American Babylon

White evangelical indifference to (and participation in) state-level voter suppression measures and the January 6th Capitol insurgency, among other things, have recently raised a significant question: How committed are white evangelicals to democracy? Only time will provide the answer, of course, but Philip Gorski’s slim but highly learned book, American Babylon: Christianity and Democracy Before and After Trump, gives us the historical background and conceptual tools to grapple with the question wisely. If nothing else, Gorski’s account indicates that the future will not give us the ineluctable answer, but just one of many potential answers. Gorski’s analytic framework focuses on the elective affinities (and tensions) between Christianity and democracy. Through a tour of key historical moments in the United States and Europe dating back to Roman antiquity, he argues for the contingency of the relationship. There is nothing inherent in either Christianity or democracy that makes them mutually incompatible....

Christianity · Democracy · Epistemology · Nothing · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · White (mutation) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Mathematics · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies