Among the settled convictions of the Western intellectual class over the past century or more was the belief that Christianity had ceased to be a major cultural force. The German sociologist Max Weber spoke of the “disenchantment of the world,” while Matthew Arnold, in Dover Beach, evoked the melancholy image of the “Sea of Faith” receding from the shores of Western civilization, leaving humanity stranded on the barren shingles of a godless world.Yet the retreat from Christian belief has not ended its moral inheritance. As the British historian Tom Holland has recently observed, many Westerners remain cultural Christians, adhering to a moral code that a citizen of pre-Christian Rome would have found extraordinary, perhaps even incomprehensible.Christianity has so thoroughly shaped the Western moral imagination that many of its core tenets are now regarded as self-evident, even by those who have rejected the faith from which they sprang. The inherent worth of the individual, the principle of the moral equality of all men, the imperative of charity, and the notion that political authority must be answerable to a moral law of higher order than itself are not merely the products of secular reason. They are largely the legacy of Christianity's long and complicated history. Whether those convictions can survive once their religious underpinnings have eroded is another question altogether.That question lies at the heart of Politics and Human Flourishing: A Christian Vision, edited by Leanne J. Smythe, an assistant professor of political studies at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC, and Jens Zimmermann, a professor of theology at Regent College in Vancouver. These ten essays explore Christianity's formative influence on Western liberal democracy and consider how its understanding of human dignity, freedom, responsibility, and the common good might continue to inform contemporary political life.Craig M. Gay's opening piece, "Remembering the 'Evangelical' Roots of Liberal Democracy," challenges the standard narrative that the modern secular state emerged through emancipation from religion. Liberal democracy, Gay contends, is founded on a set of beliefs about human dignity, equality, our own fallibility, and our freedom, all of which are very much the products of Christianity. These beliefs helped constrain the exercise of political power, provide a basis for freedom of conscience, and create the idea of a government that is not simply a creature of the political process but one bound by moral standards it did not invent. Drawing on the sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Gay suggests that liberal democracies have become amnesiac, having forgotten the chain of memory that binds them to their religious pasts..Jens Zimmermann takes a more fundamental approach. His essay “Who Is to Flourish? Human Identity and Politics” poses a question too often ignored in contemporary political discourse. To speak meaningfully about human flourishing, we must first ask what it means to be human.Zimmermann's Christian view of the person rejects the idea of the person as a consumer, a biological mechanism, or an instrument of some collective political purpose. The technocratic-managerial state can be very good at measuring economic output, running services, and calculating the outcomes of social policy. Yet administrative competence, however impressive, cannot by itself tell us what constitutes a good human life.For Zimmermann, human dignity is neither conferred by the state nor earned through economic usefulness. It inheres in the person, understood in Christian terms as created in the image of God and called into relationships of freedom, responsibility, and mutual obligation. Jon Waind examines a related question through the principle of subsidiarity: the idea that larger political authorities should support smaller communities without taking over their proper responsibilities. Families, churches, Scout troops, amateur sports clubs, neighbourhood associations, book clubs, and countless other voluntary organizations of civil society do things the state cannot.These institutions cultivate habits of trust, co-operation, affection, responsibility, and mutual obligation. Burke called them the “little platoons” of society. They form the very fabric of local attachments and practical loyalties that underpin democratic citizenship. As these institutions erode, the state is increasingly called upon to assume responsibilities once discharged by families and local communities. Nevertheless, civic life is impoverished in the process. For Waind, subsidiarity is not merely a principle of efficient government but a theological commitment — rooted in the Christian understanding of the person as made in God's image — to preserving the proper responsibilities of the family, church, and state as institutions of moral formation.Michael J. DeMoor, in “Public Policy and Human Flourishing: Analysis, Pluralism, and Social Critique,” challenges another assumption of contemporary government: that sufficiently rigorous scientific evidence can, by itself, produce sound public policy.DeMoor does not question the need for robust evidence, but notes that evidence alone cannot tell us what a society ought to value. Any policy based on the most up-to-date technical expertise will involve a series of judgments about justice, competing obligations, the risks we are willing to accept, and the proper ends of political life. Those are questions for public reasoning and political judgment; they are not questions for the expert to answer simply on the basis of expertise. The expert can tell us what is likely to happen if we follow a particular course. Expertise alone cannot establish whether that course is worth pursuing.The late David Cayley addresses a related concern. A distinguished broadcaster and documentary maker whose work for CBC Radio's Ideas exemplified public broadcasting at its best, Cayley believed that radio could introduce citizens to unfamiliar arguments, challenge settled assumptions, and sustain a shared intellectual life. .His criticism of the CBC is that it's increasingly become the mouthpiece of a particular cultural group. A public broadcaster should be a forum where citizens from all walks of life and across the political spectrum can see themselves as part of a common political endeavour. A public institution that — in effect — treats a large section of the public as intellectually and morally suspect exacerbates the very alienation it should be working to eliminate. For Cayley, the CBC's deeper failure is not simply political partiality but its growing inability to imagine a genuinely plural public, one in which citizens who disagree about fundamental questions can nevertheless meet in conversation.John von Heyking approaches the problem of political disagreement through Saint Augustine's conception of political friendship. The question he poses lies at the heart of the commonwealth: How can citizens sustain a common political life when they fundamentally disagree on the ultimate questions?Von Heyking offers a modest yet significant answer. Political cooperation needn't be predicated on agreement about the ultimate things. People of very different religions and philosophies can still share commitments to peace, justice, neighbourliness, and the ordinary goods of communal life. Political friendship becomes possible when citizens recognize the goods they share and acknowledge the limits of political authority. And all must resist the temptation to turn their deepest convictions into instruments of political domination. For Christians, this means recognizing both the value and the limits of politics. The earthly commonwealth is something we can and should serve and be loyal to, but it is not the Kingdom of God.The collection's strength lies in its acknowledgement that liberal democracy is much more than a set of constitutional procedures or a collection of administrative arrangements. Free elections, prosperity, the consent of the governed, and effective public administration are genuine political achievements. All of that, however, presupposes moral habits and convictions that procedural means can't engineer.Yet historical indebtedness is not the same as philosophical dependence. That Christianity helped give birth to liberal democracy's moral vocabulary does not establish that its central convictions cannot be defended on secular grounds. The more difficult question is whether secular accounts of human dignity, equality, and political obligation can provide foundations sufficiently compelling to sustain the institutions they are invoked to justify. The collection would have benefited from a more sustained engagement with this question.Nonetheless, this reservation does not diminish the book's central achievement. It is salutary to be reminded that the moral assumptions of modern liberal democracy have a history, and that in forgetting that history, we may well lose the capacity to explain or justify the institutions we have inherited.The question is not whether modern man must recover his ancestors' religious beliefs. The question is whether he can continue to endorse Christianity's moral conclusions while remaining completely indifferent, if not hostile, to the understanding of God and the human person from which those conclusions emerged. That is a question a civilization confident in its moral inheritance ought to ask.
