Around the world, religion is being used to fuel “us vs. them” narratives and undermine the foundations of democracy. This week, we dive into what this means and how people of faith can chart a different path forward.

Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy highlights the use of religious identity to fuel the rise of illiberal, nationalist, and populist democracy.  It examines the ways religious identity is weaponized to fuel populist revolts against a political, social, and economic order that values democracy in a global and strikingly diverse world.

The book is intended for readers who value democracy and are concerned about growing threats to it, and especially for people of faith and religious leaders, which is why we’re excited to have author David M. Elcott on the show this week. Elcott is the Taub Professor of Practice in Public Service and Leadership at the Wagner School of Public Service at NYU and director of the Advocacy and Political Action specialization.

Additional Information

Faith, Nationalism, and the Future of Liberal Democracy

Democracy and the language of faith – article in Democracy Journal

Episode Transcript

Chris Beem
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, I’m Chris Beem.

Candis Watts Smith 
I’m Candis Watts Smith.

Jenna Spinelle
I’m Jenna Spinelle and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are talking with David M. Elcott, who is the author of a book called Faith, nationalism and the future of liberal democracy. And, you know, Chris, it’s been 200 episodes of this show now, and we have yet to really talk about religion or or faith for that matter in in a substantive way. I know it’s something that you have been studying and thinking about for a long time. So I’m excited to hear where this discussion goes today.

Chris Beem
Yeah, I’ve never let the fact that I didn’t know what I was talking about, saw me from talking and here I am actually talking about something I know something about. So we’ll see if that makes a difference. I do feel like this is a really useful exercise for us to talk about now. Because a it’s it’s a worldwide phenomenon. And we can talk about that. But be it’s also extremely operative and important in in American political context, right? Always has been, you can go back all the way to the to the Great Awakening in the early 19th century, late 18th century to talk about how religion has interacted with politics. But right now, the one scene that David mentions that I think is really, really important, or really emblematic of where we are, was when Donald Trump cleared away the square, right, the Lafayette Square right outside the White House, and then walked to the Presbyterian Church there and held up a Bible. And that’s pretty much all he did, right? He, I mean, I mean, for that matter, the Bible was upside down. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t reference anything about the Bible. He didn’t say why he was holding it up. But he, he did that. And the clear message was that he was communicating exactly what he wanted to communicate to his constituency. And, and it is relevant in terms of, of where we go with this, where we understand the relationship between religion and democracy, because it’s not exactly about religion.

Candis Watts Smith 
I’m really glad that we’re talking about this. Because, you know, in that moment, Trump was essentially kind of defending a very particular brand of American traditionalism. And I just think it’s so fascinating that people buy this stuff, you know, like 29% of Evangelicals think that he’s anointed like the, like the chosen person of God. And, you know, at first I just thought, you know, maybe just American evangelicals are just weirdos. But one of the things that Elcott and his co authors show is that this kind of embrace of the kind of dominant religion is a tactic of many kinds of strong men, you know, who, and when we see this across many different contexts and across different religions that are ways to just kind of it’s a pattern. What Elkhart and their co authors show is that the thing that Trump is doing is very similar to what we’ve seen other strong men and authoritarian type figures use. And we see that in democratic backsliding across countries.

Chris Beem
Yeah, the only thing I want to add to that is that, in addition to a culture that was dominated by Christians, and there was a strong cultural establishment of Christianity throughout the nation, that same time was prevailing in terms of white membership in society, in terms of white power structures. It was also prevailing male and heterosexual right. And on top of that, America was after world war two top of them economic mountain, everybody else was rebuilding, we were the only ones who still had factories. So we were dominant in every way economically for decades, up until like, the, you know, early 70s, really, and so all of that is just tied together and is inseparable in the minds of these people who who embrace a MAGA ideology, right, that all of this a kind of cultural legacy that served them very well and that they thought was absolutely fine, is being eroded. And they’re not wrong about that. And so that is a threat. And that undermines their status status of their tribe within the broader culture. And so they have, they resisted that. They resent it, and they want to fight back. And in that regard, Donald Trump is their guy.

Candis Watts Smith 
Yeah, but let’s just also just be very clear that the change that has happened is like not inverting the hierarchy. The distinction I want to make is the difference between perception and reality.

Chris Beem
I get it, I get it. And And if enough people share the perception, I mean, I think David is is much more sympathetic to this, this perception than you or I are, but and it’s worth we should go to the interview, right? But but it is telling that at the end of the day, Christianity is just one more tag for this group for this tribe. And that’s really the extent of its of its connection to a lot of these people.

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah. And that’s actually where we start the interview with some of the those kind of distinctions between religion and faith. And so you’ll hear that in the interview, and maybe we can pick up on it a little bit more after but let’s go now to the interview with David Elcott.

Jenna Spinelle
David Elcott, welcome to Democracy Works. Thank you so much for joining us today.

David Elcott
Glad to be with you.

Jenna Spinelle
So you know, your book, faith, nationalism and liberal democracy. Those are some pretty big concepts to try to unpack. But we happen to be recording this interview a few days before Christmas, although the episode won’t be out until early next year. But you have an anecdote in the book about parade in Charleston, West Virginia, that goes back and forth between a Christmas parade and the and a winter parade. And that, at least to my thinking, really sort of encapsulates a lot of what you’re talking about, or the the ways that our ideas about faith and identity and democracy kind of intersect. So would you mind walking us through that example, and maybe how it illustrates some of these bigger concepts.

David Elcott
So the mayor of the mayor, there is West Virginia, the mayor there felt that given the diversity in the city, they don’t need to say Christmas anymore. People will celebrate what they want to celebrate, but never Winter Festival, the moment she announced that there was enormous pushback, the don’t you’re taking Christ out of Christmas, you’re taking away our cultural heritage. So right to unpack this, what are we talking about? Well, for a start, it was calculated that only about a third of the citizens in the town actually go to church. So this wasn’t necessarily coming from a faithful church going religiously observant community, rather, it has it had to do with something else, something else very important, which is a sense of who I am in the world. What is my culture, from where did my values derive? And I think deeper than that, is a sense of what it means to be in America. And that tradition of pilgrims of religious seekers who were Christians coming to a new land, this new land is almost like a new Israel. It is the reincarnation of God’s promise. And it’s not about of any particular observance, but rather about the wholeness of God’s promise to these colonial obviously, their colonial colonists. But in a sense, what what they were were religious Vanguard, and to create an America, this Christian Eden. So when the mayor wanted to take this out, this sense of deep link to the very founding of America itself, the very founding of long before there was United States. This seemed to threaten a large number of citizens in a variety of ways. One way was, wait a moment, who I am when I close my eyes, and I say the word American. I’m imagining somebody who is Christian. Somebody who is white, somebody who is sis heterosexual, somebody who’s married with some kids, someone who has a home, right? All of these are in my mind, it’s not. It’s not even necessarily conscious. It’s the way that we were socialized. Frankly, even if you’re not that person, you still would imagine, yeah, the real American, the heroic American. So that’s one thing, that my image of what it means to be American is being shattered. Another piece is where do I ground myself in the world, it doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize their other religions, or that everybody needs to be my religion. But when I think about democracy, so the book is, is on faith, nationalism, and the future of liberal democracy, the word liberal there is very important, because there are different ways to imagine democracy. One way is to say, the majority rules, right? Like when we were little kids, even preschool, the teacher says, Who wants to play outside who wants to play inside? And the majority is said, Let’s go outside and teachers, okay, the majority is that everybody goes outside, and we understand the rules. Well, what happens when 85% of the community is Christian, and they say, No, let’s play by democracy. And this democracy says, majority rule, you can be a minority you can have your place, but understand what your place is, you’re not going to determine the grounding the culture of our society. So that’s the second piece, it’s like, I’m being robbed of something that belongs to me as part of the as part of the majority. And then as I said, I think there’s this third sense of kind of divine blessing, that if we take away Christmas, if we take away that we’re losing something deep, something about the promise of, of who we are, of who we are, and what our future is. So I think all of that comes into play. And it comes into play by simply saying, You’re stealing Christmas for me, you’re the Grinch that stole Christmas. So I think it’s a very good example. Let me add to that. There’s another quote in the book, in which a commentator says it commenting about the diversity of Santa says, Just acceptance, Santa is white. So the same, you can feel that same thing. It’s not saying that black people can’t celebrate Christmas or brown people, people can celebrate Christmas, but it is a reminder that Jesus and the saints, they’re all white folk. And that’s who we are. That’s who the majority is. We have a right to hold on to that.

