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Abstract
Democratic faith may seem like an ill-advised concept when the ills of democratic life are so glaring. This article claims that it is possible, even necessary, to recover and reinvigorate a notion of democratic faith that grapples with the flaws and intractabilities of the democratic condition. Conceived of as a virtue that inhabits uncertainty, I argue that democratic faith is well-tailored for democratic exchanges — particularly those involved in the risky business of building trust among citizens. Democratic faith's temporal orientation in the present girds the activist for the spade-work of democratic life, where future success often seems unlikely. On these terms, democratic faith can be distinguished from democratic hope. Jeffrey Stout's recent work exemplifies both hope and faith as democratic virtues, however Stout neglects the language of faith in favor of hope. I argue that Stout and other activists should consider the ways that democratic faith speaks to the dogged persistence required to face the dispiriting conditions of democratic life.
Acknowledgements
For their helpful suggestions and crucial comments on earlier drafts of this essay, I'd like to thank Vincent Lloyd, Louis Ruprecht, Wayne Proudfoot, and Stephen Bush. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers, particularly for encouraging me to emphasize trust-building and the work of Danielle Allen.
Notes
1 Honig, Emergency Politics, 139.
2 Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 38.
3 Honig, Emergency Politics, 139.
4 Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times; Mathews, The Republic of Grace; Cherniavsky, “Neocitizenship and Critique.”
5 Brown, “We Are All Democrats Now.” For an earlier liberal version of the now universal acceptance of democracy, see Sen, “Democracy as a Universal Value.”
6 Stout, Democracy & Tradition; Stout, Blessed Are the Organized; Westbrook, Democratic Hope; West, The Courage to Hope; West, Restoring Hope.
7 I, along with eight others, started a multiracial Harlem community association called the “North Star Neighborhood Association,” named after Frederick Douglass's abolitionist newspaper. See www.thenorthstarharlem.com.
8 See Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, 118.
9 Dewey, “Christianity and Democracy,” 9.
10 Deneen, Democratic Faith, 12.
11 Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, 213.
12 Ibid., 211–212.
13 Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 50.
14 Niebuhr, Faith on Earth, 4.
15 Lloyd, The Problem with Grace, 77.
16 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 373.
17 Niebuhr, Faith on Earth, 21.
18 Alston, “Belief, Acceptance,” 12. I very much like the way Lara Buchak frames this issue: “Therefore, that a person has faith that X implies nothing about his evidence for X, aside from its inconclusiveness” (Buchak, “Can It Be Rational to Have Faith?” 227).
19 Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 52.
20 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 382.
21 Deneen, Democratic Faith, 49, emphasis original.
22 Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, 194.
23 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 381. Also see this passage from Adams: “There ought to be room in our conception of faith for honest investigation of all questions, and for feeling the force of objections to our faith, even while we are sustained in that faith” (The Virtue of Faith, 17).
24 Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, 197.
25 Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 27.
26 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 384, emphasis in original.
27 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 385.
28 Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, 195.
29 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 181ff.
30 Ibid., 191.
31 Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 41.
32 Niebuhr, Faith on Earth, 41.
33 Badiou, Saint Paul, 88.
34 Lloyd expresses this same notion in a pithy fashion: “Faith as a virtue has nothing to do either with human perfectibility or with divinities. It has to do with a commitment to intersubjective reality” (Lloyd, The Problem with Grace, 85).
35 Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life, 132.
36 Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 62.
37 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 388.
38 Lloyd, The Problem with Grace, 62.
39 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 388.
40 Niebuhr, Faith on Earth, 85.
41 Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods, 382, emphasis in original.
42 Ibid., 388.
43 This might come as something of a shock to those who do not think of themselves as faithful, particular to those who do not express an explicitly religious faith. Nick Bromell, for example, honestly expresses of this sort of shock: “Embarrassing as it might be to admit, the political principles of secular progressives are just as faith-based as those of a Christian conservative or a member of the Muslim Brotherhood” (Bromell, “Faith-Based Politics,” 140). This is an important step; one that is long overdue for political and literary theorists who renounce their own faith and the faith of others.
44 It would come out a few months later in 2004.
45 West et al., “Pragmatism and Democracy,” 417.
46 Both Soundings (87 nos. 3–4 [Fall/Winter 2004]), and the Journal of Religious Ethics (33 no. 4 [Dec 2005]) devoted entire issues to Stout's work, and none of the eleven responses uses a notion of faith to frame Democracy & Tradition.
47 Whitman, Democratic Vistas and Other Papers, 76.
48 Dewey, A Common Faith.
49 Ellison, Going to the Territory, 18.
50 Stout, Democracy & Tradition, 59.
51 Stout, Blessed Are The Organized, 283, emphasis in original.
52 Like Christopher Lasch before him, Stout seeks to distinguish hope from progressive optimism. This distinction runs through Lasch, The True and Only Heaven; and Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites.
