This year, as Americans celebrate Independence Day on the Fourth of July, there is evidence that the spirit of independence is eroding particularly among American millennials (those born after 1981). Yascha Mounk reveals that data drawn largely from the World Values Survey shows that less than one-third of millennials say it’s essential for them to live in a democracy, compared with more than two-thirds of people born in the 1930s and 1940s.[1]Twenty years ago six percent of young affluent Americans were open to army rule. Today it is thirty-five percent, more than a six-fold increase.
Mounk contends that a lot of the reason why most Americans supported liberal democracy is because it delivered for them. Now a thirty-year-old American has only one in two chances of making more money than their parents did at the same age. If prosperity is the key indicator of support for liberal democracy in America, an economic crisis of sufficient magnitude could trigger a crisis in American democracy. How would the Great Depression play out in contemporary America? On current trends, it could potentially overturn American democracy.
The gap between older and younger Americans in relation to democracy is also evident in a schism that seems to be emerging among older and younger Evangelicals. Peter Leithart believes that this emerging schism “may be fateful for the future role of Evangelicalism in American politics.”[2]He suggests that “Evangelical leaders are distancing themselves from the nationalist rhetoric that was near the heart of the older religious right.”
Leithart approves the move away from a “heretical nationalism that fuses Christian identity and national identity.” He approves the way in which some Southern Baptist leaders have moved closer to the Catholic position in which “Christians are always citizens of two cities, the heavenly city of God and the earthly city of America, the ecclesial polis and the nation.” In It’s Sunday in America, I argued that a return to the concept of America as a Christian nation would be dangerous to religious liberty by encouraging a return to oppressive Sunday legislation, so favored in American history well into the twentieth century.
The move closer to the Catholic position is even more dangerous to religious liberty, in my opinion. Sunday is a mark of Catholicism’s universal authority. The Catholic Church reserves the right to rule the state. Catholic natural law and the social teachings of the popes do not spring from the democratic impulse. Whichever side of the Christian nationalism debate Evangelicals adopt, the omens are not good for religious liberty. Whether it’s a return to the oppressive Sundays of American history or a super coalition with Roman Catholics leading to the revival of Sunday, Evangelicals must now be considered a significant threat to American democracy and religious liberty.
May 24, 2018, marked the third anniversary of Laudato Si, Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment that was addressed to all of humanity. I discussed it at length in Chapter 2 of It’s Sunday in America, revealing how Sunday was at the center of Francis’ interconnectedness thesis that pervaded the encyclical. Now Jeffrey Sachs, the prominent American economist who collaborated on the development of Laudato Si, praises its compelling holism and reveals that the encyclical “has been deeply received by scholars in the United States” and that there are universities “holding powerful meetings engaging faculties across many disciplines, engaging students, and engaging the public.”[3]This response to Laudato Siindicates that Sunday will inevitably be elevated as an essential part of the global solutions to environmental problems.
These developments are intensifying trends discussed in It’s Sunday in America. They reveal unmistakably that the spirit of American independence is diminishing. Democracy and religious freedom are less secure than at the time of Independence Day in 2017. There are multiple converging threats to the American polity and it now appears urgent for Americans to recover the spirit of independence that led to their national formation and the birth of religious liberty.
[1]Mounk, Yascha. “Why Young Americans are Questioning Democracy.” The Atlantic, October 12, 2017. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYhg2iAU6jY
[2]Leithart, Peter. “A Better Christian Nationalism.” First Things, June 29, 2018. Accessed July 4, 2018. https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/06/a-better-christian-nationalism
[3]White, Christopher. “Economist Sachs acts as pope’s cheerleader on ‘Laudato si.’” Crux: Taking the Catholic Pulse, June 30, 2018. Accessed July 4, 2018. https://cruxnow.com/…/06/…/economist-sachs-acts-as-popes-cheerleader-on-laudato-si…
