Constitutional Democracy: A Global Christian Imperative

In September 2003, 109 clergy from 59 denominations in Zimbabwe assembled in the town of Kadoma, at a time when President Mugabe’s unconstitutional and undemocratic rule was at its lethal worst. They issued this declaration:

We maintain that a good government comes from God and is charged with the tasks of promoting the common good of the nation, ensuring justice for all…as well as being custodian of the nation’s social and moral values. Such a government is worthy of the obedience and loyalty of its citizens as demanded by Romans 13. Any government that negates these fundamental principles…forfeits its God-given mandate to rule. It therefore cannot demand submission and obedience of its citizens. It is like the ‘beast’ in Revelation, which usurps power.

The Zimbabwean state, they charged, had become ‘irresponsible, violent, partisan…rampantly corrupt; perpetuating physical, psychological and emotional violence upon students…; inflicting violence upon women; and corrupting the minds of youth’. The delegates took the risk of pledging to raise a ‘prophetic voice to transform fear into faith’ and to campaign for a more just society.¹

This is but one example from recent history where churches have found themselves needing to stake their lives on what I am calling constitutional democracy. By pledging to raise a ‘prophetic voice to transform fear into faith’, they signal their commitment to ‘democracy’ – to a dynamic, critical engagement of the people in the affairs of the nation. As churches, they also claim a right and responsibility as communities of conviction representing a significant part of the population to participate in that process. Note that the statement does not actually use the term ‘democracy’. The specific charge against the state is that it has violated the very purposes of its existence – promoting ‘the common good’, ‘justice’ and ‘public morality’ – not that it has failed to hold elections. On other occasions, of course, the Zimbabwean churches also criticised the Mugabe regime for its routine contempt for democracy through violence, intimidation, and corruption. But in this statement their focus lies elsewhere. They make the legitimacy of government conditional on its promotion of the common good, justice and public morality. In invoking these three specific terms (henceforth abbreviated as ‘justice’), the statement captures succinctly the beating heart of longstanding traditions of Christian thought and practice about the purpose of government under God. In it, we can hear the voice not only of 109 brave clergy in one country at one moment, but also of the great cloud of witnesses that have gone before and that still echo today wherever the people of God take a stand for justice against authorities that trample on it.

I want to suggest that, in the face of mounting doubts about constitutional democracy today, the global church cannot afford to assume that Christians everywhere already support it and that the only issue is ad hoc implementation. It needs to make a compelling theological argument for constitutional democracy all over again. And in doing so, it should commit itself to both elements in the composite idea of ‘constitutional democracy’. Not just ‘democracy’, but the full package of ‘constitutional democracy’, needs to be mainstreamed in the churches’ political language.

The church must champion a powerful, decisive role for the demos, ‘the people’, in the state’s practice of justice, resisting concentrations of power in self-serving elites. It must simultaneously, and with equal vigour, work for a larger constitutional order which channels the people’s voices closer to justice, while also curtailing the ability of state institutions to commit injustice. It must also resist authoritarianism, the wielding of unconstrained and unaccountable authority for the benefit of rulers, not the people. It is authoritarianism in particular that is making a comeback today, even in normally stable democracies, often in the guise of a resurgent nationalism or populism. And it is doing so in the very name of ‘the people’ – which is why we need to handle that term circumspectly. We must not let it be hijacked by authoritarian populists. In 2020, 71 million American people still voted for Donald Trump even after four years of him wielding the wrecking ball to many features of the American constitutional democracy. That number included tens of millions of professing Christians, thousands of them in positions of senior leadership, including many in the White House and Congress. Many have still failed to repudiate what he stood for even after the violent assault on the Capitol on 6 January.

Democracy itself is not the highest or deepest political principle, nor the most comprehensive. It is one of a number of vital components of a balanced constitutional framework, all of which need to play their distinctive roles in advancing a just political order. Democracy is not itself a sufficient condition of just government. It is, however, nearly always a necessary one. I say ‘nearly’ always because, occasionally, unelected governments have sometimes pursued at least a measure of justice. But it is almost always true that genuinely democratic governments are much more prone to do justice than undemocratic ones.

