. Remarkably, today the three men are widely viewed as conservatives. That this transformation of perspective goes largely unnoticed makes it all the more remarkable. At the midpoint of the twentieth century, each man was engaged in a project to establish the basic compatibility of Christianity and liberal democracy. Faced with the brutal, dehumanizing experience of communist and fascist totalitarianism, these three thinkers defended the virtue of the only political regime that seemed legitimate in the modern world.

There were, to be sure, substantive theoretical differences between them. Simon and Murray, for example, harbored serious reservations about the ultimate theoretical compatibility of liberal democracy and Christianity. Maritain on the other hand remained more optimistic, going so far as to speculate about a future democracy "whose Christian inspiration will call forth ... throughout the world the moral forces of the 'naturally Christian soul.'" Despite these important differences, the three thinkers still agreed on the basic theological point: liberal democracy is not in principle inimical to the Christian faith.

Partly because of the efforts of Simon, Murray, and especially Maritain, the Catholic Church's public stance toward liberal democracy has changed considerably over the past century. The broad compatibility of liberal democracy and Christianity is today largely taken for granted. Catholic thinkers no longer argue about the legitimacy, let alone the desirability, of liberal democracy. Official Church documents rarely, if ever, even hint at the fact that for more than two centuries the Church railed against the anti-Christian inspiration of atheistic Enlightenment or radically humanitarian thought. Simply put, contemporary Catholic political thought typically proceeds from the dogmatic presumption that democracy and Christianity are natural allies. This, more than anything else, explains why Simon, Murray, and Maritain so quickly lost their reputations as being liberal Catholic political thinkers.

All of this helps make the "untimely" argument of Robert P. Kraynak's impressive Christian Faith and Modern Democracy especially provocative. Kraynak believes that liberal democracy needs Christianity "because its moral claims cannot be vindicated by secular and rational means alone." Methodologically bracketing all questions about the nature of the good life, philosophic liberalism is destined to proclaim "in theory but subvert in practice the dignity of man."

Modern liberalism is incapable of defending its most elementary claims about the dignity, equality, and freedom of human beings. Kraynak accordingly sees an essential connection between the liberalism of early modern political philosophy and the anti-foundationalism of postmodern theory. In his view, our postmodern theorists paradoxically rely on the moral and spiritual inheritances of Christianity, even as they rework "[the inherently flawed] strategies of the great liberal philosophers of the past."

The central argument of Christian Faith and Modern Democracy, however, advances an even more intriguing claim: while liberal democracy needs Christianity to provide it with spiritual and moral support, the Christian God "is not as liberal or as democratic as we would like him to be." Kraynak reminds modern Christians of the various pre-modern elements of their religion, elements that predate theoretical modernity: Christianity places clear limits on human freedom; Christian cosmology articulates a great "chain of being" that stretches from the uncreated God to dumb nature; and Christian theology sheds light on the dual hierarchies of the temporal and spiritual orders.

The belief that liberal democracy is the only form of government compatible with Christianity is a modern illusion. Truth to be told, for "at least sixteen hundred years ... the Bible was understood to support kingship, theocracy, and other hierarchical institutions." Kraynak's book, in contrast to most secular and Christian works on this subject, thus takes seriously modern democracy's and Christianity's contrasting claims about human nature and political life. In so doing, the book performs the valuable service of clarifying the modern theologico-political problem.

Kraynak brings a much-needed sense of prudence and political sobriety to Christian political discourse. His political sobriety, while influenced by works of classical political philosophy such as Plato's Laws, is in large part informed by classical Christian teachings--a point the book's subtitle, God and Politics in the Fallen World, makes clear. Christian teachings concerning the Fall and original sin not only provide the most realistic, existentially satisfying account of human nature; they also articulate the limits of all political action.

