God and Democracy in Africa

In his book, The Church and Politics: A Theological Reflection, Kenyan theologian Bernard Boyo writes, “that most Christians in Africa have no theological or biblical foundation to guide their [speech about and] involvement in politics. They have not been prepared to think biblically about what to [say or] do when personal, group, and national interests clash, nor have they thought deeply about what is involved in living in states characterised by religious pluralism.”

Does Boyo suggest the Bible can help realise democracy in Africa? There is sufficient scholarly work (see further down), that makes a biblical case for democracy. Boyo writes more explicitly that the Church hasn’t used Scripture to prepare Christians in Africa for engaging with politics.

Suppose the Bible can be a tool for advancing and realising democracy, but the Church in Africa isn’t biblically prepared to engage with politics, or because of an emphasis in the Church on getting souls into heaven to the neglect of being ‘salt and light’ on Earth, isn’t willing to engage with politics at all.

C.S. Lewis said, “It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.” Is it not also true that Christians who think only of the other world, fail to do their biblical duty in this? Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. said, “Some people are so heavenly minded…they are no earthly good.” To the extent this is true of the Church, it isn’t effectively positioned to help realise democratic governance in Africa.

Boyo’s words rang true during a men’s conference held in South Africa in 2023. The guest speaker, who has since announced publicly his intention to run for President in 2029, reflected a lack of biblical understanding of Church-State relations when he said, “The Church [in South Africa] is a government in waiting”. As I have attested here, the aspiring president isn’t the only prominent South African Christian leader to have a skewed understanding of Church-State relations.

More recently, at the presentation of a course on good governance and freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) in West Africa, a prominent Church leader from a country ruled by Africa’s oldest dictator and beset with a separatist struggle and an Islamic insurgency, boldly proclaimed to the course facilitator and fellow attendees – among them Christian politicians, state employees, and students of politics – “I hate democracy because God is not democratic. Democracy is demonic”.

In East Africa, one conference brought together Church leaders and government officials to discuss how the Church in Africa can come alongside the African Union (AU) and its member states to help achieve the AU’s Agenda 2063 aspirations – one of which is, “An Africa of good governance, democracy, respect for human rights, justice and the rule of law.”

A conference speaker, who happens to be a prominent anti-corruption figure in Kenya and who holds a PhD from a Christian university, took a stab at democracy when he told delegates that if God allowed the ancient Israelites to vote about whether they should enter the Promised Land or not, they never would have occupied Canaan.

Concerning the recent protests in Kenya, one Christian journalist wrote about “the perception that the government and politicians have not listened to the cry of the citizens.” One must wonder how the conference speaker who appears to disfavour democracy, thinks Kenyans must act for change, if not through democratic means.

For Christians to refrain from advocating for democracy is one thing, for Christians to actively agitate against democracy is another. The above-mentioned examples of Christians engaging in anti-democratic rhetoric reinforce two further scholarly observations about how Christians view democracy and whether the Church is equipped to advance democratic governance.

Concerned about the role of Christianity in contemporary struggles for democracy in Europe, German theologian Wolfgang Huber, wrote in 1992 that, “the historical distance of churches towards democracy” has severely compromised the “affinity of Christian faith to democratic values”.

More recently, British theologian Jonathan Chaplin warned 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.” ??

There are several reasons why any African, Christian or otherwise, might want to agitate against democracy. One, for example, is the belief that democracy is a concept and practice originating in the West. For some, the implication of this view may be that democracy is un-African and, therefore, a form of governance that, firstly, is imposed from outside the continent, and secondly, cannot work or shouldn’t even be attempted in the African context.

However, in a continent where Christianity is the majority religion (56 % of Africa’s population identifies as Christian), where Christians are the “most committed” in the world (“they attend religious services more regularly and consider religion more important in their lives”), where “[r]eligious leaders are more trusted and less widely seen as corrupt than any other group of public leaders,” and where several Heads of State profess to be Christian, the potential implication for the advancement of democracy in Africa, of Christian leaders who claim democracy is unbiblical or demonic, is clear.

Does Boyo’s observation and the examples of anti-democratic sentiment and rhetoric from Christian leaders given above help us understand why, according to Afrobarometer ’s recently published survey findings, support for democracy has declined and opposition to military rule has weakened across 30 African countries, while “more than half of Africans are willing to accept a military takeover if elected leaders ‘abuse power for their own ends’”?

Ideas matter

Ideas matter because they have consequences. Ideas rooted in or linked to the belief in a transcendent, supreme being can prove especially stubborn and consequential.

Christian author, educator and administrator, Gerald Smith, recognised this. From an American perspective, Smith wrote during World War Two, “If President Wilson's demand that the world is to be made safe for democracy is to be realized, [the notion of] democracy must be safe in the Christian church.”