Christian commentators have often suggested that mounting a theological defence of a particular form of political order such as constitutional democracy is inherently improper. For some this is because, they claim, ‘the Bible doesn’t prescribe any particular form of government’, which may be literally true. For others, it is because, while public theology can issue general principles like justice or the common good, it isn’t equipped to endorse specific institutions. Let me say here, rather bluntly, that I think these are lazy attempts to evade the cumulative claims of the tradition’s reflection on its authoritative texts and historical experiences. I suggest that after 2000 years, the jury is in on something like constitutional democracy, however different it may look in different national and regional settings. Still others make the observation that ‘Christians can be faithful under any form of government’. That is also true as a matter of fact. But if that is all we can say, it is exactly the kind of faith that, for example, the Chinese government wants Christians in Hong Kong to embrace; thankfully, many of them are not (to their cost).

It’s true that public theology cannot claim immediate and irrefutable biblical, theological or ecclesial authority behind something like constitutional democracy. But if the church is to be faithful in political practice as well as in theory, it is bound to be drawn into making controversial political judgements. To paraphrase long-time Methodist political activist Mike McCurry’s remarks from an earlier webinar in this series, public theology needs to ‘get practical’. Who would have thought that a commitment to constitutional democracy would again have become controversial, also among Christians? — but so it is. Luke Bretherton sums up the point I’m making aptly: ‘Christians do not need democracy to practice their faith, but democracy enshrines some central Christian commitments, and so, as a judgment of practical reason, democracy should be an aspirational feature of political order for Christians’.²

Before I set out my case, it’s worth being reminded of the scale and range of the threats currently facing constitutional democracy. In 2018, two American political scientists published a book with the bleak title How Democracies Die.³ The same year Cambridge professor of politics David Runciman published one called How Democracy Ends, the opening words of which are ‘Nothing lasts forever’.⁴ These writers join a growing chorus of voices lamenting the multiple stresses on democracy today. Runciman is not talking about places like Saudi Arabia where democracy never existed. Democracy, he observes, ‘looks exhausted in the places where it has its deepest roots’, and is in danger of ‘drifting into cranky obsolescence’.⁵ Globally, it is proving impotent in responding effectively to crises like the financial meltdown of 2008, climate change, or pandemics; seemingly irrelevant to many younger citizens in an age of ubiquitous social media; corroded by a post-truth culture; and on the back foot in the face of the insidious threats of manipulation by digital technology.

Last year the Cambridge-based Centre for the Future of Democracy published a report Global Satisfaction with Democracy 2020, which offered an equally sober diagnosis of democracy worldwide, concluding that it is in ‘a state of deep malaise’:

In the West, growing political polarisation, economic frustration, and the rise of populist parties, have eroded the promise of democratic institutions to offer governance that is not only popularly supported, but also stable and effective. Meanwhile, in developing democracies the euphoria of the transition years has faded, leaving endemic challenges of corruption, intergroup conflict, and urban violence that undermine democracy’s appeal.⁶

At such a time, the global church needs to re-articulate its commitment to constitutional democracy with renewed passion and clarity, joining with many others sharing that commitment.

I want to outline three distinct theologically grounded arguments for constitutional democracy, showing how together they offer a coherent and substantial vision. Then I’ll suggest some major institutional implications flowing from those arguments. I’ll conclude with a comment on implications for the global church.

Most Christian churches and political theologians did not begin to entertain support for democracy as we know it until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Until the Reformation, the great majority either opposed it on principle or simply couldn’t imagine its possibility. Even Reformation thinkers who championed a political role for ‘the people’ had in mind a very restricted section of the population. Most political theologians did affirm that government was appointed by God to promote justice and the common good, that rulers were subject to natural and divine law, and, increasingly, that they were also subject to human or positive law and could be held accountable for breaches of it. These helped lay foundations for the ‘constitutional’ side of the term ‘constitutional democracy’. But foundations for the ‘democratic’ side were also being quietly laid, even as early as the high Middle Ages. Movements such as Conciliarism, and then later Calvinism, generated powerful streams of thought that nurtured these foundations. Rich theologies of ‘representation’ and ‘consent’ began to take shape alongside influential practices such as shared episcopal authority, monastic self-government, and the duty of rulers to ‘seek counsel’ from wise advisors and not rule alone.⁷ These, among others, helped seed churches’ much-later embrace of democracy. There’s no time to rehearse that complex and chequered history,⁸ so I’ll simply fast-forward to the mid-twentieth century, where we find a powerful flowering of Christian accounts of constitutional democracy emerging in the aftermath of war and totalitarianism. In 1944, Reinhold Niebuhr published The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defenders, the last globally influential Protestant work.⁹ Three substantial Catholic offerings appeared around the same time: Jacques Maritain’s Christianity and Democracy¹⁰ and Man and the State,¹¹ and Yves Simon’s The Philosophy of Democratic Government.¹² At Vatican II, Catholicism eventually gave its official approval of democracy, notably in the encyclical Gaudium et Spes (1965).¹³

