For the new year, offering my prayer for democracy

My New Year’s wish is for the health and resurgence of democracy. What follows is a slightly edited version of a morning prayer I offered last month at the Appleton Chapel of the Memorial Church at Harvard University.

Let us say a prayer for democracy. But let us do more than pray. Let’s ask ourselves what it means to live by a democratic ethic. “Here on earth,” as John F. Kennedy said, “God’s work must truly be our own.”

We know that democracy, particularly in its liberal form, is embattled, facing threats within nations that have long been proud of their democratic traditions, and competition from systems that tout themselves as better able to deliver many of life’s good things.

But the greatest threat to democracy may be our own indifference.

Democracy properly encourages open-mindedness. But are we so openminded that we are not willing to say, unequivocally, that a system providing for free speech, freedom of conscience, a free media, freedom of religion, and genuinely free elections is both morally and practically better than alternative systems?

Democracy is and always has been imperfect in practice. Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident who became his country’s president, told Congress in 1990: “As long as people are people, democracy in the full sense of the word will always remain an ideal. One may approach democracy as one would a horizon, in ways that may be better or worse, but which can never be fully attained.”

In embracing democracy, as the historian James Kloppenberg has written, we are standing up for three contested principles: popular sovereignty, autonomy and equality. We are also embracing three premises: deliberation, pluralism and reciprocity.

We know that in its liberal form, democracy must at times resist popular sovereignty — a majority of the people cannot vote away their own rights or anyone else’s. We know that our own quest for autonomy can conflict with our obligations to the communities to which we owe debts. We know that many democracies, including our own, are a long way from true equality.

We should also be prepared to live it. For religious people, the grounding for democracy is a belief that all human beings are endowed with equal dignity by God. But one need not be religious to insist on the equal dignity of our fellow human beings.

A devotion to democracy thus ought to affect how we treat others. We often have to deal with hierarchies, but we should never internalize them. Those at the bottom of formal authority structures see things and know things that cannot be seen from on high.

Democracy, finally, is rooted in two intuitions, about our aspirations to transcendence, which allow us to imagine a better world, and about our proclivities to sin and failure, which require limits on the power any of us can wield.

Democracy imposes a discipline. It demands that no fortunate group should ever claim, by virtue of its position or its educational attainments, the unchallenged right to impose its will on others. To invoke the late Benjamin Barber’s lovely phrase, the only aristocracy democracy fully sanctions is “an aristocracy of everyone.” It is the one sort of aristocracy worth praying for.