The Gospel Coalition recently published a favorable review by N. Gray Sutanto of Can Religion Save Democracy? How More Faith—Not Less—Can Heal Our Public Life by Matthew Kaemingk and Shadi Hamid. The book itself is cowritten by an Evangelical “public theologian” and a Muslim political scientist. The Gospel Coalition frames it as a “must read” resource for “principled pluralism,” drawing parallel lessons from Christianity and Islam on humility, delaying final judgment, and tempering political passions so that democracy can function amid deep disagreement.
TGC’s own promotional language describes the book as one of the first the reviewer would recommend for an “accessible retrieval of principled pluralism from a Christian and Muslim perspective.” The authors themselves frame declining institutional religion as a driver of polarization: political tribes fill the void left by churches and mosques, turning elections into quasi-holy wars. Their proposed remedy is not secularization or conversion campaigns, but more public religion that cultivates the civic virtues democracy allegedly needs. Kaemingk and Hamid emphasize that they remain unconverted to each other’s faiths and are not calling for theocracy.
This framing is open to several substantive objections.
First, democracy is not a Christian imperative. Scripture and the historic Christian tradition have operated under empires, monarchies, republics, and modern democracies without treating any particular regime type as required by the gospel. The church’s primary calling is the proclamation of Christ, the administration of the means of grace, and the formation of a people whose ultimate citizenship is not merely temporal. Treating the maintenance or “saving” of a particular liberal-democratic order as a shared Christian-Muslim project elevates a contingent political arrangement above the distinctive claims of the Christian faith. Christians may prefer ordered liberty, limited government, or constitutional restraints for prudential reasons grounded in natural law or experience with human sin; they have no revealed duty to sacralize democracy itself or to partner with non-Christians in a project whose stated end is the preservation of that system.
Second, a Christian-Muslim political alliance of the sort implied by the book’s collaboration is practically and theologically untenable in the American context. White Evangelical Protestants remain one of the most consistently Republican constituencies in the electorate. American Muslims, by contrast, lean heavily Democratic. The two communities diverge on abortion, sexual ethics, the role of religious law, free speech boundaries, and the proper scope of public orthodoxy. Shared abstract talk of “humility” or “God only knows” does not erase these concrete differences. Neo-Calvinist traditions that Kaemingk and Sutanto draw upon historically distinguished common grace from special grace and recognized that rival comprehensive doctrines (including Islam) make incompatible claims about ultimate authority. Treating both traditions as interchangeable reservoirs of “democratic table manners” flattens those claims.
Third, the pluralism advocated here sits uneasily beside observable patterns of large-scale Islamic immigration. European data over the past two decades document persistent gaps in labor-market outcomes, higher rates of certain crimes in some North African and Middle Eastern immigrant cohorts relative to natives, parallel societies, and repeated episodes of Islamist violence or grooming scandals. US outcomes have not been as bad, yet public debate continues over integration, fertility differentials, and the importation of contrary cultural values. The book and its TGC review do not explicitly endorse open borders; their focus is domestic polarization. Nonetheless, the broader intellectual project of elevating interfaith “principled pluralism” as the solution to democratic decline tends, in practice, to treat high levels of religious and ethnic diversity as a settled good rather than a managed variable. Additionally, social cohesion is sure to decline when politics increasingly becomes about race and religion as a result of a multiethnic democracy. When institutions that shape Evangelical opinion frame Christian-Muslim partnership as a civic good, they lower the salience of empirical questions about scale, selection, and cultural compatibility.
TGC’s review therefore illustrates a recurring pattern: a preference for abstract pluralism and interfaith cooperation over the more particular obligations of Christian doctrine, the political realities of the communities involved, and the concrete results of recent demographic change. Christians can recognize common-grace insights wherever they appear without adopting the premise that their distinctive faith exists primarily to supply resources for the preservation of modern liberal democracy. The Gospel Coalition’s push for pluralism itself is wicked as well as the Islamic alliance means to accomplish the ends.
One Response
The behavior of these err “gospel” coalitions is the primary reason, why certain Asian governments treat certain monotheistic religions as the enemy of the society, ban all their religious expression and imprison and execute followers.
Because they have a point. It’s not that hard to keep an atheist one-party dictatorship going for another century when making no difference between “Christian” and “Christian” before execution. While allowing “interfaith pluralism” is just historically known to lead into bloody chaos with following destruction of civilization, and some kind of paganism following up.
This is why it’s important to keep your own house clean, “The West”!