Jenna Spinelle
Right. And, you know, zooming out, then from this, this one kind of example, how do these sort of faith based or the these identities that have faith traditions as part of them, how are they dangerous? Or how do they seek to undermine liberal democracy

David Elcott
In Germany, in Europe, for example, it turns out that the more pious you are, the more religiously observant going to church, observing the either Catholic or Protestant rituals, the less likely you will support the nationalist groups. So it’s interesting, and it’s more so in in Europe than the United States. So the less you are observant, the more radical you’re going to be to demand holding on to these values. Now, what does that mean? Well, if I’m saying that to be a real German, a true true German, among the other qualities is, you have to be white. And you have to be Christian, not Christian in practice, but that that’s your identity. That means that a third generation Turkish Muslim will never be German, frankly, my family which came from Germany, my family was in Germany, it leaves during the Crusades, if not before, which means over 1000 years, but because my family was Jewish, we could never be truly German. It doesn’t mean that we’re evil in today’s Germany. But it does mean that we don’t quite belong, we don’t quite have a place. And I think that when we see religion, being used religious identity being used to fuel the nationalism to fuel the populism, we see that in Israel with Jews, we see it in India with Hindus, we see even Myanmar with Buddhists. We see it in in Indonesia with Muslims. I think we saw it most powerfully in America. When Donald Trump held up a Bible in a church that he has never attended, the Bible is upside down. I think it was clear that if you would have asked him to cite verses from the Bible, it would have been difficult for him. But he held it aloft with a serious face. So what was he saying? He wasn’t saying, I’m a God fearing Christian. He was saying, this Bible that I’m holding, is what America is. And it is where we, those who belong belong. And I’m making that very clear to those for whom this Bible in this fashion is not yours. You are a minority in this country except your place.

Jenna Spinelle
You know, you’ve you’ve mentioned several different faith traditions over over the past couple of minutes Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, and it seems like there is a trend you’ve identified of you all of them being used in their particular cultures in a very populist or anti democratic way. Is there something about that is sort of a common denominator, you know, realizing that each religion each faith tradition, in and of itself is different, but is there are there overarching qualities that make them particularly good tools for this, this populace toolbox, so to speak,

David Elcott
Loss, loss, a deep sense of loss. After World War Two, nationalism was curtailed. The United Nations was formed, there was a whole series of universal laws that were established on religious freedom, even sexual identity, democracy, protecting the individual. And if you look, for example, the United States courts, it is exactly after World War Two that you have decision after decision that is focused on protecting the most vulnerable, the most disenfranchised, the most underserved, particularly those of color of alternative sexual sexual identity, sexual being of nationality of language. So imagine this, your family has lived in America, a nice Christian family for many, many generations. You are you work, you have your family, you have your home, and you feel that you’ve been waiting patiently for your piece of the American dream. But you hear the government saying, wait a moment, wait a moment? No, no, first, we’re going to deal with African Americans because they were enslaved. And we’re going to give them benefit. Wait, wait, wait. Now we have Muslims who are in our country, they’re their immigrants, we’re going to protect their rights. So we’re not going to have God in schools. We’re not gonna have prayer in schools, because we also have some atheists, and they don’t believe and we don’t want, do we have to protect their rights. And wait a moment, we’ve got immigrants coming in, frankly, they came over without against the law. And they’re jumping ahead of us in line as well. And these an LGBT trans, they’re asking for bathrooms, and they’re all jumping ahead of me in line, who’s thinking about me? And so I get more and more angry. And the more that the country focuses on identity, who’s black? Who’s Latino? Who’s Asian, wait a moment, what about whites? What about me? And, and by the way, you see that in Israel, where you have an overwhelming Jewish majority, but they have to pass a law that says none of this the Jewish state there you can be here, but this is a Jewish state. Right? So what you realize is, there is a deep sense of anxious loss taking place, loss of my country, loss of who I am loss of my identity.