Political theology’s interest in the theme seems then to have receded into the background. By the 1970s, those earlier works had been overshadowed by political theology’s preoccupation with other, no less pressing, concerns, such as liberation theology’s resistance to capitalism and dictatorship in Latin America, black theology’s opposition to racism, and feminist theology’s critique of patriarchy. Further developments of these generative schools of thought, such as post-colonial, indigenous, and ecological theology, continue to flourish globally today. But since the 1990s, a specific focus on the institutions of constitutional democracy has re-emerged in political theology, triggered by, for example the collapse of communism, the emergence of global economic oligarchies, and the resurgence of nationalism and populism. The effort to forge a new Christian account of constitutional democracy is well underway.

I now want to extract from these various historical and contemporary strands of political theology three complementary arguments that together amount to a powerful case for constitutional democracy today. I call these ‘defensive’, ‘consent’, and ‘participatory’ arguments.¹⁴ They don’t address all the challenges facing democracy today, but can serve as instructive starting points for the kind of reflection I think we need. Two of these arguments are nicely captured in Niebuhr’s widely cited assertion that ‘man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary’.¹⁵

What I’m calling the ‘defensive’ argument is captured in the second clause: ‘man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary’. The institutions and processes of constitutional democracy are a necessary check on the inescapable tendency of sinful officeholders to abuse their power. In his most famous work, Moral Man and Immoral Society, Niebuhr argued that human collectives, especially larger ones in possession of significant power, magnify the tendency of humans to exploit each other.¹⁶ In the later work The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, he writes:

If men are inclined to deal unjustly with their fellows, the possession of power aggravates this inclination. This is why irresponsible and uncontrolled power is the greatest source of injustice. The democratic techniques of a free society place checks upon the power of the ruler and administrator and thus prevent it from becoming vexatious.¹⁷

This was the driving concern of the Kadoma statement. It is the daily reality of Christians in many parts of the world where constitutional democracy does not exist or is extremely fragile. The protective argument remains powerful and necessary today. It is a negative argument for democracy, an argument about what democracy can prevent. The other two arguments offer positive reasons for endorsing democracy.

The ‘consent’ argument affirms the longstanding Christian view that political authority originates ultimately in God rather than in autonomous popular will. Yet it also insists that the people have a vital role in legitimizing those who will exercise that authority. The argument comes in various forms. On the most radical version, God is seen as transmitting a right of self-government to the people as a whole. God has designed humans with a natural inclination towards political community. When the people establish governments, they are acting in conformity with that inclination. This idea has medieval roots but is stated with special clarity in an influential sixteenth-century Huguenot document: ‘it is the people that establishes kings, gives them kingdoms, and approves their selection by its vote. For God willed that every bit of authority held by kings should come from the people, after Him....’¹⁸ This was a century before John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and two centuries before Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract. The Christian tradition did generate the notorious ‘divine right of kings’ in the seventeenth century, which conferred almost absolute power on the monarch. But it also birthed what we can call a ‘divine right of citizens’. In this specific sense, Christianity is radically ‘populist’. Out of this stream of thought emerged, for example, potent covenant theologies that construed God, rulers, and people as involved in a three-sided network of mutual obligations. On this view, rulers are not first of all deputies of a sovereign people but trustees of a God-given purpose that stands above both people and ruler. In giving consent to particular officeholders, the people are undertaking before God to obey their rulers and to hold them accountable for violations of that purpose. This covenant theology was an important contributor to constitutional democracy in the early modern period.

