Christianity and Freedom, Vol. II: Contemporary Perspectives. Edited by Allen D. Hertzke and Timothy Samuel Shah

Extract

Recently many liberal scholars in the West have argued that one of the best ways to assess the potentials for democratic politics of a religion is to examine its long trajectory of past events and stories that support liberal ideology. Thus, they maintain that you cannot really learn anything useful about Islam’s or Christianity’s deep orientation to freedom and democracy from Islamic or Christian radicals/terrorists. This selective approach to evaluating a faith’s deep commitment to democracy and freedom (pluralism) ignores current history, ongoing events and stories, and the immediacy of current violence or conflicts between adherents of the various religions. This book, Christianity and Freedom, resists this regnant methodology of liberal scholars without necessarily rejecting liberalism or pluralism. It demonstrates an alternative methodology to evaluate the democratic claims of any religion. Its method is to focus on a religion’s contemporary dealings with minorities in spaces and cultures where its adherents are in the majority and in power. This is the thesis—partially concealed under the weight of data and analyses.