Spiritual Democracy : Mark Cladis
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Spiritual Democracy : Mark Cladis
1. Introduction: The Scope of Spiritual Democracy This article proposes spiritual democracy as a concept that both denotes and elucidates a distinctive form of democratic life—one urgently called for in the context of ecological and political catastrophe. Spiritual democracy is not a mystical, nationalistic political body nor is it a democracy based on supposed transcendent or immutable ideals. Rather, on my account, spiritual democracy is a lively, culturally specific, culturally contested, progressive democracy that is both existing and aspirational. The term “spiritual,” when linked to democracy, signals modes of thought, practice, dispositions, affects, and visions of diverse individuals and communities as they cultivate democratic relationships—not only with one another, but also with ancestors, future generations, and more-than-human beings. It points toward what can be understood as an integrative complexity, namely, the interweaving of people and place, knowledge and wisdom, gratitude and reciprocity, and beauty and loss. This democratic interwovenness of people and place requires that democratic commitments to the dignity of the human person and flourishing of human communities be extended (and transformed) to include the dignity and flourishing of nonhuman creatures, entities, and communities. Additionally, democratic interwovenness entails listening to, and witnessing, the hauntings of places and ancestors, such that their prophetic voices might be heeded, their emancipatory power released, their crying out for renovated futurities acknowledged. Spiritual democracy, in this regard, attends to what Kyle Whyte (of the Potawatomi Nation) powerfully describes as intergenerational dialogues between present participants, past ancestors, and future descendants.1 Spiritual democracy is not primarily understood as a set of democratic procedures or legal codes, but neither is it bereft of procedural justice or of democratic principles such as “one person, one vote.” Still, its scope is not limited to elections and procedures: Spiritual democracy follows Thoreau when he wrote, “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.”2 In Thoreau’s view, what was ailing democracy in the United States was not so much a lack of formal democratic institutions but a dearth of wild democratic spirit and character. How else were citizens of his time to confront the most profound threats to a genuine democracy: slavery, manifest destiny, capitalistic markets, and the commodification and exploitation of the natural world? Spiritual democracy’s scope, then, is not limited to elections and procedures, but rather includes the manners and character of its diverse, progressive, wild citizens and communities. It is important to note that spiritual democracy is not presented here as a universal moral foundation for the democratic nation-state or as a doctrine meant for adoption by all democratic citizens. Spiritual democracy does offer a distinctive ethical vision, but it does so as an invitation and not prescriptively, seeking to contribute to democratic culture—rather than defining it. To be clear: spiritual democracy is not in the business of issuing a universally accepted conception of the good, attempting to impose a single moral vision on democratic institutions. Rather, spiritual democracy is simply one normative orientation that individuals and communities may cultivate within a pluralistic democratic state. Descriptively, spiritual democracy refers to a dynamically constructed legacy of progressive movements, figures, practices, and aspirations that extends into the present and listens to the future; normatively, it marks a cultural and aesthetic space in which one may locate oneself—and from which to critique, interpret, and reimagine the ways and manners of the nation—while remaining as one optional stance among many within a pluralistic democracy. Moreover, nothing in this orientation assumes shared religious commitments or assigns to religious claims some kind of special standing in public life. On my reading, spiritual democracy remains secular insofar as it neither privileges religious perspectives nor excludes them from democratic contestation. Its “spiritual” character does not name confessional doctrines but rather, as we will see, a set of relational and ethical attunements and orientations. For a democracy to remain democratic, it must protect the various social and political spaces in which competing ethical visions encounter one another. Spiritual democracy—with its relational, ancestral, and more-than-human commitments—participates within that contested, agonistic space as one possible stance. Of course, this conception of spiritual democracy is not meant to belittle elections, rights, and formal democratic institutions. These provide necessary structures for a democracy, but they do not create the necessary practices of listening, responding, imagining, and caring that sustain it. Many contemporary critiques of liberal democracy—especially those concerned with its vulnerability in the face of anti-democratic movements—underscore the point that procedural minimalism is insufficient. For democracies to survive and even flourish, they need to be equipped with distinctive democratic cultural, aesthetic, and ethical dispositions. The issue is not whether a single moral orientation should govern all democratic life, but how democratic cultures acquire the sensibilities necessary to resist such threats as democratic erosion and ecological destruction, and to cultivate capacious, reparative forms of democratic practice. It is here in this context that spiritual democracy offers a dynamic set of democratic practices and sensibilities. It sets out ways of attending to relations among humans, more-than-human beings, ancestors, and future generations, and it sketches modes of imagination, care, and relational attentiveness that can help to fortify progressive, ecological, and justice-oriented democratic practices in a wounded, interdependent world. What it contributes, ultimately, is a sense of how democratic cultures might be sustained by ethical and affective practices that exceed procedural forms while also honoring democratic plurality. Having delineated the broad contours of the concept, I now turn to four critical dimensions of spiritual democracy: the formation of democratic second nature; the constitutive influence of Walt Whitman; the dispositions that animate spiritual democracy; and the roles of the ancestral and more-than-human within its framework. 2. Democratic Second Nature(s) People and place shape a spiritual democracy even as spiritual democracy shapes people and place. The shaping engendered by spiritual democracy may be referred to as “democratic second nature,” that is, the cultivation of an ecologically responsive, progressive democratic subjectivity. Second nature is the formative, dynamic process of acquiring, in time and place, various beliefs, practices, and dispositions that become appropriately internalized. Progressive democratic second nature is dynamic and subject to constant critique and transformation.3 Indeed, critique itself is a cultivated capacity in spiritual democracy’s second nature. The notion of second nature is developed in diverse philosophical traditions—from G.W.F. Hegel’s conception of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) to John McDowell’s neo-Aristotelian account of habituated virtue, and it is implicitly found in John Dewey’s pragmatist accounts of ethical and social cultivation.4 These frameworks differ in their various commitments, and yet they all converge in depicting second nature as an internalization of practices, dispositions, and modes of judgment that become “natural” through social and personal cultivation as opposed to biological inheritance. My use of the term is strongly informed by these thinkers (especially McDowell and Dewey), and yet I explicitly direct it toward progressive eco-democratic ends. Whereas Aristotelian and Hegelian accounts often emphasize the settling of ethical formation, a progressive eco-democratic second nature emphasizes its ongoing unsettling—its commitment to critique and to transform inherited ways and perspectives. Also, while pragmatist accounts highlight the socially embedded character of democratic habits and practices, they remain primarily focused on human influence and interaction; in contrast, I suggest that a spiritual eco-democratic second nature expands this sphere of influence to include the more-than-human and the ancestral. In this sense, progressive democratic second nature is anything but a static achievement: it is, rather, a living, critical, relational process of becoming. The implicit argument here is that progressive democratic thought and action are not only compatible with ways of cultivation—tradition, practice, and exemplars—but require them. For some time now, I have been interested in models of democratic institutions, communities, and practice that do not rely on either: 1) appeals to rational choice or market efficiency models, often purportedly derived from principles of universal, deliberative human rationality, or 2) political arguments based on natural reason or any other anchors in an ahistorical moral reality.5 My interest, rather, is in exploring models that understand progressive democracy as liberatory, sociocultural work, whether at the local, nation-state, or transnational level. To acknowledge the sociohistorical nature of democratic achievements (however limited they may be) is also to acknowledge the fragility of those achievements. Democratic achievements are not written and secured in a foundation of transcendent stone. Sociocultural forces erected them and can just as easily bring them down; even the most basic achievements cannot be taken for granted. This should make us vigilant, especially if we hold that there are some things that no community or person, anywhere, at any time, should need to worry about happening to them. Democratic protections pertaining to torture, “disappearing” people, a