What does it take to sustain a democratic polity? This question has taken on great urgency as many Americans have come to fear that the basic institutions and norms of democracy are under threat in their country, but it is a question that arises time and again in moments of crisis within American history. One aspect of this question is to what extent democracy can be sustained with such racially, culturally and religiously diverse a population. This is not the first moment in American history that has seen an outburst of nativism and chauvinism that seeks to roll back and suppress the increasing diversity of American life. Such efforts are often stated as attempts to restore American democracy, suggesting that democracy requires a high level of cultural homogeneity. At best, this conception of democracy insists that so-called “tribal” differences must be set aside, de-emphasized.
Against this narrow conception, there have been those who champion a more pluralistic vision of democracy. One such champion was Mordecai Kaplan. In developing his program for American Jewish life, Kaplan also articulated a conception of democracy that could fully incorporate the importance of respecting and promoting the distinctiveness of national and cultural groups. What this element of Kaplan’s work shows, I think, is he was not just arguing for Jews and Judaism to accommodate democracy. He was arguing that for America to be truly democratic, it had to fully embrace cultural and religious differences of various kinds, Jews and Judaism included. Indeed, he thought that genuine democracy could only be achieved if any and all national-cultural groups could be given the chance to flourish and maintain their distinctiveness. In this essay, I will focus on three key points that emerge in Kaplan’s conception of democracy: 1) the importance of a democracy as an ethos, and not just a political system; 2) the importance of national cultures as sources for spiritual nourishment; and 3) democracy is inimical to all forms of national chauvinism. At a time when hyper-nationalism, chauvinism and fascism represent major threats to the health of democracy, Kaplan’s pluralistic conception of democracy offers us a compelling vision for sustaining democracy as a political system and as a way of life.
Kaplan’s reflections on democracy emerge in the context of his broader project devoted to the question of how Jews could maintain Jewish distinctiveness within the context of a democratic society, such as the United States, that instilled (albeit imperfectly) an egalitarian ethos in its citizens. Seen from this perspective, Kaplan’s program of democratizing Jewish institutions and Jewish theology might appear to be a form of accommodationism, meaning an insistence that Judaism needed to adjust new social and political conditions to ensure its survival. While there is some element of accommodationism in his thought, this framing fails to appreciate Kaplan’s commitment to democracy as an intrinsically good way of life. Kaplan believed that in its fullest sense, democracy — both as a political system and as a moral ethos — promoted the well-being and actualization (what he terms “salvation”) of every member of any society. Thus, Kaplan’s project of interpreting Judaism in a democratic key was a moral and theological necessity, not just a socio-political one.
Kaplan believed that the task of rebuilding Jewish life in America for millions of new immigrants and, more importantly, their American-born children, required a clear understanding that while democracy presented unprecedented opportunities for Jews, it also presented unprecedented challenges for the organization of collective Jewish life. As Kaplan succinctly put it in a journal entry from 1913,
Democracy threatens the integrity of the Jewish social group. It tends to disintegrate the very social organization which is the bearer of Judaism and without which Judaism is inconceivable.[1]
Kaplan understood that the strength of the Jewish communities of much of Europe before emancipation was the cultural autonomy they were granted by political authorities. Modern democratic governments, by contrast, only acknowledge individual citizens as political constituents and do not grant power or autonomy to distinct cultural or religious groups. The kind of autonomy that Jews enjoyed in the past could not be established by official political means within modern democratic nation-states.
More importantly, however, Kaplan saw the challenge that democratic culture posed for Jewish life in spiritual and not just political terms. Kaplan understood that the typical modern nation-state “expects all of its citizens to identify themselves completely with it, to accept its cultural values and to further it social aims and ideals.”[2] The threat to Jewish life did not come just from democracy as a political system but from the national self-understanding that emerged in democratic nation-states, what he called democratic nationalism. According to Kaplan, the organizing principle of democratic nationalism was that sovereignty was invested in the people of a particular geographic area whose interests alone were the basis for legitimate government action. In his brief forays into historical analysis, Kaplan argues that democracy as a form of government has served largely as a vehicle for the creation of national unity in the new political conditions of modernity.[3] More specifically, modern nation-states developed principles of religious toleration not because they valued cultural pluralism per se, but because they wanted to de-emphasize religious differences that would interfere with the sense of unity among the citizens of newly formed nation-states. Thus, despite the formal separation of church and state in America and other Western nation-states, Kaplan believed that what had been developing in these states was not a pluralistic culture but a new religion based on loyalty to a national culture and the state.
Kaplan’s concern was that even in America, where Jews had been more welcome than any other nation in the West, democratic nationalism and the emergence of what he called an “American religion” could overpower the spiritual vitality of Judaism:
A time is coming when it will be not only difficult to live a Jewish life in America, but almost impossible. That will be when Americanism, in the sense of an American religion, or the Religion of Democracy, will have come into being. It will probably take three or four generations to evolve; but since the certainty of its coming is apparent, Judaism should not fritter the precious hours either in self-complacent day dreaming or in ill-considered and sporadic enterprises.[4]
Kaplan’s use of the term “religion” to describe the emerging American democratic culture is, of course, striking. In his account of modern political societies, Kaplan rejected the idea that religion and national culture were separate spheres of life. This passage was meant to alert his readers that no matter how much one asserted the spiritual or ethical compatibility of Judaism and democratic norms, America’s democratic culture was competing with Judaism for the spiritual loyalty of American Jews. Kaplan’s designation of democracy as a “religion” also shows, I think, that Kaplan thought of democracy as much more than a political system. Democracy is a set of values, an ethos, that its adherents regard as sacred, a set of guiding principles that informs the way they treat their fellow citizens on a day-to-day basis and inspires them to serve the common good through political and social action. For this reason, Kaplan thought it urgent that the American Jewish community should both build robust institutions that would maintain a distinct Jewish communal existence as well as adopt democratic norms and principles as central values of Jewish life. In this way, he hoped, Jews could internalize the ethos of democracy within Jewish life and participate in that ethos.