Contemporary Christian political thought, typically focuses more on the various societal and institutional obstacles to "social justice" than on the limits that fallen human nature places on political life. Like the great totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, Christian socialism and liberation theology also refuse to recognize that evil is a permanent and constituent feature of the human world. Whether or not it is rooted in either Christian or humanitarian convictions, the naive and willful belief that evil can be eradicated on a societal level necessarily leads to tyranny and terror.

At the heart of Kraynak's book lies the insight that Christianity risks losing its soul by entering into a full partnership with liberal democracy. In a learned and thoughtful, but finally overstated, chapter titled "The Opening of Christianity to Democracy and Human Rights," Kraynak argues that "Kant's philosophy of freedom and his notion of the human person as a possessor of inalienable rights has been the decisive factor in changing Christian politics." Kraynak believes that in engaging the modern world, Christian social and political thought too often has let philosophic modernity set the terms of the debate.

Desperate to show the enduring relevance of Christian thought, many Christian theorists have been too quick to incorporate Enlightenment-based arguments into their thought. As a result, today many traditional Christian teachings are supported by arguments that proceed from the explicitly non-Christian premises of Enlightenment rationalism. Kraynak artfully shows how Christians such as Maritain, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Martin Luther King let Kant's views on human dignity and freedom inform too much of their own thought on these matters. Indeed, Kraynak argues that the widespread incorporation of Kantianism into traditional Christian teachings is the greatest contemporary threat to the integrity of the Christian faith.

"Kantian Christianity" jumbles together Christianity's belief that man's dignity is rooted in his being created in God's image and Kant's insistence that human dignity "is based on autonomous self-determination." Such an amalgam characteristically emphasizes the brute fact of human autonomy over the fact that this freedom is rooted in God. Kraynak believes that Kantian Christianity has no adequate account of the restraints natural and divine law place on human beings. As a result, these restraints all too often come to be seen as artificial and arbitrary limits on human autonomy.

In this context, Kraynak criticizes a number of "Christian personalists," including Niebuhr, Maritain, Murray, King, and the Catholic neoconservative Michael Novak, for failing to appreciate the influence that liberalism's teaching on rights and autonomy has on the self-understanding of modern man. The logic of rights necessarily gives rise to "a corrosive ... culture of rights and [the] leveling effects of mass democracy." As examples of this tendency, Kraynak points to the new role that "the language of rights" plays in Christianity's public arguments about abortion and war.

Where the Church traditionally stressed a person's moral duty not to be complicit in abortion, it currently emphasizes the fetus's basic "right to life." Similarly, most Christian Churches today understand the justice of war to be grounded in society's "right to self-defense" and not in its moral duty to uphold the common good--a fact that many of the Christian responses to the terrorist attack of September 11 made painfully clear. In Kraynak's mind, Kantian Christianity fails to see what such diverse thinkers as Tocqueville and Nietzsche saw only too well: when pushed to its logical conclusion, philosophic liberalism nurtures the rootless individualism that increasingly defines the life of modern human beings.

Kraynak concedes that some Christian thinkers such as Pope John Paul II (and, I would add, Simon and Murray) are able to keep "Kant in a box" by carefully qualifying their "arguments in favor of freedom and democracy" with explicit affirmations of the created character of the world. By so doing, they manage to defend both the dignity of the human person and the desirability and legitimacy of such goods as self-government, independent social institutions, and modern constitutionalism.

Given the pervasive influence of Kantian ideas of freedom and autonomy in the modern world, Kraynak concludes that even these carefully crafted arguments have a "tendency to get out of control." But while not denying this very real problem, such flexible theological approaches seem to embody precisely the kind of prudence and political sobriety that Kraynak himself demands. Rather than looking backwards to a pre-democratic past or forward to a post-democratic future, they prudently try to moderate the democratic excesses of our present. Christian political thinkers who advance such arguments thus practice the kind of "education relative to the regime" that Aristotle's Politics (Book 5, Chapter 9) points out is constantly necessary in political life.