Jenna Spinelle
So you were talking earlier about the decline of membership in organized religion, we continue to see that here in the US, there’s new data out from Pew now about 29% of people surveyed identify with no religion at all. But if I’m understanding your argument correctly, like that is not really as relevant as it might seem on its when we consider some of these larger trends and factors because these issues are much deeper than whether you belong to a particular church, etc.

David Elcott
Yeah, I think I have a yes or no to that. Yes, America is about a third of America sees itself as no affiliation affiliated with no religion, whether or not people go to a church or belong to a church. They’re not affiliated but and, you know, among younger, 35 and younger, it’s the majority religion is not. That’s for sure. It’s even more pronounced in in Europe. But as we said, religious identity and religiosity are two different things. So that’s part of it. But I also think that in the United States, as, as we have seen, politically, this populist, nationalist fueled nationalism fueled by Christianity in America is a minority. It’s a very loud voice, and it may be very dominant at the moment in the Republican Party. But if you simply take the stats, it’s a minority, the the states divide in a way that it makes it look larger. And certainly, I do believe that to be politically successful in America, you have to have a religious voice, even if it’s not, you know, it’s not about a religious voice of piety, but a religious voice of values. You know, seeing that, you know, this is what Jesus did would do is important. That said, the dominant media voice is one of religiosity. So people kind of differ. Well, if I want a prayer, in school in you don’t. But okay, what do I care if you say the prayer, whereas I care enormously if you’ve stopped me from seeing a prayer, if you look at the Supreme Court rulings over the last 50 years, Potter Stewart, I probably about 50 years ago, maybe even more said, in a dissent about about religious expression. He said, This is gonna come back to bite us, you can’t limit religious expression more than any other expression. And we’re seeing the supreme court now and ruling After ruling based on both the First Amendment, but also the legislation passed under the Clinton Democratic administration, the Religious Freedom Act, is being used now repeatedly, we’re seeing in terms of vaccines, demanding that I don’t have to have a vaccine, because of my religion, or I don’t have to provide contraceptive in my, in my health care because of my religion, or I’m not going to bake a cake for a gay couple. Because of my religion. We’re seeing an assertion here. And I’ll say the same thing. Again, it’s not linked to religious piety, it is linked to the demands of identity. And in some ways, it’s even more threatening. If I’m a deeply religious person, do I care if somebody else does something? Why do I care? But if, if all I’ve got is that identity, I don’t have religious practice, I just have that identity. Well, I don’t want to challenge I don’t want to threatened. That’s very important to me.

Jenna Spinelle
So how can people of faith faith leaders work in support of liberal democracy? How can we sort of push back against some of these forces we we’ve been talking about?

