ISBN-13: 9780826218575 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 224 str.
America has seen faith-based initiatives and the audacity of hope in twenty-first-century politics, but few participants in our political scene have invoked the other Christian virtue of charity as a guiding principle. Abraham Lincoln extolled the merit of loving thy neighbor as thyself, especially as a critique of the hypocrisy of slavery, but a discussion of Christian love is noticeably absent from today s debates about religion and democracy.
In this provocative book, Grant Havers argues that charity is a central tenet of what Lincoln once called America s political religion. He explores the implications of making Christian love the highest moral standard for American democracy, showing how Lincoln s legacy demands that a true democracy be charitable toward all and that only a people who lived according to such ideals could succeed in building democracy as Lincoln understood it.
Havers argues that it is simplistic to conflate Lincoln s invocation of with charity for all with his abiding support for the ideal of human equality. The ethic of charity in his view also brought a uniquely Christian realism to the universalism of democracy. He also describes how, since World War I, intellectuals and political leaders have denied that there exists a necessary relation between democracy and Christian love, proposing that democracy is sufficiently ethical without reliance on a specific religious tradition. Today s neoconservatives and liberals instead posit a universal yearning for democracy that requires no foundation in the ethic of charity. Havers shows that this democratic universalism, espoused by those who believe a chosen people should uphold the natural rights of humanity, is alien to the sober thought of both the founders and Lincoln.
This carefully argued work defends Lincoln s understanding of charity as essential to democracy while emphasizing the difficulty of fusing this ethic with the desire to spread democracy to people who do not share America s Christian heritage. In considering the prospect of America s leaders rediscovering a moral foreign policy based on charity rather than the costly idolization of democracy, "Lincoln and the Politics of Christian Love "makes a timely contribution to the wider debate over both the meaning of religion in American politics and the mission of America in the world and opens a new window on Lincoln s lasting legacy.
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