free press, academic freedom, LGBTQ+ communities, and so on, are all vulnerable in the absence of sociocultural support for democratic laws, institutions, and practices. Laws, for example, can be interpreted, amended, or ignored in unjust ways, bringing great harm to the lives and institutions of a democracy. My suggestion is that, by recognizing the sociocultural ways and manners of spiritual democracy, we can purposefully attend to and cultivate a dynamic democratic second nature—an identity or subjectivity—that combats such democratic threats as white supremacy, misogyny, and environmentally destructive forms of anthropocentrism. It remains an open question whether a progressive democracy can be achieved or the extent to which it can be approximated—a society and form of government marked by justice, freedom, and equality, and liberated from such harms as racism, patriarchy, homophobia, oligarchy, and wanton indifference to the more-than-human world. The theme of the 2025 Political Concepts Conference at Brown University was the double entendre, “the end(s) of democracy,” and surely the prospect of democracy’s death, at least in the United States, seems increasingly like an open question. This is not to suggest that democracy in the United States was ever alive and well; still, “we’ll know it when we lose it.”6 Spiritual democracy acknowledges the real possibility of the end of democracy—democracy, a frail sociohistorical creation that can collapse faster than it emerged. But spiritual democracy also participates in the struggle to shore up and transform ailing democracies. In other words, spiritual democracy serves the ends (the aims) of democracy. Now, considering the current colossal threats to democracy, it might seem naïve to champion spiritual democracy. But I worry that it is more naïve to think a democracy can be achieved and sustained without giving more attention to democratic progressive culture and aesthetics, to its social practices and affect, its grieving and celebrations. A progressive democracy, I have said, requires arguments, principles, and public reasoning, yes, but much more as well. I am not interested in reducing political theory to sociology, moral deliberation to historical inquiry, or social criticism to social engineering. I am, rather, bringing attention to the importance of the spiritual integrative complexity of people and place and the sociohistorical and material character of democratic beliefs, practices, and institutions. 3. Walt Whitman When I speak of spiritual democracy as the integrative complexity of people and place, I have in mind something like what Walt Whitman called “a sublime and serious Religious Democracy,” namely the many and diverse cultural threads that form a complex, progressive democratic social fabric.7 This intricate weave, in Whitman’s view, is composed of poetry and pottery, literature and carpentry, opera and folk songs, philosophy and masonry, old and young, women and men and—I am sure Whitman would add—queer, trans, and nonbinary individuals. Each member of society is called on to contribute uniquely to the complex weave of the emerging spiritual democracy. This public engagement in building spiritual democracy does not bring the diminishment of individuality but rather its flourishing. Whitman maintained that “a greater product”—the sacred forms of a shared democratic life—results when individuals participate in (and not simply compete in) an inclusive and lively public life.8 When Whitman wrote of “a sublime and serious Religious Democracy,” he was referring to what he called the third stage in the development of American democracy.9 The first stage is the establishment of democratic, legal rights, as expressed, for example, in the Constitution; the second stage is the material basis for daily living, as exhibited, for example, by railways, farming, newspapers, schools, and monetary currency. The third stage is the development of what Whitman called “Religious Democracy” and what I am calling the spiritual base of a progressive democracy, namely its sociocultural matrix. Whitman’s hope was in plural, dynamic, democratic forms of life, inclusive of a wide variety of human experience, expression, and ways of being. While he never slighted the significance of achieving “equal franchise” or “an elected government” (the on-going work of stage one), he maintained that there is a “deeper, higher progress,” one which reaches deep into the manners and characteristics of a society as well as into the life of the individual. Hence Whitman declared:
Whitman’s verse, “Leaves of Grass”, can be interpreted as a poetic expression of “democracy in all public and private life.” The very title of this collection of poems, “Leaves of Grass,” invokes the notion of honoring distinct and diverse individuality (private paths, each blade of grass) as well as the ensemble (public paths, the interlacing of the weave). Pursuing spiritual democracy is not a venture in discovering a single, fixed national moral identity; rather, it is a journey in discovering how rich identities, fed by diverse streams, can also be fed by shared visions of who we can become: forging solidarities, bringing diverse backgrounds and perspectives to the work of combatting fascism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, and moving toward a progressive democracy. Far from sanctioning nationalism and marginalizing those not deemed “true Americans,” spiritual democracy puts a premium on the stories and movements of those lacking power and social standing—those stigmatized by reason of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and dissident thought, those who fight and fought to make a contribution to the cause of human dignity and justice. We can draw on and contribute to a diverse repertoire of public democratic rituals, practices, and stories; we can draw on powerful exemplars and symbols found in such movements as abolitionists, women’s suffrage and feminist movements, Black Power and Black Lives Matter, farm workers, Indigenous peoples, anti-nuclear, and LGBTQ+ movements, Occupy Wall Street, disability rights, and environmental justice movements. These movements represent a diversity of achievements that are worth celebrating—for celebration, too, belongs to spiritual democracy. And yet, again and again, we are reminded of—and should be reminded of—the fragility of such achievements. Again and again, we are haunted by—we should be haunted by—the loss and suffering of those whose lives were supposed to be honored and ameliorated by such achievements. The fragility of our collective work and achievements, the persistence of injustice and the attended sorrow, and the fatigue and dismay that violent backlash produces are all sensible reasons for warranted despair. Still, in face of such despair, spiritual democracy seeks to cultivate a variety of wild and radical dispositions. Hope is one of these. 4. Spiritual Democracy’s Wild Dispositions In spiritual democracy, hope is a disposition and practice that nourishes efforts to form solidarities and work toward life-affirming practices despite warranted despair and evidence that enduring change, while possible, may not be likely. We do not need to choose between hope and despair, between “positive affects” and “bad feelings.” Despair is certainly called for when faced with settler colonialism, anti-Black racism, homophobia and transphobia, patriarchy, and the massive exploitation of the more-than-human. Spiritual democracy honors and cultivates a wide set of complex dispositions and affective responses, including hope, wonder, reverence, and love as well as despair, grief, irreverence, and rage. Engendering appropriate affects and dispositions is vital to spiritual democracy’s efforts to promote forms of solidarity and life-affirming, progressive democratic ways of life that resist the various faces of oppression. Regarding hope, its particular form in spiritual democracy is exemplified in the life and work of W.E.B. Du Bois: it is not a cheerful denial of cheerless facts, nor is it faith in inevitable progress. It is, rather, hope as a social practice and disposition that is informed by suffering and loss, by uncertainty and vulnerability.11 Another disposition and practice central to spiritual democracy is the cultivation of democratic enhanced attention as it is joined to praxis-oriented empathy. Praxis-oriented empathy is a disposition and practice that both motivates and accompanies the witnessing of social harms and the practical work of social justice and transformation. Such empathy is a form of care but also a form of critique: caring about suffering requires commitment to critiquing and dismantling structures and practices of injustice. It is important to note that praxis-oriented empathy is not sentimental sympathy. Sentimental sympathy is a disposition and affect that grants an individual “deep feeling” but entails no attending, practical consequences. It is what Oscar Wilde referred to as “the luxury of having an emotion without paying for it,” and similar to what Saidiya Hartman and Xine Yao have referred to as the gaze of the voyeur or spectator.12 There is nothing inherently wrong with sentimental sympathy, though it can be pernicious if readers credit themselves with helping the world due to their profound feeling and concern. In addition to failing to produce practical results, which might be expected from apathetic readers, “sympathetic readers” may feel virtuous and experience personal self-fulfillment, having been “touched” by the suffering and oppression of others. Sentimental sympathy, then, must be differentiated from praxis-oriented empathy, the type of empathy spiritual democracy seeks to cultivate: an empathy that promotes forms of attention and engagement that include a wide range of emotional, bodily, intellectual, and practical political responses seeking to combat various forms of suffering and oppression. I would like to note one additional disposition and practice associated with spiritual democracy: the wild. Du Bois was committed to a spiritual democracy, that is, a democracy in which justice is located not only in