Marilynne Robinson's Democracy in America
Marilynne Robinson has a high regard for American democracy–but she urges us to remember that it requires great humility and diligent tending in order to flourish.
By Rebecca Lewis
The Christian story is a strange one. As Christians, we claim that humans are created by God and made in his image to rule over the earth. This same God “humbled himself and became obedient unto death—even the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:8). And he calls us to humble ourselves and take up our own cross. What are we to make of this mix of exaltation and abasement?
There are obvious theological implications. But throughout her essays, particularly those in The Givenness of Things, Marilynne Robinson suggests that there are implications for American politics as well. Our “abiding sacredness” demands that we work to sustain the democratic tradition we have inherited, and our humility makes that work possible.
Robinson’s vision of democracy is rooted in her high regard for American Puritans’ early experiments with self-governance. In an essay on John Winthrop for the New York Review of Books, Robinson writes, “Puritan interest in attempting a return to biblical standards of life in society was not a nostalgia for an imagined past, a desire to live ancient lives, but a will to reform society in keeping with the vastly more humane laws and teachings of both testaments.” The Puritans saw the democratic practice as the form of governance worthy of those made in God’s image.
We are the Puritans’ heirs. Even now, the town or congregational meeting, the university department where “people get together, talk something over, take a vote” and then abide by the community’s reasoned decision is “a little microcosm of democracy” that shows “what it’s supposed to be.”
But democracy demands much of us. It calls us to “teach and learn broadly and seriously.” It requires “a generous estimate of the integrity and good will of people in general, and a generous reckoning of their just deserts.” Robinson’s vision of democracy is less an ideal than a practice that we must nurture, constantly and faithfully.
We have not so nurtured it. We have often failed to achieve the “standard of competency [that] democracy requires.” We have neglected the humanities that form us as broad and serious thinkers in favor of a narrow, technical education oriented toward the needs of a global economy. We have neglected habits of generosity for the chance to win control over scarce resources. And yet, for Robinson, our exalted status requires that we press on toward the high calling of democratic practice. If “people are images of God . . . [then t]here’s no alternative that is theologically respectable to treating people in terms of that understanding . . . It seems to me as if democracy is the logical, the inevitable consequence of this kind of religious humanism at its highest level.”
Democratic practice allows us to attempt to make an account of our lives together in a manner that can withstand and correct our inevitable errors. Discerning the right path or policy takes time and deep thought; democracy is slow and deliberative.
If our exalted status grounds the argument for democracy, does the call to humility undermine it? By no means. If it were always possible to discern the best policy—or find a leader with an ability to discern the best policy—it would be difficult to justify the inefficiencies and frustrations of democracy. There’s little to deliberate over when the right answer is clear. But we are creatures who “see through a glass darkly” and “do not know what to pray for as we ought” (1 Cor. 13:12, Rom. 8:26). We are mysteries to ourselves, to say nothing of our neighbors.
Robinson writes that faith “necessarily exceeds any account I can make of it, thank God, and will withstand every error I make in attempting to limn it out.” Democratic practice allows us to attempt to make an account of our lives together in a manner that can withstand and correct our inevitable errors. Discerning the right path or policy takes time and deep thought; democracy is slow and deliberative. Our individual limitations mean that even when we feel certain, we may be wrong; democracy requires building consensus, forcing us to reexamine our own beliefs and seriously consider those of others. Our collective limitations mean that we will enact ineffective, even evil, laws; democratic debate allows us to recognize what we have done, and democratic institutions allow us to respond to that recognition with action.
Robinson has long urged greater respect for democratic practice and greater attention to its tending. This remains her response to the problems we face today. She argues that “[o]ur heavily redacted history has meant the loss of many options.” In her telling, “Those who control the word ‘American’ control the sense of the possible,” and so we must escape our “alienat[ion] from a history that could help us find a deep root in liberality and shared and mutual happiness.” Only then might there “be any future for representative democracy.” As recently as this summer, she argued that our present problems demonstrate “the need to recover and sharpen a functioning sense of justice based on a reverent appreciation of humankind, all together and one by one.”
