NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE D emocracy in the abstract is never a guaranteed net benefit to society. Minority groups in the Arab world, particularly religious minorities, learned this the hard way during the aftermath of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. It’s a mistake to limit the work of the American founders to raw majoritarian democracy. Rather, the ordered liberty they sought to uphold relied on metaphysical foundations and the Western world’s Judeo-Christian social precepts.

But in a recent piece at Christianity Today, Paul D. Miller argues that democracy doesn’t need a cultural Christian majority. It’s true that a democratic society might not need a Christian majority. But liberal democracies all over the world exist because of the Christianization that occurred through European colonization and imperialism. Miller lists South Pacific and African states as examples of non-Christian societies that have functional democracies, apparently unaware that much of the South Pacific was Christianized through American, British, and French missionaries. Botswana, one of the supposedly non-Christian countries or what he ambiguously calls “new Christian societies,” is 80 percent Christian. Even the “new Christian” language is specious when we consider that Roman Catholic missionaries have been active in Asia and Africa since the 1500s. Japan’s government, although never Christian officially, was heavily influenced by Christian commitments to liberal democracy during the Meiji Era (Japan has had more Roman Catholic prime ministers than the United States has had Catholic presidents). While Miller’s assertion is well intentioned and understandable given the unusual populist syncretism between religion and politics among revivalist groups, his conclusion is ultimately shortsighted and deals with the wrong question.

The United States might not need Christianity to retain the electoral institutions that sustain a majoritarian democracy. But treating the loss of cultural Christianity as adiaphora is neither good for liberal democracy nor the practice of Christianity in the U.S. Miller worries some of his friends “still insist that Christianity and democracy are inextricably linked.” Certainly, history shows that Christianity is not linked to any form of government, because there is no form of government that is sacred. But history does show Christianity was and is linked to the development of liberal democracy practiced in the United States. Does this mean that every American needs to be a practicing Christian? No. It does mean, however, that society needs to at least believe that the Golden Rule has an authoritative and binding metaphysical foundation, for example. Maybe an overwhelmingly atheist society can do that . . . but I doubt it.

Christianity has survived under a variety of different political systems. Miller is correct to state that the United States does not necessarily need a churchgoing majority of pious Christians to maintain its liberties, but the United States’ peoples cannot be indifferent to overthrow, or potential overthrow, of the Christian socio-moral foundations. While the United States might not need a churchly people, it does need a religious people. John Adams recognized this when he declared that the United States Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

While Miller agrees that Christianity and self-government might be compatible, he argues that if it wasn’t, it would not threaten his faith. Yes, if self-government and Christianity were incompatible, it might not wreck one’s faith. But, as Protestants and Roman Catholics throughout American history understood, removing Christianity from society might certainly cripple self-government.

While American Protestants and Roman Catholics long rejected a state church or theocracy, they also rejected the notion that Christianity had no influence on the cultural or social order. In the darkest days of the Revolutionary War, George Washington told his soldiers that, while they were “zealously performing the duties of good citizens and soldiers,” they certainly “ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of Religion — To the distinguished Character of Patriot, it should be our highest Glory to add the more distinguished Character of Christian.”

Throughout the 19th century, Americans understood that ordered liberty in the United States had an unavoidably Christian socio-moral foundation that was necessary for the development and maintenance of its constitutional liberty. Charles Hodge, one of the most influential Protestant intellectuals in the 19th-century United States, thought it necessary for Americans to “be taught sound religious principles” from an early age. He believed, in the words of his biographer Paul Gutjahr, that it was “absolutely essential to educate Americans as thoroughly as possible to ensure that the country was guided by thoughtful, cultured, and well-considered decisions,” and that this civil catechesis was deeply Christian. Hodge declared those who demanded “that religion, and especially Christianity, should be ignored in our national, state, and municipal laws” to be “not only unreasonable but . . . in the highest degree unjust and tyrannical.”

Roman Catholics immigrating to the United States in the decades preceding the American Civil War had no affection for Protestant cultural supremacy. But even Archbishop “Dagger” John Hughes of New York understood the religious toleration Roman Catholics enjoyed in the United States was not a secular creation. Nor was it enacted ex nihilo. Hughes told his fellow Catholic Americans that they were “indebted” to Protestantism’s “liberality.” Almost all the Founding Fathers, Hughes reminded his flock, were generally Protestant. More specifically, the United States’ commitment to religious toleration was birthed from English Protestant Whigs who understood that dissenters — those who practiced religions outside the state church of the majority — nonetheless deserved to be a part of civil society and to enjoy legal protections.

Into the 20th century, the nation retained a commitment to Christianity’s cultural and moral underpinnings in the constitutional democratic order. President Franklin Roosevelt told Americans they needed “the sustaining, buttressing aid of those great ethical religious teachings which are the heritage of our modern civilization.” This allusion to Christianity became more explicit in the lead-up to the United States’ entry into the Second World War, when FDR posited that fascists hated “democracy and Christianity as two phases of the same civilization. They oppose democracy because it is Christian. They oppose Christianity because it preaches democracy.”

Ronald Reagan, who admired FDR and even quoted him as president, spoke constantly about faith and employed religious language in his descriptions of the United States. His regular invocations of the Puritans made it clear where he thought the moral foundations of the republic lay. In 1980, he told a group of Evangelicals in Dallas that, to Americans, “as to the ancient People of The Promise, there is given an opportunity: a chance to make our laws and government not only a model to mankind, but a testament to the wisdom and mercy of God.” Reagan saw cultural Christianity as critical to the creation of law in the United States and indispensable to its cultural and political order. He believed “faith and religion play a critical role in the political life of our nation, and always have, and that the Church — and by that, I mean all churches, all denominations — has had a strong influence on the state, and this has worked to our benefit as a nation.” Reagan followed this statement with allusions to the Puritans, the abolitionist movement, and the removal of prayer in public schools.

Miller argues that “civic virtue is essential to sustaining an open society” but “civic virtue is not the same thing as Christian belief, and Christianity is not the only source of it.” What Miller misses, however, is that Christianity was very much the source of our particular American civic virtue, received from British common law and the longue durée of Western political, religious, and social thought. Hodge, Archbishop Hughes, Roosevelt, and Reagan did not need a society of Evangelicals. They did need a society of people who respected Christianity’s foundational place in the development of law. The United States might not need a society of pious Christians to stay a liberal democracy. But it certainly needs a society that respects Christianity to stay one.

Paul Miller’s claims are innovative. Certainly, aspects of pluralism are worth celebrating. But without commitment to historic Christian socio-moral conceptions, it’s hard to see how liberty and religious liberty have any transcendent meaning. The United States certainly has become less churched, but only recently has it become actively anti-Christian. It is far too early to say whether the democracy the United States enjoys can actually survive in a post-Christian society. The question of whether Christianity is necessary for democracy or adiaphora is ultimately less important than the question of what belief system will teach and sustain virtue in a free republican society. Roman stoicism and the great pagans certainly have their role; so too do the other great Abrahamic faiths, Judaism and Islam. But the most influential metaphysical commitments for constitutional rule in the United States remain the truths of Christianity. Dismissing them as incidental to the maintenance of American liberty runs the risk of historical ingratitude and present hubris. We don’t know what a fully post-Christian society looks like yet. I’d rather not find out.