A democracy thrives when its institutions cultivate broad, pluralistic dialogue. Regional universities and colleges, by their very design, open students to multiple perspectives and encourage civic responsibility. Yet, alongside these institutions of breadth exist communities, organizations, and churches that often narrow vision, collapsing pluralism into exclusivism in order to match a preferred identity. When churches in particular sacralize partisan politics, as they have lately done, a heretical form of faith emerges - one that undermines both the gospel and the constitutional order. The initial efforts may have been sincerely undertaken at first, but they have metastasized into a national cancer affecting America's national institutions and very constitutional democracy. It no longer is a simple question of new ideas challenging older beliefs, but has become a structural contest between institutions which nurture pluralism vs. institutions which can erode the very same.
In the past, organic roles had been switched between church and state - even as they have again today under maga-rights pursuants. Churches which once led against slavery, and for abolition, the women's vote, and the removal of child labor from dangerous factory settings, are today leading against the humanitarian rights of migrants, transgender and gay populations, women's rights to medical care, minority rights to equality and justice, and even healthful earth-care initiatives. For any democracy to become more than ambition, they must practically create dialogue across all community sectors. Where this concerns education, it must recenter between universities of breadth to culturized communities polarized between their faith and practice. This must necessarily include all media sources as well as educating voices as they compete with ideologues and their beliefs.
1. Universities as Custodians of Pluralism
Regional universities are uniquely structured to foster openness. By design, they gather students and faculty from across social, economic, and cultural spectra, creating hubs of pluralism even when they are not elite or global in reach. These institutions are (democratically) mandated by accreditation standards, curricular breadth, and research expectations to present students with multiple, sometimes conflicting, viewpoints. Academic freedom, though often contested, stands as a public trust - a safeguard which prevents universities from collapsing into syncretic echo chambers.
Pluralism here is not accidental; it is built into any democratized educational system. Whether through general education requirements, interdisciplinary seminars, or exposure to global literature, students are encouraged to encounter the unfamiliar. For many, a university classroom may be the first place they will meet someone of another religion, race, or political philosophy unless their family culture had previously reciprocated this effort in their formative years of childhood and teens. These new encounters and settings can be significant, perhaps unsettling, but vital when advancing towards maturation across a breadth of subjects, disciplines, endeavors, and entrepreneurship.
Case illustration: Consider the way many regional universities in the Midwest and South function as “first-contact zones” for rural students. A farm student from Iowa may share a dorm with an international exchange student from Nigeria; or, a first-generation Appalachian student may debate policy with a professor shaped by cosmopolitan city life. These exchanges are rarely perfect, but they model the democratic promise: difference need not lead to division; but can lead to dialogue.
Application: In this sense, universities are democratic crossroads. They normalize dialogue as the lifeblood of civic life, preparing students to inhabit a constitutional democracy in which diversity is inevitable and multi-environmental dialogue as indispensable to living in the postmodern world of the 21st century.
2. Communities as Mediators of Breadth
Localized communities, organizations, and churches, however, function differently. While universities broaden horizons, focused communities tend to narrow them. What is learned in the classroom is filtered through local histories, economic anxieties, cultural assumptions, and pervasive beliefs. Cosmopolitan ideas are often re-translated into manageable, localized forms, reshaping acquired information into digestible, localized stories that may either resonate with lived experience or create tension within family and community.
Statedly, communities provide vital stability and identity. They preserve traditions, anchor relationships, and offer "safe-continuity" in a rapidly changing world. But this very strength can also become both a personal as well as corporate liability. Stability can ossify into insularity, parochialism, provincialism, even inflexibility and sectarian myopia. The global horizon can shrink down into narrow cultural views where outside perspectives are treated with suspicion and hostility.
Case illustration: When debates about climate change reach small manufacturing towns, they are often reframed not as global crises but as threats to local jobs or ways of life. What universities present as scientific consensus, local communities may interpret as elitist interference. The same data, filtered through local experience, takes on new meaning.
Application: Here the civic imagination is tested. Will openness be preserved, or will it collapse into the comfort of sameness? Communities, caught between the breadth of universities and the closed-mindedness of churches, serve as the mediating ground where the battle for pluralism is often won or lost.
3. Churches as Ideological Fortresses
Within local churches, the narrowing dynamic often hardens into ideology. Churches are deeply intimate networks of belonging, where trust is reinforced through ritual, authority, and shared moral commitments. These qualities make churches powerful communities of care, but they also render them vulnerable to ideological capture. A capture that often goes against it's own virility and self-care.
When preferred partisan ideas enter the communal sanctuary, they are not merely discussed but can often become sacralized. A political stance becomes a “biblical truth.” A policy preference becomes a divine mandate. Once internalized through sermons, small groups, or prayer meetings, these ideas acquire moral force beyond debate.
Case illustration: In recent years, many churches have recast public health measures, election integrity, or immigration policy as spiritual battles. Masks were not medical devices but signs of tyranny. Voting rights were not constitutional debates but matters of good versus evil. Immigration was framed not as an economic or humanitarian issue but as a threat to Christian identity. In each case, political ideology was sacralized into (unhealthy) theology.
Application: The result is what may be termed authoritarian evangelicalism - a trans-denominational movement that fuses grievance, nationalism, and politics with the language of divine authority. Where universities prize pluralism as a civic necessity, these churches re-frame pluralism as compromise, weakness, or even apostasy. Congregants are taught not to engage across difference but to resist it as faithfulness - often to their own detriment as well as their civic community around them.
