Christianity Today October 20, 2026 9 min signal 2026-10-20

“Can Religion Save Democracy”? Yes, but not like this.

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

October 20, 2026

- Facebook

- X

- WhatsApp

- Telegram

Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Brazos Press

Two galvanizing events, 25 years apart, convinced many people that religious faith poses an existential threat to American democracy. On September 11, 2001, it was Islamic theology that motivated the terror attacks aimed at the World Trade Center, the White House, and the Capitol. And on January 6, 2021, it was Christian theology that animated some members of the mob who breached the Capitol in an effort to overturn the presidential election results.

According to this narrative, democracy can be saved only if we get religion out of the public square.

This description of the conflict between religion and politics recapitulates the self-congratulatory narrative that modern nation-states told about the so-called wars of religion that beset Europe in the centuries after the Reformation. On this account, “secular” political states saved Europe from bloody-minded religious zealots. Yet as theologian William Cavanaugh has demonstrated in The Myth of Religious Violence, this just-so story gets the historical facts wrong and obscures how the “migrations of the holy” from the church to the state makes politics more violent.

Thanks for signing up.

Explore more newsletters—don’t forget to start your free 60-day trial of CT to get full access to all articles in every newsletter.

Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again.

Cavanaugh’s remedy for this disease is straightforward: We must repent from the worship of political idols and devote ourselves to the one true God. However, in their new book Can Religion Save Democracy? How More Faith—Not Less—Can Heal Our Public Life, Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid offer a softer remedy, more palatable to Americans who remain skeptical of institutional religion’s civic value.

Rather than asking those who have made politics the main thing to turn back to God, they simply invite them “to draw on wisdom that is older than our current crisis,” wisdom they say can be found in their respective Christian and Islamic traditions.

They confess that some readers will find this proposal “too radical.” Maybe so. But given the authors’ diagnosis of our political and spiritual ills, it’s not nearly radical enough.

Kaemingk is a Christian theologian, and Hamid is a Muslim political scientist. Both were on faculty at Fuller Theological Seminary’s Mouw Institute of Faith and Public Life, and both are now senior fellows at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. This book flows out of their ongoing collaboration and friendship, which bridges deep religious and political differences.

In the preface, the authors insist that “the strangeness of religion is at the heart of the case we hope to make in this book. We need more strangeness, rather than less.” They also state up front that Christianity and Islam are distinct religions that should not be conflated and that we should not think we can merely “use religion for its emotional, social, and political benefits.” These are promising convictions! A book that worked them out consistently would have been far more interesting and more of a genuine gift to democracy.

### Rejecting Evangelicalism Is Not How We Restore Democracy

Daniel K. Williams

### You Can Be a Christian and a Patriot

Rachel Ferguson

The book Kaemingk and Hamid actually wrote, however, repeatedly conflates the effects of Christianity and Islam, tames the strangeness of these faiths, and treats religion as an instrument for the renewal of democratic politics. Take, for instance, their effort to reassure their core audience—whom they envision as nonreligious Americans—that they won’t ask readers to themselves practice a particular faith:

This book is not an argument about whether Christianity or Islam is true. Nonreligious readers don’t need to convert for our arguments to hold weight. Readers can freely approach these ancient religious reservoirs, take a momentary drink of their political wisdom, then walk away. You don’t have to believe that a faith tradition is true to grasp its insights about what it means to be human and to live amid challenging differences.

This makes for an odd rhetorical posture. On the one hand, practicing religion, in general, is good for other people because it helps them avoid political idolatries. Kaemingk and Hamid, for instance, muster data from various studies to show that people who go to church or mosque are less likely to be political extremists than their secular neighbors.

On the other hand, don’t worry: You, secular person, can still treat politics as the realm of ultimate importance, merely sipping as needed from religious insights.

This therapeutic approach guides the book’s approach to its eight basic claims:

Everyone worships, and if we are honest about who we are worshiping, we’ll “create a truly diverse democracy.”

Conflict between religions is good “because conflict is crucial to a healthy democracy.”

Faith in God’s sovereignty should call all human certainties into question, which is good because “assuming you and your group have all the answers is dangerous to a democracy.”

Elevating political leaders into idols erodes necessary political diversity.

Trusting in divine justice—and the existence of hell—makes political justice penultimate.