A fair critique of this political vision is that it doesn’t seem to answer the systemic problems we face with the urgency they demand. More and better humanistic education, greater reverence for humankind, a deeper respect for the achievement that democracy represents, a stronger commitment to doing the work to maintain it—it is well and good to commend these to ourselves and our fellow citizens, but how will that solve the problems we face now?
And these problems are urgent. It’s impossible to live in America right now and not see that something is wrong. What precisely that something is, how deep the rot goes, how we might go about fixing it—each of us has our own ideas, or our own further questions. But nearly all of us believe something is wrong. This, at least, is what I have gathered from phone calls with friends the pandemic keeps me from seeing in person and the newspapers I check once a day because checking more often is overwhelming. For those who favor data over anecdote, polls support me here too. A recent one found that only 12 percent of respondents were satisfied with the way things are going. When they considered the state of the country, 71 percent felt anger and 66 percent felt fear.
To the problem of evil or questions about the relationship between justice and free will, Robinson suggests that Christ is “a response, not an answer.” Perhaps we should think about our current political moment in a similar manner. Because many of the problems we face are so big that to name them truly is to admit we have no answer for them. We can get by without answers—we are good at muddling through—but it is impossible not to respond, whether by action or inaction. And we can take up this response with an urgency fitted to the depth of the problems we face.
We take up the task not because we are confident that it will solve all our problems, but because it is the work suited to the sort of creatures we are.
By calling us to take seriously our democratic heritage, Robinson offers us a way to start to respond. “[I]n our earlier history . . . there was the conscious sense that democracy was an achievement . . . It was something that people collectively made and they understood that they held it together by valuing it . . . It’s a made thing that we make continuously.” In valuing and making and remaking our democracy, in doing the hard work of living together, we witness to God’s love for us and his presence among us. “God’s first act of grace toward us was to make us worthy of his attention and loyalty and love.” How can we not, then, extend to one another the same attention, loyalty, and love–in our personal relationships and also in our politics?
What might this look like for each of us? Many different things, I imagine. I have few conclusions about this, and fewer that I will state with confidence. One, though, is that the practice that Robinson writes of demands that we stay put. There are good reasons to leave our hometowns or to move from one place to another. But the work of democratic practice requires that many of us choose to stay somewhere long enough to know our neighbors, the needs of our communities, the location and time of the town meeting–that we stay long enough to care about the location and time of the town meeting. And let us remember, Jesus “fulfilled an exalted purpose in living and dying an obscure figure in a minor province.”
Robinson often refers to another demand of democratic practice: we must reject the notion that the true character of our common life together is that of a competition over scarce resources. Competition is “a language of coercion that implies to people that their lives are fragile, that it is charged with that kind of unspecific fear that makes people . . . feel that they can’t get their feet on the ground.” Competition may spur us to hard and important work. But often it traps us in a race whose object “changes from moment to moment.” In that fearful race, we have little time to cultivate the attention and loyalty and love that democratic practice demands. And if there is a competition to win, then the humble (and humbling) work of staying put–of tending to our communities so that they are capable of democratic practice–begins to seem foolish and self-defeating.
It is likely that this work will never feel like it is enough, in that it will not definitively solve the problems we face. But we are east of Eden and await Christ’s return. Neither Christians, nor the church, nor any state will solve the problem of evil or end suffering. Efficacy is the wrong standard. If God’s relationship to us and our relationship to him provides the justification for democratic practice, then that is reason enough. We take up the task not because we are confident that it will solve all our problems, but because it is the work suited to the sort of creatures we are. The practice of democracy itself, not just particular policy outcomes, is demanded of us. Knowing God’s goodness, we can take up the work with a deep hope and faith that in doing so, we are participating in love of creation and of neighbor.
Rebecca Lewis is in her third year at Yale Law School. She is a proud native of Chicagoland and looks forward to returning upon graduation.