As much as Kaplan sought to change the ways Jews thought about and practiced Judaism, he also presented a challenge to American conceptions of democracy itself. Recall Kaplan’s claim that the separation of religion and state largely served to foster national consolidation in modern democracies. Kaplan goes on to challenge modern democracies to recognize that religious freedom should entail that each and every national culture should be given the freedom to flourish. In a passage in Judaism as a Civilization, he puts the point quite forcefully:
Religious freedom is not merely freedom to entertain any or no conception of God. It is essentially the freedom to remain loyal to one’s historic culture. The notion that allegiance to a state precludes identification with more than one nation will therefore have to be scrapped.[5]
Here, Kaplan has interpreted a basic element of American civic life in a daring and innovative way that was rooted in his own experience of America as a nation of immigrants who found distinct ways to maintain their culture of origin and be civically engaged Americans. Long before multiculturalism entered the American lexicon, Kaplan was extolling the virtues of hyphenated identities as a vehicle for a more inclusive, genuine democracy.
Kaplan’s reinterpretation of the principle of religious freedom is premised on the idea that national cultures are vital sources of spiritual sustenance akin to and essentially integrated with religion. This may not have been how the American founders viewed the matter, but Kaplan views this development as a growing recognition of the spiritual significance of national cultures. “Nationhood,” he argues, is “essential” to “the highest moral aspirations.”[6] He goes on to interpret the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 as a tale about the spiritual significance of national cultures that should inform contemporary Jewish social ethics. Jews should confidently defend their own right to national distinctiveness because they could do so consistently for all peoples — that is, all national cultures. All national cultures have a right, he believes, to preserve their distinct culture, even if they are not the predominant group within a nation-state. Again, Kaplan’s language challenges received conceptions of democracy:
If democratic nationalism is to heed fully the claims of justice and reason, it must concede the right of the Jews throughout the world to retain their status as a nation, though the retention of such status involves their becoming a new type of nation–an international nation with a national home to give them cultural and spiritual unity. In the very process of conceding this right to the Jews, democratic nationalism will be living up to its own more ethical conception which has recently emerged, the conception which sees in internationalism the only hope for civilization.[7]
Kaplan’s embrace of the term internationalism points to his understanding of democracy as fundamentally humanistic. A particular democratic polity may primary be “of, by and for” its own people, but it must also be responsible to the ethical demands of all peoples, including those who with different national backgrounds who live within its borders.
This is why Kaplan argued that reconstructing Judaism to be consistent with democratic principles required dropping the notion of divine election, or Israel being God’s chosen people. Where other modern thinkers and theologians had tried to reinterpret the idea of Divine election, Kaplan insisted that the idea must be completely eradicated from the Jewish theological vocabulary because it was inconsistent with the principles of cooperative democratic citizenship: “If one’s people is God’s chosen, then its interests must surely take precedence over those of any secular nation.”[8] Kaplan’s use of the term “interests” here is telling because he saw the notion of Israel’s election as including all the elements of rabbinic political theology: the covenant between God and Israel at Sinai, the notion of Israel’s exile among the nations as a punishment from God, and the hope for a return to the land to rebuild the Temple and live under Messianic sovereignty. Israel’s election by God not only implies a religious exclusivity in the worship of God but also a political exclusivity among members of the covenant — the Jewish people. In other words, Kaplan did not think that a people that believes it is chosen by God could genuinely take the interests of secular, or unchosen, peoples into account for reasons other than expediency.
Kaplan’s rejection of chosenness flowed from his view that any Jewish theology or ideology that sought to justify some measure of separate collective existence of the Jewish people must be consistent with the spirit of democracy for moral reasons, not just for strategic ones. But it also reflected his insistence that national chauvinism of any kind is morally incompatible with democracy. Democracy, in order to achieve its moral promise, had to reject any principle that allowed one nation to view its interests as superseding those of other nations. That held for the domestic sphere as well as the international, and so no single nation could claim cultural superiority even within the boundaries of one particular nation-state. No cultural or religious group can claim, Kaplan thinks, the privilege of cultural supremacy in a democratic society, no matter the history of that society. To make such a claim is to undermine the highest ethical standards of democracy itself.
It was in this spirit that Kaplan believed that he could promote the development of robust Jewish cultural attachment as well as robust Jewish civic participation in American democratic life. What he believed in fact was that fostering Jewish distinctiveness was itself an expression of the humanistic values of democracy. Kaplan believed that the recurring American anxieties about cultural homogeneity and “tribalism” are misplaced, and that the temptations to nativism and chauvinism must be resisted. All religious and cultural groups, not just Jews, can and should maintain their distinctiveness because cultural pluralism is what gives a democracy its spiritual and moral vibrancy.
If not cultural homogeneity, then, what does it take to sustain democracy? Though he does not use the term, I suggest that we think of Kaplan as promoting solidarity between different national cultural groups, both within nation-states and between them. A sense of solidarity means that we can we work in cooperation with people of different groups for the shared common good while maintaining our distinctiveness while respecting and celebrating theirs. This spirit of solidarity achieves the humanistic, internationalist ethos that Kaplan thought was essential to the spirit of democracy. No one national culture owns the nation; that is simply not democracy.
[1] Scult, Communings of the Spirit, p. 61.
[2] JC, 20.
[3] Kaplan, “How May Judaism be Saved?” p. 36.
[4] “The Future of Judaism,” p. 161.
[5] JC, p. 234
[6] JC, p. 233
[7] JC, p. 232
[8] JC, p. 23.