Cancel culture and mob justice violate our political covenant with our fellow citizens.

“Religious institutions are some of the best training grounds for becoming good citizens.”

Prayer builds virtues like humility and patience that “American public life desperately needs.”

### An Atheist Urges Christians to Help Save Democracy

Bonnie Kristian

### You Are the Light of the Public Square

Justin Giboney

If some of these sound similar, well, it’s because they are (one, three, four, and five are particularly difficult to distinguish from one another). Sections from a given chapter could easily be slotted into a different one, and this makes the book feel choppy and repetitive. For instance, we are told at least four separate times that Islam means “submission.” The contrast between hope and optimism gets developed twice, several pages apart. The prose tends to be superficial and formulaic, glossing over key distinctions. And the conclusion, according to my ear and at least one detection tool, sounds AI-generated—which, whether it is or not, doesn’t exactly make for compelling reading.

Again and again, Can Religion Save Democracy? states that Islam and Christianity are different and that adherents need to bring their particular convictions into public discussions. In practice, the authors treat the two faiths as wells anyone can draw from interchangeably.

In fact, both traditions have their own complex, conflicted, and distinct relationships with democratic politics. John Milton’s Paradise Lost is, among other things, an account of how God’s kingship means humans should not be ruled by monarchs. In the American context, you don’t get the notion that a printed constitution might serve as the final political authority without Protestant practices of reading the printed Bible.

It’s in this vein that priest and scholar Oliver O’Donovan calls political liberalism Christianity’s “child” before going on to note that “it has left its father’s house and followed the way of the prodigal” and so may even be understood, in some sense, “as Antichrist.”

Islam has birthed its own rich and varied set of political arrangements, but it’s not at all clear that it could foster liberal democracy in the same way that Protestant Christianity did. For historical reasons alone, Islam has a very different relation to American political life than Christianity does, but this book consistently glosses over such differences.

Can Religion Save Democracy? never addresses the fundamental question of which faith and which God shapes people who are capable of democratic self-government—much less which God might be the true one. It’s the difference between a “four views on …” book and one that too often tries to average very different views into one. Even when they share common commitments, Muslims and Christians arrive at them for different reasons, and I’m not sure it helps to obscure those differences.

Repeatedly, Kaemingk and Hamid make the necessary (and, I think, true) observation that “as religion recedes from American public life, political disagreements take on a quasi-religious fervor.” It’s odd, then, that they argue we should transfer “the ‘covenantal’ aspect of religion” (an aspect that not all religions have!) to America, encouraging readers to “think of the United States as its own kind of covenantal community whose sacred bonds run deeper than mere self-interest.”

They apply the Genesis 15 covenant that God makes with Abraham to all human communities; our relationships with others are supposed to be covenantal, they argue, not contractual. (Yes, I know his name is still Abram at this point in the biblical narrative; Kaemingk and Hamid refer to Abraham throughout their reading of this episode.)

In so generalizing, the authors conflate our very different relationships with “our nation, our spouse, or our friend.” Marriage is a covenant. Some friendships can be covenantal. But imagining American citizenship as a divine covenant is rather like thinking I’m in a covenant with the telephone company. Christian membership, which depends on Christ as the head of the body, can’t be confused with national citizenship.

If the problem is that the holy has migrated from the church to the state, and that political disagreements have come to take on a quasi-religious fervor, then the remedy does not lie in the realm of politics at all. Our political life will improve only to the extent that Americans return the locus of our ultimate loves to the true God. That’s the sole way to break the power of political idols. And in this case, it very much matters who the true God is and what he commands us to do.

Kaemingk and Hamid clearly recognize this; they see that our society is sick and rightly name its disease. But their book shies away from the hard prescription called for by their diagnosis.

Jeffrey Bilbro is professor of English at Grove City College and editor in chief at the Front Porch Republic. His most recent book is Words for Conviviality: Media Technologies and Practices of Hope.

- More from Jeffrey Bilbro

- Facebook

- X

- WhatsApp

- Telegram

### A Good Theology of Place Needs Particulars, Not Platitudes

Jeffrey Bilbro

### The Christians You Need Might Be the Christians Next Door

Jeffrey Bilbro

### Put Not Your Trust in Techno-Kings

Jeffrey Bilbro

### Church in a Time of Brain Rot