American democracy is experiencing a crisis of meaning, community, and moral purpose. Secular frameworks have proven insufficient to address the deep questions of belonging and obligation that citizens face. Yet the dominant conversation about religion and public life remains stuck in a defensive posture—focused on whether religion is compatible with democracy rather than on how it might be essential to democracy’s renewal. This is a failure of imagination on both sides: secularists too often assume that less religion will produce better politics, while religious communities too often retreat into insularity or reduce faith to partisanship.
Meanwhile, the world’s largest religious traditions make truth claims that sit in genuine tension with democratic pluralism. Christianity and Islam—home to roughly half the world’s population—both contain exclusivist theological commitments, including claims about salvation and damnation, that raise hard questions about how believers relate to fellow citizens who hold fundamentally different convictions. These tensions cannot be wished away, but they can be engaged with intellectual honesty and good faith.
There is an urgent need for rigorous, cross-tradition scholarship that takes both religious conviction and democratic principles seriously—and that reimagines the relationship between the two as generative rather than adversarial.
The Faith and the Future of Democracy Initiative pursues its research mission through three complementary activities:
Occasional Paper Series: A paper series featuring original scholarship on religion, pluralism, and democratic theory—providing a dedicated venue for work that bridges theology and political science, with a particular focus on the constructive contributions of religious thought to democratic culture.
Dialogues and Convenings: Invitation-only workshops and public dialogues that bring together scholars, religious leaders, and practitioners to wrestle with the initiative’s core questions—modeling the kind of cross-tradition engagement that democratic life requires.
Symposium Series: Symposiums structured around a provocative prompt and featuring four to six essay-length contributions offering deliberately diverse and conflicting perspectives.
The Faith and Future of Democracy Initiative
A catalyst for Christian+Muslim discourse.