The third argument for constitutional democracy is the ‘participatory’ argument. It is captured in the first part of Niebuhr’s statement quoted earlier: ‘man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible’. Here democracy is seen as an expression of the human potential to assume responsibility for public justice, making possible a vocation to active citizenship. The many forms of political participation – voting, debating, campaigning – are channels for the fulfilment of that vocation. This idea is prominent in modern Catholic social teaching, which claims that all human beings, by virtue of their inherent dignity as those equally made in the image of God, are to work for the common good. This includes promoting justice through politics. As Pope John XXIII put it in Pacem in Terris, ‘a natural consequence of man’s dignity is unquestionably their right to take an active part in government’.¹⁹ Participation is seen as fittedness to the shared pursuit of justice and the common good. The participatory argument contains more radical implications than those typically used by advocates of consent arguments. Such advocates could allow for very unequal entitlements to share in the selection of rulers and the shaping of government action. But participatory arguments affirm the equal possession of a capacity for pursuing justice by all human beings, even if such a capacity is often stifled or twisted. Ultimately, this led to support for universal franchise and many other extensions of democratic participation.

Participationists also appeal to the vision of, and practical experience of, the church as a spiritual community of equals, all equipped to contribute to the common good and empowered by the Spirit to speak the Word. Maddox summed up the Puritan expression of this vision:

In the Puritan congregation each person was worthy of full participation in discussion not merely out of respect for her or his worth before God, but also because each person in a gathering in Christ’s name could be a vessel for the outpouring of the Spirit – each could be moved by God to add something genuinely revealing, or revealed, to the collective understanding.²⁰

When such a vision of ecclesial equality started to spill out into secular politics, it served to advance democratising trends.²¹ As political scientist Robert Dahl puts it: ‘all men were equal not only in the eyes of God but equally qualified to understand the word of God, to participate in church government, and by extension to govern the commonwealth’.²²

To gather these ideas together: the consent argument offers a criterion for the popular legitimacy of government (a divinely-endowed right of the people); the participatory argument calls for equal political rights for those equally bearing human dignity and empowered by the Spirit (a divinely-endowed capacity of the people); the defensive argument urges democracy as a protection against the sin of authoritarianism (a divinely-given shield for the people). From these claims, I think we can begin to build a robust, integrated model of a participatory, representative constitutional democracy. This is an arrangement offering a decisive role for the people within the state, while also holding both government and people accountable to higher norms of justice, expressed in a constitutional order. Such a vision of a dynamic, justice-seeking political community can serve as the right kind of ‘utopian’ horizon that, by holding before us imaginative possibilities exceeding the present, can direct and inspire our practical political objectives. What are those objectives?

This is where public theology ‘gets practical’. With all due recognition to vastly different contexts, let me sketch some key aspirational features of a constitutional democracy that could inform Christian political thinkers and activists, as they seek to exploit whatever margins of freedom they enjoy in their own situations. Some of them may seem obvious and familiar. But it is the most basic foundations of constitutional democracy that are in question and that need to be re-articulated today.

First, the rule of law. This is a principle applying to everyone and every group in society but its most important application is to the state. It is not an abstract jurisprudential idea but the most fundamental principle of a just polity, more important than democracy itself, indeed, a necessary condition for it. It is what was fundamentally lacking in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and is routinely violated in Putin’s Russia. But it also under stress in stable democracies like the UK, where in 2017 it took the Supreme Court to tell the government that it was unlawful for it to initiate, on its sole authority, the radical constitutional change that leaving the EU amounted to. The rule of law demands that all organs and officers of state are consistently subjected to law and can be effectively held to account for breaches of it. As Jeremy Waldron sums it up:

The important demand of the Rule of Law is that people in positions of authority should exercise their power within a constraining framework of well-established public norms rather than in an arbitrary, ad hoc, or purely discretionary manner on the basis of their own preferences or ideology. It insists that the government should operate within a framework of law in everything it does, and that it should be accountable through law when there is a suggestion of unauthorized action by those in power.²³

Where this principle is weakly embedded, we see routine corruption, breaches of due process, or tax evasion. Where it is absent, we see political opponents silenced or assassinated, dissenting organisations suppressed, and public funds stolen for the private enrichment of politicians and their cronies. The idea of the rule of law is central to South African theologian Charles Villa-Vicencio’s liberationist work, A Theology of Reconstruction.²⁴ Some earlier liberationists, such as those supporting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, seemed impatient of impediments to ‘the will of the people’ – understandably, since that will had been so thoroughly repressed in the dictatorships they had endured. But it was precisely the lawless abuse of governmental powers by the apartheid regime that led Villa-Vicencio to insist on the pre-eminence of the rule of law as a condition of just democracy.

