It All Comes Down to Faith, Hope, and Love
This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the Faith and Democracy Summit–a summative convening for Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement’s Faith In/And Democracy initiative held in Phoenix on November 28, 2023.
Over the last four years, I have had the joy and privilege of coming alongside the PACE Faith In/And Democracy Learning Community to tell the stories of some remarkable grantees, and share insights regarding what we have learned along the way. This community has been an inspiration to me. In the same way that working with religious groups serving those in need when I worked in The White House helped me to not lose sight of the heart of faith in this country, serving with FIAD these last four years has made me more hopeful, and more appreciative for how people of faith and faith-inspired actors and ideas can benefit our democracy in partnership with philanthropy.
It is a difficult task to summarize four years of work, but I will make an attempt here with the aid of my faith’s theological virtues of faith, hope and love. These are my parting thoughts of encouragement, direction and caution.
First, faith. “Nothing can do what faith does the way faith does it.” This is the core thought I offered near the beginning of this initiative. I developed the line in an attempt to strike at the indispensability of faith and religious contribution if we — in our place and context — are to have a healthy democracy, without claiming that religion is the only good or possible source of positive civic virtues and contributions. No doubt, there are many, many others.
Yet, while faith is not the only plausible contributor to a healthy democracy, faith is essential, if for no other reason, because our democracy is made up of many, many religious people. One definitional characteristic of government in a democratic society is that government is not the prime, or first, mover. Government acts, ultimately, because of the people. And the people come from outside of government to create the government, the government does not create the people. The government owes its existence to the people, not the other way around. So our civic life must recognize the people, and people must be able to be themselves in our civic life.
PACE, FIAD, our partners and friends in this work–they all get this. This Learning Community has spent four years mining all of the ways in which this is true. What makes PACE a civic organization, what makes FIAD a civic organization, is that, to me, it has always taken its lead from the foundational fact, the foundational reality, the foundational existence and salience of faith in our civic life, separate and apart from any inherent, foundational value judgment regarding that fact. The value judgment, again, in my view and in my experience, was on civic aspirations of representation, inclusion, flourishing, and those aspirations naturally led to a recognition that some work needed to be done to understand and resource the ways in which faith and democracy are related.
The future of faith is inextricably linked to the fate of our democracy. We do not have to have a perspective on whether that is a good thing or not in order to share that assessment.
But I can’t help but look back on these last four years and see it as a great thing; a wellspring that can nourish our democracy if we cast down our pal. And that is what PACE has been doing for four years. We have spent these four years retrieving water from that well and thinking about how we can share it, how we can get more of it, how we can keep the wellspring from contamination, knowing that we only have some influence over that, but taking responsibility for what we can and should.
I cannot encourage you enough to read the resources that the PACE team has developed for your edification over the coming months. Read about our grantees. Read about the best practices that we’ve drawn up, the various minerals which we found most enriching. You will find not just perspective, not just ways of doing, but knowledge. Knowledge that will help you do your work, and live your life, and serve those you serve.
Faith in democratic work is essential because of the people who make up the democracy, but also because of the sense that the historical, institutional, theological, intellectual, human and other resources of faith offer invaluable contributions to our democracy.
Which brings me to hope. Here, I don’t refer to a strictly theological conception of hope, but more an alertness to positive possibilities.
At the Center for Christianity and Public Life, we have a Public Life Fellowship for exceptional civic leaders, and we just wrapped up our first class of fellows earlier this month. In our final meeting, one of our fellows, a wonderful public servant, Marlon Brown, shared a final reflection. He said this: “We talk about the intersection of faith and politics, and I get it, but the nature of an intersection is that it’s the point at which two things meet, perhaps there’s an exchange, but then they go their own way. What I’ve learned this year, what I have clarity on, is that what we’re looking for is less of an intersection, but more of roads merging and following along the same route.”
When it comes to our civic life, we need to consider how faith and democracy are parallel roads, running alongside one another, and then we can have conversations about where we are going together.
Yes, we need to think about mitigation. We need to think about crisis moments. But we will never build trust if we only come to faith and democracy as an intersection, a place we arrive at only to pass. We must turn to what we will do together. We must move from an intersection to hope for the road ahead.
A recent Pew Research study found historically low levels of trust in government, as only 20 percent of American adults said they trust the government in Washington to “do the right thing” “just about always” or “most of the time,” a result that has been more or less consistent since the turn of the last century. The same Pew study also found that 65 percent of Americans believe that all (15 percent) or most (50 percent) candidates for public office run in order to pursue their own personal interests. Only 21 percent believe candidates run for office to serve their communities.
I think it is a difficult thing to come to terms with for those of us who believe in the good politics can do, but many Americans don’t believe politics is failing, they believe politics is inherently self-aggrandizing. They don’t believe that politics is failing to deliver, they increasingly don’t even have an imagination for our civic life as a forum for service.
I have been surprised by the tremendous power that comes from when we can express confidence in faith from the democracy space, and in democracy from the faith space. It is very easy to undermine confidence and trust in something from the inside of that system or community, and I increasingly think that restoring confidence and trust in and within a system or community requires support and inputs from outside of that system.
I don’t think this is how PACE would have described the goal of this initiative — it probably isn’t even the most precise depiction of PACE’s aims today — but that is what I have witnessed coming alongside this work. I have seen the mutual edification that occurs, the empowerment and improvement that occurs, when faith does the thing that faith does the way faith does it, and when that is recognized for its value from those who are perhaps not fully understanding, or on the inside of, a particular religious community or a religious community generally.
It also works the other way: when our democracy can be recognized and valued, when civic contribution can be recognized and valued from those outside of a particular contribution and its intended direct beneficiaries, it is our democracy that is enlivened. We saw this at my organization’s recent summit, as those of other faith traditions, those in elected office and public servants of various sorts, came to both listen and to be heard, to be told “you are valuable, your work is valuable, you’re not here because we want to be served by you, but because we value and desire your service to others, to the public.” Our democracy will gain strength, we will restore trust in our democracy, not by our democracy endlessly affirming itself, but in part by our civic life receiving the blessings of others. This might be all democracy can do for the good.
This is what the political theorists and theologians refer to as the ennobling of our politics. This is what I see and hear from Kristen Cambell, from PACE and from this Learning Community: a desire for a civic life that is deep, that is ennobling, that is worthy not only of citizens’ participation, but their vocation.
This restoration, this renewal, is impossible without love. It is impossible. I know there can be some hesitation around using a word like love in conversations like this. We think love is too soft. We think the problems in our country are too hard, too big, too technical, for love.
Love, according to Aquinas, is the will to good. One of the primary challenges we face in a politics of power is that we are tempted to seek to influence people we do not love. This breeds injustice, and reciprocating resentment and rage, which breeds injustice…
I am concerned about philanthropy, civic leaders, religious leaders, who are and will be tempted to influence people they do not love. We must guard against this.
What I want to leave you with is that there is no policy, no technique, that will overcome a lack of love. We cannot reliably build a democracy in which people will the good of others without love, because willing the good of others is what love entails. Our politics requires reform, yes, but our politics needs–most of all–a new heart, out of which good and just reforms can emerge. There is no plan or system which will make our democracy whole without love.
Faith. Hope. Love. These are what we should take with us, what we allow to guide our course as we move forward from here, strengthened and emboldened by all of the knowledge and resources, learnings, relationships, and friendships, true friendships, which we’ve gained from this beautiful community.
Michael Wear has served as Storyteller/Analyst for the entirety of PACE’s Faith In/And Democracy Initiative. He is President and CEO of the Center for Christianity and Public Life.