What Kraynak advocates instead is a recovery of the prudential appreciation of the relation of Christianity to the political order found in Saint Augustine's teaching on the city of God and the earthly city. In marked contrast to the political ideologies of the twentieth century, Saint Augustine's teaching is predicated on the realization that politics is an inherently limited enterprise and that the spiritual realm of the Church transcends the limitations of the political order.

Because it does not absolutize politics, the doctrine of the two cities recognizes that there are a wide variety of regimes that can promote civic virtue and preserve what Augustine called the "tranquility of order." The Augustinian approach Kraynak advocates acknowledges the legitimacy of Caesar's realm, but is careful to subordinate this realm to the more perfect realm of the Church. By so doing, it avoids the monistic temptations of both ideological totalitarianism and theocratic despotism.

Kraynak concedes that in the modern world this approach would have to take the form of "Christian constitutionalism," a form of "liberty under God" that is not tied to the anti-nomian, right-based premises of philosophic liberalism. Kraynak admires the non-rights-based democracy described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whom he presents as a political Augustinian, as a model of this kind of government. Solzhenitsyn "shows how a Christian ... can reject totalitarianism without embracing the western theory of human rights and still advocate constitutionally limited government under God."

While I am hesitant to criticize a book that addresses so many important questions so very well, it must be observed that the relationship between democracy, liberty, and Christianity is even more subtle than Kraynak presents it. He is undoubtedly right to draw attention to the fundamental claims that separate classical Christianity from modern Enlightenment philosophy. Christianity clearly cannot affirm the kind of radical human autonomy that philosophic liberalism does. Nor can Christianity accept liberalism's uncompromisingly democratic view of the world. It was partially for these reasons, as Kraynak shows, that earlier Christian thinkers preferred to forge a prudential rapprochement with liberal democracy. But to recognize this is still far from saying, as he does, that the Christian faith is inherently illiberal and undemocratic.

Christianity sides with ancient political philosophy in criticizing the liberal and democratic excesses of modern political philosophy. But by the same token, it also sides with modern political philosophy in criticizing the illiberal and undemocratic excesses of ancient political philosophy--in fact, such criticisms were first formulated in the Church Fathers' critiques of the radically unitary character of the Greek polis and the godlike self-sufficiency of the classical philosopher. Embodying the "fullness of truth," Christianity is able to make sense of the partial truths that are articulated by both ancient and modern political philosophy.

Because it lines up too squarely on the side of classical thought, Kraynak's powerful defense of the genuinely pre-modern elements within Christianity paradoxically cedes too much ground to liberalism's claims. Like Kantian Christianity, Kraynak in effect allows liberalism to define the content of democracy and liberty. His apologetic approach has the undesirable and perhaps unintended effect of defending Christianity's basic stance towards liberty and democracy negatively in reaction to those of philosophic liberalism. Whereas Kantian Christianity distorts the Gospel's teachings by trying to make them too similar to those of liberalism, Kraynak distorts these teachings by trying to make them too dissimilar to liberalism's.

Pre-modern theologians such as Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas did not oppose liberty or democracy per se. Rather, what they opposed were exaggerated political and philosophical notions of liberty and democracy. Their theological reflections, like the more flexible theological approaches taken by John Paul II, Yves Simon, and John Courtney Murray, affirmed what is good about liberty and popular political participation. But precisely because Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas were theologians, their writings also drew attention to the fact that liberty and popular political participation are not the highest human goods, that they do not, to use John Paul II's phrase, constitute the whole "truth about man."

Even taking this criticism into consideration, the fact remains that Kraynak has written an impressive book. Christian Faith and Modern Democracy raises a series of tough questions about the relationship of Christianity and liberal democracy that no one who thinks seriously about these matters can afford to ignore. Kraynak's book promises to play an essential role in this debate for the foreseeable future.

MARC GUERRA teaches theology at Assumption College in Massachusetts. He is the editor of Reason, Revelation, and Human Affairs: Selected Writings of James V. Schall (2001).