Second, an effective separation of powers among the main branches of state. This respects the distinctive role each branch plays in a constitutional democracy, but even more importantly, it prevents an undue concentration of power in any one – executive, legislature, judiciary – or in any of their sub-units, especially the military or the bureaucracy. It is, in American language, one of several ‘checks and balances’ needed to restrain overreach on the part of any branch, although it is, to say the least, not working particularly well in the USA today. The degree and manner of ‘separation’ varies widely across political systems and no single model can apply universally. Let me mention just two crucial features by way of illustration.

First, the effective accountability of the executive to popularly elected legislative assemblies (parliaments, Congress, and so forth). Executives exist to lead the process of promoting justice through law-making and governance and to do that they need the power to initiate legislation and take executive actions. But only elected assemblies can authorise legislation. Laws must be made by them, not by executive decree. Nor must such assemblies merely rubber-stamp what executives have already decided – a constant danger when a government has an overwhelming majority in legislative assemblies. Popular assemblies must also be empowered to scrutinise government actions and censure and modify them where necessary. These are the most important checks on what Runciman calls ‘executive aggrandisement’, a regression he considers the greatest threat to democracy today, which occurs ‘when those in power chip away at democratic institutions without ever overturning them’²⁵ – as in places like India, Turkey, the Philippines, Ecuador, or Hungary. Writing in 2018, Runciman thought it might also be happening in the USA; we now know that it was, although it was slowed by other state agencies and finally narrowly halted by the electorate – for now. It was also occurring well before President Trump.

Third, a vertical diffusion of political authority across different tiers of government. These might be regional: the three devolved administrations of the UK; American ‘states’; German ‘lände’; and so forth. Or they might be local: various levels of municipal governance. The system might be federal, as in the USA, Canada or Switzerland, in which case regional powers are entrenched in a constitution. Or it might be unitary, as in the UK or France, where regional powers can be changed by statute. But whatever its form, the virtues of a vertical diffusion of authority are many: it allows each tier to inform, balance and restrain the others; it widens opportunities for citizen participation in politics; it enables policy experimentation by lower tiers; and, more controversially, it offers platforms for political resistance to domination from the centre – as in the ‘lesser magistrates’ championed by the Huguenot document I cited earlier against the (Christian) monarchs oppressing them.

Fourth, ample avenues for popular representation and participation. This requires, firstly, a robust suite of political rights, including the right to vote, to stand for office and campaign, and civil rights, such as rights to freedom of conscience, expression, movement, assembly or association. Authoritarian regimes routinely curtail such rights because they empower citizens to challenge governmental abuses. The right to vote is of special importance. It affirms that the voice of every (eligible) citizen counts in deciding who will exercise the offices of legislator and governor within the state. It is the point at which the people entrust to designated representatives the role of leadership in the pursuit of political justice. It hardly needs emphasising that the integrity of elections is indispensable to this process. So is accepting the outcome of free and fair elections, vital to the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another. The principle was cynically turned on its head by President Trump in his groundless claim that the 2020 election had been ‘stolen’. The US electoral system is certainly in need of far-reaching reforms but, happily, it is not (yet) possible to subvert it fraudulently. In stark contrast, in what are called ‘façade democracies’, a veneer of electoral process conceals endemic subversions such as those perpetrated by autocrats like Mugabe; state manipulation of the outcomes, as has occurred in Iran or Belarus; or one-party rule, as in China.

But a set of individual political and civil rights isn’t enough. In addition to rights, we need institutions: structured channels through which the people’s convictions and interests can be formed and represented and by which they can actively engage in the democratic process. These include sites of citizen education, a free and diverse media, access to forms of participation such as citizens’ assemblies, movements of community organising, and many more independent associations operating in the realm of civil society, outside the reach of the state. Notwithstanding its downsides, digital technology opens up new possibilities for such engagement, and a major task facing constitutional democracies today is learning how to harness the creative power of such technology for democratic purposes.²⁷