The present-day decline of American democracy suggests that the Church in America has failed to adopt and act upon a biblical view of national democracy. Whatever the case may be in America, if what Smith wrote in 1917 was true then and remains true today, it follows that there in the world where Christians exist in greater numbers, and where, therefore, at any given time, a significant number of Heads of State may be professing Christians; where Christians are “most committed”; and are more biblically informed on matters of civil governance than Christians elsewhere; there one will find the greatest potential for establishing and maintaining democracy.? ?

However, where these same conditions hold, except that Christians are less biblically informed on matters of civil governance (as Boyo has observed in Africa) and, therefore, at greater risk of adopting the counterproductive views of Church-State relations and democracy cited above, the greater the potential will be for the value that the Church can offer democracy to be frustrated and unrealised.

If a significant number of Christians in Africa (among them, Christian heads of state and other government or state officials), believe that democracy is undesirable because God is undemocratic and democracy is demonic, could this help explain several related factors characterising governance in contemporary Africa, that are contrary to what one would expect to see in a functioning democracy?

These factors include but are not necessarily limited to the already mentioned decline in support among Africans for democracy and weakening of opposition to military rule; the growing disparity between the demand for and supply of democracy in Africa; the inclination of several heads of state to extend term limits or abolish them altogether; perceptions of corruption in Africa relative to the rest of the world; the number of African countries that Freedom House characterizes as “not free”, and lastly, the decline in voter participation in Africa. ???

A 2023 report published by The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance on The State of Democracy in Africa is a ‘mixed bag’. In her Council on Foreign Relations blog post entitled Democracy in Name Only for Africa, former United States Ambassador to Botswana and Representative to SADC, Michelle Gavin, writes, “Three decades after the fight for multiparty democracy in Africa, many on the continent still face sham elections, restrictions of rights, and few improvements.” Finally, Afrobarometer CEO Joseph A. has warned that Africa’s long-standing democracies are under pressure.

A flawed political theology

There will be negative implications for democracy and human well-being in Africa to the degree that Christians in the continent are anti-democratic because they believe God is undemocratic and democracy is demonic. Underlying the thinking that characterises the aspiring president in South Africa, the Church leader from Cameroon, the learned anti-corruption official from Kenya, and potentially many others in Africa, is a flawed political theology.

The Christian who assesses the value or desirability of any governance system, including democracy, based solely on what the Bible reveals about who God is and how He governs, fails to recognize how the Bible differentiates between God’s nature and human nature or fails to properly consider the implications of this difference for God’s comparatively direct governance of ancient Israel vis-à-vis human governance elsewhere in space and time.

Scripturally, Christians ought to agree that God is undemocratic and that the Kingdom of God is not a democracy. This much of what the Cameroonian Church leader said is true. God is not democratic, if only because His will and laws are not determined according to the collective will of the governed, in ancient Israel, for example, or humankind more broadly, whether as a whole or in part. Therefore, God’s Kingdom is not a democracy.

At the same time, however, if what the Bible reveals about the Christian God’s sovereignty and nature is true – that He is all-sovereign and perfect – there is no need for Him to be democratic or govern democratically. Because the Christian God is all-sovereign and perfect, He doesn’t abide by, nor is He restricted to human standards and measures, including standards and measures of what constitutes good governance.

In the words of American academic, Mordecai Roshwald, “human government cannot be compared with divine rule, or the other way round.” More emphatically, American theologian Richard Neuhaus, writing at the end of the Cold War, put it this way: “We betray our Lord if, in theory or practice, we equate the Kingdom of God with any political, social or economic order that is short of the Kingdom of God.” And because Neuhaus believed humans to be created in God’s image, he added, “To mistake any existing or proposed social order for the Kingdom is the great crime against humanity.”

As much as the Bible reveals the Christian God’s sovereign and perfect nature, it also reveals humanity’s imperfect fallen nature as distinct from God’s nature. A professing Christian ought to adopt the view of fallen human nature. It is integral to why anyone would identify sincerely as a Christian in the first place. The Bible tells us that Christ came to Earth as a perfect, unblemished sacrifice to die a sinner's death on behalf of fallen humans.

The implications for power relations of a fallen humanity

From a Christian perspective, fallen human nature has implications for how human beings go about acquiring, exercising, transferring, and responding to the exercise of power, and what the consequences are of the methods employed in each case.

These implications are best captured in Christian Realism – a school of thought that Political Scientist Eric Patterson describes as “a way of thinking about foreign policy, law, politics, and society, that is Christian and realistic in its orientation.” For more on Christian realism, readers can follow the links here, here, and here.? ?

Historical and contemporary realities teach us that without appropriate limitations, how humans acquire, exercise, transfer and respond to the exercise of power, including political power, can spiral out of control with devasting consequences that ripple across political boundaries and time.

Holding a biblical perspective of human nature and its relationship to power, and seeing how this relationship manifests in history, alongside the understanding that good governance is essentially about creating a sustainable and just order through the appropriate acquisition, exercise, transfer and regulation of power; the significance of the choice of what form of governance to employ in the management of human affairs on earth and in every nation-state, including African countries, becomes glaring.