David Elcott
So for the last many decades now, I’ve been working in the interfaith and inter Ethnic World in the United States and around the world as well. Trying to bring together a variety of people with differences, trying to bring them together. Even though such a large percentage of Americans are not religiously observant, many of them are not even affiliated. The religious voice matters. And to a great degree, the dominant voice has been an extremist voice. So we have a pope who is making very strong statements about immigration, very strong statements about about protecting rights of people, right. He’s been, you know, equivocal on gay rights equivalent abortion, saying, Look, we have to care about everyone. Everyone has a place remember he says, communion is not for the perfect, it’s for the center. So there needs to be a place for everyone there. But in reality, when I when what feels authentically religious, authentically Christian, its triumphalist authentically Jewish is triumphalist authentically Hindu is triumphalist. So we need to be able to create authentic voices in the language of their own tradition that can develop in NP proponents have a theology of democracy. A theology of democracy means that God is unknowable. And that’s what the book actually attempted to show that this type of use of religious identity to fuel nationalism is a form of heresy. Because faith has to be beyond the nation. One can be a patriot, one cannot be a nationalist, because if you’re a nationalist, you’re denying it. The larger vision of your faith. And I think we are, it’s touching go. I think that if we can’t get a commitment to those core principles of truth, what what one author writes the constitution of knowledge and respect to that, of pluralism? Of Well, I can use, I used a model in the book that’s helpful

Jenna Spinelle
Finite and infinite games

David Elcott
Yeah, liberal democracy is an infinite game, it means that you want to continue playing it, you play, you lose one time, but you win the next hand. And so you got to follow the rules, because otherwise, otherwise, the game can’t continue. Liberal Democracy is an infinite game, it doesn’t have an end it only as a continuation. But if you believe whether it’s on the extreme right, or the extreme left, whether you believe instead, that really it should be a finite game, we should so vanquish the other side, that they are gone, they are destroyed, they cannot come back, the victories absolute. So if I play that finite game, I’m going to change the laws of who can vote, I’m going to change the laws of who will make the decision of which votes are valid. I’m going to create laws that will disenfranchise population populations. And if those don’t work, I will try to manipulate the system by claiming that I won an election that I lost, right, all of these are true threats to the liberal democracy as we understand it. And I’m concerned that we don’t have the strength to battle that as effectively as we need to. I’ve seen the deterioration in these last years. And that increasingly, it’s ironic, you know, we moved as a professor, I stopped teaching that I know, I’m teaching my students I have, I know everything, I have the truth, I’m going to teach them. And I accepted that with what I want to promote is the diversity of views, storytelling. So you have a story to tell, and I have a story to tell. I can’t say your story’s wrong. Because I have to respect your voice in telling your story. But what happens if your story is racist? What happens if your story just annihilates? Me? Right? What happens if you if I say, if I say, but these are the facts? And you say, No, I’ll have alternative facts, or facts are not important, what I believe is important. So I think that we are it’s a fraught time. And I think that we’re there to be an election in which those who are looking for the absolute victory, the finite game, if they were to come to power, again, I do not have confidence that our institutions would be strong enough to withstand that.

Jenna Spinelle
Well, David, these are such big questions. And there’s there’s so much in this book that that we did not get to, I hope our listeners will pick it up and dive further into these arguments. But was there anything else you wanted to add or any final thoughts you’d like to leave our listeners with?

David Elcott
America, which is the audience here, post World War Two, was at the forefront of fighting for the expansion of democracy. And in these last years, it is been the opposite model for the world. I traveled the world. So I see how America, I see and hear how America is viewed. We can’t afford to fail in this democratic enterprise. Because what will unfold will be terrorizing for all of us. How is that for a challenge, but also a somewhat depressing way to end?

Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, well, you know, I think that out of every crisis comes opportunity out of every challenge comes opportunity, right? So I think that that’s definitely in that message as well. Great. Well, David, thank you so much for joining us today.

Candis Watts Smith 
Thank you, Jenna, for the great interview with David Elcott. One of the things that stood out to me and I’d like to hear more what Chris thinks about is that we’re not just talking about America, religion, politics illiberalism, but more specifically, we’re talking about how religiosity gets D linked from faith and how the kind of religious identity is being You served in these kind of nationalist illiberal projects. And that is totally separate and apart from like, the kind of doctrines of the religion. Chris, did you?