Equally, a key concern of political theology is preventing electoral politics from ‘going retail’, from degenerating further into consumerism, where rival parties offer different products to niche sections of the market; or into factionalism, where parties appeal narrowly to their ‘base’, whether based on class, occupation, ethnicity, tribe, region, or religion. Rather, what must be chiefly represented via the right to vote is the people’s political convictions, the diverse visions of justice, and the common good they adhere to (if they do). If governance really is about such things and not about buying people’s support, the process of choosing representatives must adequately reflect the people’s convictions about them. This implies two requirements. First, it requires political parties that articulate the people’s political convictions rather than serving merely as coalitions of narrow interests or functioning as mere electoral machines by which to win power. Given that mainstream parties are almost everywhere in steep decline (who wants to show up at a boring meeting when you can click on a petition), this is an enormous challenge. Here again, suitable tools of ‘digital democracy’ needs to be creatively utilised to that end. Second, it needs electoral systems that facilitate the expression of those convictions, whatever else they do. In my view that implies a form of proportional representation, perhaps alongside representations of locality or region, or, in traditional cultures, tribes or ethnic groups. Here, contextual factors loom especially large. In any event, a key challenge for Christian citizens everywhere is to work for parties and movements, including social media networks, able to rise above divisive and toxic factionalism and to integrate the multiple demands a plural democracy throws up into a wider vision of a shared common good.

Through these and many other means, a primary goal is to unleash new participatory energies into our dangerously moribund democratic processes. Otherwise, we risk sinking deeper into what has been dubbed ‘zombie democracy’, where people are manipulated consumers of politics rather than active agents shaping it.

Fifth, an acceptance of pluralism. If the above features of a constitutional democracy are present, there will already be widespread political pluralism. Public space for freedom and thought, speech and association and a vibrant civil society will itself allow a plurality of political visions and parties to emerge. Former Zimbabwean President Canaan Banana, himself a liberation theologian, opposed multi-party systems as a betrayal of ‘the people’. But the sheer plurality of these visions and organisations is vital to safeguarding the people’s authentic, if dissonant, voices and thus to block the imposition of a single state ideology. Today democracies must reckon with multiple kinds of plurality, based not only on ideology but on religion, region, culture, gender, ethnicity, or other forms of identity. A constitutional democracy shows respect for the people by acknowledging this sprawling, turbulent and often fractious diversity and resisting reifying it into a single homogenous identity. Politicians love to be able to claim that ‘the people’ want this or that, that ‘the nation’ has decided this or that, or that they alone represent the true people against the elites, but this is always deceptive and manipulative.

Safeguarding pluralism also requires a deeper ethos of humility and solidarity: humility, in recognising that my tribe, even if a majority, cannot claim a monopoly of wisdom or power; solidarity, in affirming that all the many tribes in a plural democracy share a common citizenship as members of a single political community and so need to work for common political goods. One of the key tasks of the church is to help nurture this ethos of humility and solidarity wherever it can. That means, first of all, enacting it in its inner life.

I’ve proposed that powerful strands of Christian political thought and practice have over the centuries yielded cogent grounds to opt decisively for constitutional democracy – to affirm what someone has aptly termed a ‘preferential option for constitutional democracy’. I’ve sketched some indicative institutional guidelines that seem to flow from such an affirmation, not as any kind of blueprint to be implemented irrespective of context but as compelling prudential aspirations to inform Christian citizens in any global context, however they work them out.

The strands of thought and practice I’ve drawn on lean mostly on twentieth-century Western sources and obviously don’t capture the whole of what the Christian political tradition, past and present, has to offer on the theme. But I think the vision of a just constitutional democracy I have sketched does express some fundamental and recurring insights on political order that are deeply embedded in the Christian tradition at its best.

Constitutional democracy is certainly not to be imposed unilaterally by outside powers. Nor may Western Christians presume to instruct others on how its core aspirations are to be pursued elsewhere. But it would be a mistake to suggest that constitutional democracy is merely a Western peculiarity that is culturally unsuitable elsewhere. For a start, that is empirically false, as nations as diverse as, for example, Ghana, South Africa, Tunisia, South Korea, Fiji, the Czech Republic, or Chile suggest (whatever their particular shortcomings). But, also, I do not hear many reflective Christians outside the West calling for anything else, although some both in the West and elsewhere are beginning to skate perilously close to condoning authoritarianism.²⁸ What most theologically reflective Christian movements for democracy and justice outside the West seem typically to demand are one or another element of constitutional democracy as I have outlined it. What Western churches must more fully acknowledge, however, is that they are profoundly in need of voices from other global contexts to enrich and challenge their own understanding of what makes for an effective constitutional democracy – not least because Western democracy itself is rapidly falling into disrepair. Those global voices are now rising up with confidence and clarity, often bringing with them an impressive authority forged out of conflict and suffering. For the global church to become more faithful in its democratic engagement, it must respectfully and gratefully heed such voices. Who knows? In the providence of God, the future of democracy worldwide may be in their hands.