The best form of governance Christians can hope for

To help qualify Roshwald and Neuhaus’ cautionary notes about equating the Kingdom of God with any temporal or human-made form of governance, theologian John De Gruchy reminds us that just because “it is wrong to equate Christianity with a particular political system does not mean that all systems of government are equally acceptable to Christian faith.”

To reinforce his argument, De Gruchy cites German theologian and anti-Nazi dissident Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote as follows: “There is justification for asking which form of the state offers the best guarantee for the fulfilment of the mission of government and should, therefore, be promoted by the church.”??

From a biblical perspective, the best form of governance that any professing Christian in Africa or elsewhere could hope and advocate for is that which best aligns with Scripture by accommodating and making allowance for human nature and at least two other related biblical truths, namely, that humans possess inherent dignity and significant potential.?

According to the Bible, humans are created in God’s image. Can a stronger case than this be made for inherent human dignity? From a Biblical perspective, the form of government that best balances the realities of fallen human nature and inherent human dignity will also have the greatest success at cultivating an environment that promotes and allows for the freedoms without which human potential is stifled or oppressed.

The Bible is not only a religious account of the Christian God’s sovereignty and perfection, humankind’s fallen nature, and God’s redemptive plan considering this fallen nature. For Christians, the Bible also tells of humankind’s potential. Since, according to the Bible, humans are created in God’s image, and, therefore, endowed with God’s creative power, can it be otherwise?

American Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s assertion that “man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary,” recognises both humankind’s potential and fallen nature.

Because democracy, as I have previously explained, allows or aims for, (1) “A system that places limitations on power to avoid abuse (and not just government power, but also on the power that any one individual or group can exercise over or against any number of other individuals or groups)”; (2) “Inclusive and participatory governance so that beings of intrinsic value can contribute [to governance according to their potential]”; and (3) “A secure, free and relatively predictable environment so the individual can pursue and fulfil his/her potential [as much as possible]”, it is the form of governance that best aligns with Scripture and is, therefore, the best form of governance that Christians can hope for in the present age.

This conclusion echoes Winston Churchill’s thoughts on democracy that he shared more than two years following the end of World War Two: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”

At risk of doing what Roshwald and Neuhaus caution against, American theologian Arthur McGiffert’ praised democracy more emphatically than what Churchill would 28 years later. Writing during World War One, McGiffert had the following to say about democracy: “It is the only state of society worthy to be called the Kingdom of God on earth and the only one worthy to be made the object of Christian faith and effort.”

Is democracy biblical?

In response to the question of whether democracy is biblical, Executive Director at The Center for Christian Civics in Washington D.C., Rick Barry , shares the following perspective:

“Democracy is not…ANTI-biblical or UN-biblical. But it is EXTRA-biblical. The biblical authors never experienced it, and it wasn’t relevant enough to the history of salvation for the prophets to get any revelation about it, so the Bible doesn’t directly address it…Now, if something is un-biblical or anti-biblical, it’s at odds with the values prescribed by the Bible and the themes of salvation as they are portrayed in the overall story of God’s word.”

Similarly, American theologian Albert Cook acknowledges, “In the Jewish thought of this time there is no trace of the principle that ‘governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.’”

Even though the bible doesn’t address or endorse democracy directly, the definitive features of democracy are not at odds with the Biblical values. Beyond this, much of what we read in the Bible, bound by, or founded upon human nature, dignity and potential, lends support to democratic government and society.

This is why Oates argues that democracy “is logically related to Christianity at its core and hence is supremely compatible with it.” For Hutchison, “biblical religion and the tradition of thought and feeling flowing from the Bible have made valuable contributions to the democratic spirit.” Oesterley and Robinson contend, “The ancient Semitic nomad would not have understood the term democracy, but he had deeply planted within him an unconscious theory of life which corresponded to the attitude which that word indicates in common speech.” Barth observes that Christianity, when faithful to the Gospel, “betrays a striking tendency to the side of what is generally called the ‘democratic state’”. Finally, De Gruchy finds that “certain fundamental impulses within democracy may be traced to the ancient Hebrew prophets.”

Therefore, even if democracy isn’t ‘biblical’ (if what is meant by ‘biblical’ in this instance is that the Bible explicitly endorses democratic governance), the Bible as a whole lends more support to democracy than any other type of national organisation of human affairs. Democracy remains, therefore, in the words of political theologians Neuhaus and Chaplin, “A Christian Imperative”, in Africa and elsewhere. The sooner Christians in Africa, starting with those occupying formal leadership positions, recognise this, the greater the potential for realising democracy in Africa will be.?

Craig Bailie is a former lecturer in Political Science. He holds a Master’s degree in International Studies from Rhodes University and certificates in Thought Leadership for Africa’s Renewal and Transformative Governance from the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute [now Thabo Mbeki African School of Public & International Affairs (TM-School) ] and the University of the Free State (UFS), respectively. He has completed several doctoral courses through Regent University , including Applied Exegetical Studies. He is the founding director of Bailie Leadership Consultancy .