53 Stout, “Comments on Six Responses,” 730.
54 Vincent Lloyd characterizes hope in this fashion: “The virtue of faith requires acknowledging the tragic. The rhetoric of hope persuades by eliding the tragic” (Lloyd, The Problem with Grace, 75). On this account, hope distracts us from the immense difficulties of the present by persuading us that things can be better than they are. Hope enchants fantastically. Lloyd goes so far as to deny that hope is a virtue: “Hope is not a virtue, it is a rhetorical technique… It is used to persuade” (Lloyd, The Problem with Grace, 71). When Lloyd denies that hope is a virtue, he is denying that hope is a morally excellent aspect of character. This dichotomous contrast that Lloyd draws between hope and faith is much too strong. Imagining conditions different from what they are does not require denying the tragedy of conditions as they are.
55 Stout, (Blessed Are The Organized, 283.
56 Ibid., 283.
57 Stout, Democracy & Tradition, 9.
58 Stout, Faith, Hope, Love, 93, 89.
59 Stout, Democracy & Tradition, 59.
60 Ibid., 58.
61 Stout is right to say that sometimes “making a difference for the better” may come in the form of a “holding action against forces that are conspiring to make things worse than they are” (Stout, Democracy & Tradition, 58). The object of hope in this case is a conservative one, but even this more conservative version of hope looks to the future. The difference that is being sought — “simply keeping things from worsening to the extent they would have worsened if you had not acted” — is still a difference that concerns the future, a future in which things are not as bad as they otherwise would have been.
62 Allen, Talking to Strangers, 112.
63 Ibid., xvi.
64 Ibid., 48.
65 Ibid., 165.
66 I want to thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me.
67 Stout, Democracy & Tradition, 293; Stout, Blessed Are The Organized, 211, emphasis in original.
68 Stout's democratic faith is obviously secular in that he professes no belief in anything supernatural. But it is unlike the secular faith of Annette Baier with its ultimate vision that “some actual society… will embody the kingdom of ends on earth, that the possible will become actual” (Baier, “Secular Faith,” 147). Stout refuses to redeem democracy and pronounce it sacred: “I am not claiming that democracy is the essence of modernity. Nor am I claiming that the social practices in which democratic ideals are embedded live up to those ideals themselves. Far from it” (Stout, Democracy & Tradition, 289). Also see Stout, “A House Founded on the Sea.”
69 Stout, Blessed Are The Organized, 118.
70 Stout, Democracy & Tradition, 7.
71 Stout, Blessed Are The Organized, 204.
72 Ibid., 96.
73 Recent work on the intersections of the secular and historically marginalized identities include Jakobsen and Pellegrini, Love the Sin; Cady and Fessenden, Religion, the Secular; and Kahn and Lloyd, Race and Secularism in America.
74 It is, in part, on these grounds that Democracy & Tradition in particular has received tremendous acclaim. West calls it “the most important text in ethics since After Virtue” (West et al.,“Pragmatism and Democracy,” 444). Charles Reynolds claims that Democracy & Tradition “is the most important work… in ethics and political philosophy since John Rawls published A Theory of Justice in 1971, as well as the most ambitious work in religious ethics since David Little and Sumner B. Twiss published Comparative Religious Ethics: A New Method in 1978” (Reynolds, “Conversations with Jeffrey,” 247).
75 “Secular, Not Secularist” was the title of the keynote address Stout gave at the conference, “The Varieties of Secular Experience,” at Vassar College in November of 2008. For a fuller discussion of Stout's understanding of the secular see Stout, Democracy & Tradition, 92–100; and Stout, 2007 Presidential Address.
76 On this, Deneen and Rorty serve as mirror images of each other. Though Deneen makes clear that he is not “calling for religious belief by those who do not share such faith,” Deneen's overwhelming emphasis is on the way “‘traditional’ teachings — especially religious and in particular the Judeo-Christian belief of fundamental human depravity” can “serve as a witness” and “be seen as a first line of defense” against democracy's grandiose energies (Deneen, Democratic Faith, 5, 11). For yet another example of Rorty's persistence on the superiority of non-theistic citizens, see West et al., “Pragmatism and Democracy,” 419.
77 Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 95.
78 Shulman, American Prophecy, 246.
79 Shulman, American Prophecy, 246.
80 Cited in Ruprecht, “Muted Strains of Emersonian Perfection.” For West's fuller account of this theme, see West, “Cultivating Critique in the Age of Obama.”
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Jonathon S. Kahn
Jonathon S. Kahn is an Associate Professor of Religion, and a member of the Programs in Africana and American Studies at Vassar College.