4. Theological Heresy: Collapse of Gospel into Ideology
Theologically, this represents a profound heresy of collapse. The radical openness of the gospel - its call to mercy, love, and reconciliation - is reduced to a narrow demand for conformity and control. Instead of shaping political life through compassion, these churches may sacralize preferred political ideologies as active, possibly destructive, internal and external forces.
The “one true way” of the divine ceases to be Christ’s way of love and becomes the way of nationalism or authoritarian populism. In this collapse, the church ceases to be the Body of Christ and becomes an ideological machine. What should have been faith renewed for the world is instead faith distorted into a weapon of power.
Case illustration: In sermons recorded across evangelical denominations, pastors have equated voting for a particular candidate with fidelity to Christ. To dissent politically is to dissent spiritually. This inversion replaces the gospel of grace with the gospel of grievance, enshrining division as a sacred duty.
Application: For pastors, theologians, and lay leaders, the task is to name this collapse directly. Sermons, curricula, and small group studies should emphasize the difference between gospel-centered faith and ideology-driven religion. Teaching practices can highlight the radical inclusivity of Christ, contrasting it with the narrowness of nationalism. Churches can create liturgies, testimonies, and communal acts of service that embody hospitality, showing that faith flourishes not through conformity but through compassion.
5. Constitutional Betrayal: From Democracy to Dominance
The constitutional danger mirrors the theological one. Where universities cultivate pluralism as essential to democracy, authoritarian evangelicalism casts pluralism as weakness. Civic space is reimagined not as a forum of equals but as a battlefield for dominance.
This distortion undermines the very framework that makes religious freedom possible. By collapsing faith into ideology - such as the removal of "church and state" boundaries - politicized churches betray the Constitution’s founding vision of a pluralist republic devoted to equality and justice, and as equally devoted to not giving preference to any one voice, religious or otherwise. A true democracy equally weights all voices in theory. In practice, the founding fathers, having suffered exclusion by dominating religious unions in their former home (Europe), sought separation of state oracles from dominating religious bodies and institutions. They did not wish to reduce democracy to theocracy, nor citizenship to conformity to legislated authoritarian rules of personalized or religious discrimination and bias.
Case illustration: Efforts to enshrine explicit Christian identity into public schools or government policies illustrate this un-democratic urge to revert back to the days where the institutionalized church dominated state politics. When pluralism is dismissed, protections for religious minorities and secular citizens alike are weakened. Ironically, the very Constitution that shields churches from state interference is undermined by the churches themselves when they seek dominance rather than dialogue.
Application: For civic leaders, educators, and congregants, vigilance is required where faith begins to mask authoritarian impulses. This means insisting that civic spaces remain accessible to all, not just the religious majority. This would critically include educational, judicial, legal, and religious spaces as example. Moreover, practical measures might include supporting inter-faith councils, participating in community forums, and defending policies that protect pluralism. By reminding churches that the Constitution safeguards their freedom precisely by protecting the freedom of others, communities can reorient their polarized conversations from dominance to dialogue.
6. Reversing the Reversal
The downward trajectory from universities dedicated to openness to church-led polarization, either rightly or wrongly perceived, illustrates how rapidly democratic pluralism can be undone in a blended nation whose history has always been one of many voices. It also can reveal the possibility of healthful reversal should dialogue engage between universities and communities. Where this has been done successfully we see the correspondent rise of medical health, inclusion, forward economic diversity, emerging industry, and attractive community projects. If pluralism is to survive, it must flow upwards, downwards, and sideways at all times. These are the marks of an inclusive democracy unled by nationalized or religious doctrinaires.
-
Universities must continue fostering breadth but also communicate its civic urgency in accessible ways. Their message cannot remain locked in academic language; it must filter back into the communities from which their students come.
-
Communities must cultivate curiosity and resist the temptation to collapse global concerns into parochial suspicion. They can become bridges of understanding rather than barriers to it.
-
Churches must rediscover the gospel’s radical hospitality. To disentangle faith from partisan captivity is to reclaim Christianity’s central call: to love one’s neighbor, not to conquer them.
Case illustration: Initiatives where churches partner with local universities - on refugee resettlement, climate resilience, or civic educational opportunities - show how pluralism can be reactivated. In such collaborations, institutions of breadth and institutions of belonging work together, rather than at odds, to build democratic strength.
Application: For all three levels - universities, communities, and churches - the call is to rebuild channels of dialogue. Universities can establish ongoing partnerships with local churches and civic organizations, providing resources in accessible language. Communities can organize forums where academic voices and everyday concerns meet in honest exchange. Churches can reclaim practices of radical hospitality by welcoming diverse voices into study, worship, and service. In this way, each institution plays a role in reweaving pluralism back into the civic fabric.
Conclusion
The contest is not merely between ideas but between structures of influence. Traditionally, universities have functioned as guardians of breadth, communities as mediators of identity, and churches, too often, as fortresses of closure. When closure triumphs, both gospel and Constitution are diminished. But when breadth reclaims its place, democracy and discipleship can once again meet in the shared work of love, justice, and the common good. The future of both faith and democracy depends on which structure, or which attitude, prevails.
Suggested Bibliography
-
Philip S. Gorski & Samuel L. Perry, The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy.
-
Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
-
Andrew L. Whitehead & Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God.
-
Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth.
-
John B. Cobb Jr., Process Theology as Political Theology.