Chris Beem
Yeah, no, I think that’s right. And, and what I got out of this was just a reminder of how unique the United States is, among first world nations in terms of religiosity. And in terms of the connections between religion and culture, so he talks about the AfD, which is the far right party in Germany, and they had these big rallies, it’s too far to call them neo Nazi, but they’re definitely pro white and pro German heritage, right. And so they had these rallies in front of the cathedral in Cologne, which is probably one of if not the most important church body in Germany, right goes back to that well into the Middle Ages. And the pastors turned off the lights when this happened, right? They said, We want No, I mean, then the lights are huge, and it’s all lit up and spotlights every night. And they turn them off when this this rally was happening. And it was very clear what they were saying. They were saying, We want no part of this. We the genuine people who are part of this congregation, this community are telling you that we don’t want you connecting your movement to our faith. But the people who are may have D don’t care about that at all. They explicitly say we’re not talking about Christianity, we’re talking about Christian dumb, we’re not talking about Jesus, we’re talking about a cultural heritage that connects us to our germaneness that is inseparable from our Germanus. And I think that’s really, really interesting. And I don’t think it’s exactly the same as what you see in the United States.

Candis Watts Smith 
I think that there are two things, maybe to split apart here. I do think that there are especially white evangelical Christians, who really are invested in figures like Trump, who they know that he knows that he’s not really a Christian, but they don’t care because they think that he’s like a vessel for the larger bringing about God’s vision on Earth. I do think that there are some people who have kind of de linked Christianity, their kind of religious identity, and religiosity. And you know, I think about like those people who are like really stuck on like, not being able to say Merry Christmas or something. It’s like, you didn’t go to church, you don’t really care. The thing that you’re stuck on, are like that lady who was like, everybody knows that Santa is white is like, what? And like, what she’s conveying is that like, the tradition center, somebody like me, right, and it doesn’t really matter if it’s about it’s Santa Santa is not Jesus. And you know, so I don’t know, I think that there are two maybe components, but that are working together, right that like I do think that people who are white evangelicals do care about the link between their religion and their politics. And then there are people who are using that part of the group to build a larger coalition for certain kind of conservative politics. I mean,

Chris Beem
I think you’re right, that there are these two groups, actually, there’s three groups. The third group that I’m really pissed at, is the Christians who No, this is false. But who No, this is not Christianity, but are unwilling to say so explicitly. There are those, we in Barbara’s one, there are those but but I just think about my, you know, my guide, Reinhold Niebuhr, if you were alive right now, he’d be apoplectic about what was passing as Christianity and and he would be calling these people out in terms in explicitly Christian terms. And so I do think that is a big difference with with what you see in Germany and elsewhere, that there’s this kind of stew of faith, non Faith Christian Christians, and and not enough people are demanding that these distinctions be called out. It’s just there’s just no two ways about it. If you are identifying a faith with a partisan point of view, that is the very definition of idolatry and and I I just don’t hear enough. Christian saying that.

Candis Watts Smith 
The other thing that co authors are really concerned about is yeah, like we can disagree on policy, and you can choose any rationale that you want. But when you use religion as the excuse to undermine democracy, now we have a very large problem, because, you know, we can disagree on abortion, we can disagree on contraception, we can disagree on all of these things. We can’t use religion to say this is why we need to prevent people from voting, or right, right, like, this is not that.

Chris Beem
No, I mean, really, you could just say it, you cannot use religion. Full stop, right? I mean, you have every right and indeed, you have a responsibility to connect your faith to the way you think the world should be run the way you think God wants the world to operate, where, you know, to extend your values into the public sphere, but you don’t have the right to add religion as some kind of veneer to a policy agenda. And and whether that’s right or left, it’s wrong. It’s not Christian. I mean, you know, if you there’s nobody stopping you. But there’s something just fundamentally false about that effort. And I’m quite confident that your faithful Jew, or Muslim would say exactly the same thing.

Candis Watts Smith 
I like to hear Chris preach. And I am thankful to have David Ellicott talk about his book, and to, you know, bring after 200 episodes or so the question of religion and politics, a conversation that we are really in need of given the patterns that we see across the globe and the way that religion is used. And so with that, I’ll say thank you. I’m Candis Watts Smith.

Chris Beem
And I’m Chris Beem, thanks for listening.