Does Democracy Need a Church?

Citizen University is taking the idea of democracy as a faith one step farther than most

The Background: Last week I introduced the idea that democracy is not a system, but a faith: a commitment to a certain set of beliefs and principles.

One of you asked if I’d come across Civic Saturdays. I had not but was intrigued. It is/was Citizen University’s effort to put together a church service—music, sermons, “civic scripture,” call and response—dedicated not to a religion but to democracy itself.

Civic Saturdays doesn’t seem to have taken off yet; Citizen University’s last Citizen Saturday YouTube post was ~8 months ago. But what a worthy experiment! And here are a couple of links worth your time:

• A 2022 interview with Citizen University founder Eric Liu, and in particular this quote: “Optimism is a spectator’s posture. Hope implies agency. Hope says I have something to do with the outcome.”

• Check out their resources, including "Five Opportunities to Level Up Your Civic Skills.”

• See this Britannica entry on democracy, and especially the section on Dewey’s view of public education as the “church of democracy.”

Image credit: “A democratic indignation meeting,” by Kepler, borrowed from the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ppmsca.28576/.