Imagining God, Imagining Democracy
20 years ago, it would have seemed alarmist to talk about a global “crisis of democracy.” Yet here we are, in a time when no other language seems appropriate. By any standard definition of democracy, we are in worsening shape. We can look at laws that protect civil rights and freedoms, government deference to the will of the citizenry, the enactment of free and fair elections, peaceful transitions of power, and many other indicators. Those who measure these things report that, around the globe, the early 21st century has been an era of regression.
Of course, for as long as we’ve had democracy, we’ve had people telling us that this thing called democracy is not what it claims to be. In several of his works, Karl Marx distinguished between the form and the substance of democracy. The former referred to the democratic edifice that protects the power of the bourgeoisie (the actual “democracy” of his time), and the latter referred to the democratic ordering of society by the rule of the proletariat majority (what true “democracy” would look like). In an irony of history, 20th-century world leaders would juxtapose the democratic alliance against the communist bloc. But for Marx, democracy and communism were sister terms: not identical realities, but kindred, hazy visions of a coming reorganization.
However you react to Marx, I suspect we can agree that actual democracy in the 20th century regularly fell short of democratic ideals. For myself, seeing this clearly has been a process of unlearning. In the 21st century, I have unlearned that the United States is the most thoroughly realized democracy in human history. I have unlearned that there is equal opportunity for everyone who works hard. I have unlearned that God’s blessing of protection and prosperity is our reward for our church-going ways. I have unlearned that it is our burden to share our blessed way of life with the world. This unlearning has been necessary, but painful. And if it is as common among educated White people as I suspect, then the crisis of democracy is not just a decline in key political indicators. It is millions of mini-crises in our minds and hearts, a plague of existential fear that we are not who we thought we were.
This is what makes a theological tack so important for moving forward. Certainly, it’s tempting to feel a sense of urgency, to double down on democratic activism, and to leave the deep thinking for later. The problem, though, is that democracy’s activism is democracy’s life force. If we participate in the same old ways, we cannot be surprised if we get the same results: the form of democracy restricts us. We can intuit that a hostile political comment on Facebook does not create a better world. But can we find in the crumbling edifices of “democracy” a better way to act out democracy? Not without the deeper spiritual work of healing and reimagining.
The theological writer Karen Armstrong has used the phrase, “the God behind the gods,” to gesture at a key truth in our humanity. In her book A History of God, she describes how many polytheistic religions shared a base assumption about the divine reality: that their pantheons were not so much a host of real entities, but rather fragments or expressions of a bigger divine essence standing behind their visions—“the God behind the gods.” Building on this idea, we can understand theology as an effort to imagine God behind the gods. When we come to a point where our visions break down, and the misalignment between God and our gods becomes obvious, we start again to imagine anew.
For his part, Marx was cautious about envisioning democracy or communism in too much detail. Perhaps he believed that by specifying them too much in advance, we might miss the “real thing” because we were looking for what we imagined. Where we are now, the temptation might be different: to miss the real thing because we are fighting for what we had. The terror and the hope of our time is that we are not working for democracy as we have known it. We must work for Democracy behind the democracies, which we can only very hazily see.
When we refer to “the crisis of democracy,” therefore, we are naming a breakdown in forms of democracy that we loved, but that were always imperfect. We are naming a spiritual and theological breaking point as much as a geopolitical one. The risk for well-meaning, politically conscious people is that we try, with a little fudging and a little forcing, to put the broken thing back together, rather than doing the harder work of imagining something more aligned with our fundamental truths. If we want to avoid this risk, theology is not an afterthought, nor a pastime for more peaceful eras: it is the creative force to do that very hard but necessary work.
Armstrong, Karen. 1993. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Ballantine Books.
Daniel Doveton. 1994. "Marx and Engels on Democracy." History of Political Thought 15(4):555-91.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1978. "The Marx-Engels Reader." edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and C.
Riedl, Rachel Beatty, Paul Friesen, Jennifer McCoy, and Kenneth Roberts. 2025. "Democratic Backsliding, Resilience, and Resistance." World Politics 77(1):151-78.