Politics, Ethics, and Religion

Abstract

In this essay, I argue that religion is centrally important in the future of liberal democracy in the Western sense of the word. Without the values of religion, we may have to face the emergence of authoritarian and totalitarian forms of political existence. My starting point is the experience of the so-called post-Communist countries. The essence of this experience is that liberal democracy as a political form may lack genuine content if the society, in which it exists, is devoid of the fundamental human attitudes essential for sustaining such a democracy. This experience can be complemented by the experience we have in the European Union or in the United States today, because even in these organizations we witness clear signs of the loss of common values, which endangers the proper functioning of stable democratic systems. However, some form of religion – traditional or renewed – may help to revitalize the values and their subjective basis, the proper human attitudes to encounter the danger of the decline of contemporary liberal democracies.