its laws and institutions but also in the hearts and minds, the habits and practices of its citizens. An aspect of that spiritual democratic culture is its wildness: its capacity to challenge and unsettle and to incite hope and transformation. In Du Bois’s view, we hear the spirit of a spiritual democratic culture in that “wild voice” of the courageous abolitionist, David Walker, as he boldly condemned the atrocities of slavery to an audience of Southern legislators.13 And we hear it as well in that powerful, wild voice of Zora—in Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece—as she stood in front of her congregation with that “wild yearning” and proposed the wild idea of a collective farm, a liberatory alternative to the cruel “second slavery” of tenant farming.14 In spiritual democracy, such wildness is a cultivated disposition and social practice. 5. Ancestors Informing Spiritual Democracy I invoked Whitman’s title and poem, “Leaves of Grass,” to suggest something of the vast diversity and different ensembles, or weaves, that make up spiritual democracy. Who belongs to a democracy has always been a contested question. Who is included, who is excluded? Who is welcomed, who is marginalized? Are immigrants welcomed in U.S. democracy? Undocumented people? All children born and raised in the U.S.? Trans people? And this group, too: Are ancestors welcomed members of our communities, members of democracy? What difference might it make to include them, or to exclude them? Spiritual democracy seeks to be receptive to all the voices in the land, including those of the ancestors. The practice of honoring and attending to ancestors is ubiquitous among countless Indigenous groups around the world. Indigenous ancestors provide palpable sources of life, offering comfort, ways of resilience and sovereignty, and assisting their people in public and private hardships such as genocide, dispossession, sickness, and heartbreak. The Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte describes imaginative, intergenerational dialogues between Indigenous ancestors and future descendants that seek to guide and empower Indigenous communities in the face of various forms of oppression.15 As Whyte describes it, intergenerational dialogue between ancestors and future descendants would address “what actions we or our communities ought to take to respond to the issues and problems that characterize our current situations.”16 Euro-Americans, in contrast to Indigenous communities, tend not to listen to their ancestors. As Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Silko once commented, “Dead souls are always near us . . . Europeans did not listen to the souls of their dead. That was the root of trouble for Europeans.”17 If the ancestors are silenced, a democracy will not be able to receive their stories. Yet without the stories, to quote Silko again, “you don’t have anything.”18 Silko’s warning, however, is also a message of hope: you have everything (or at least much) if you have the stories—powerful, vital resources for healing, resilience, resistance, and social transformation. So, the question is: How to include ancestors of all kinds as vital members of communities and democracies? How to have reciprocal, intergenerational relationships with them? How to receive their stories? The first step is to be receptive to active ancestors by recognizing them in other cultures and listening for them in your own. In this regard, U.S. democracy can learn much from Indigenous cultures. Indeed, spiritual democracy seeks to ask: What ancestors do members of the United States have, and what stories do they bring? Ancestors cannot vote or have direct representation in forms of government, but they can help to guide voting and sociopolitical beliefs and practices. The practice of listening to ancestors would entail something like a critical piety, acknowledging the presence of ancestors, listening to their voices, but not uncritically following them.19 Ancestors are no more or less trustworthy than some of the living who would attempt to wield power by feigning to speak on their behalf, thereby legitimating all kinds of harm. I am suggesting that those who would bring the voices and stories of the ancestors to public debate and conversation should be treated no differently than any other person, religious or nonreligious. All perspectives initially welcomed, none initially privileged. No voice—including the one speaking on behalf of the ancestors—is treated as a special case. This, then, is an example of the manner and ethos for how a democracy like the U.S. can potentially include the active presence of ancestors, whether those ancestors be Indigenous, African, European, Asian, and so on. It is a way to host a truly intergenerational, democratic dialogue that could address, among other things, settler colonialism in the past, present, and future of the United States. Perhaps we would hear the voice of settler ancestors who would acknowledge what Kyle Whyte has called their fantasy: the expansion of U.S. territory and the concomitant elimination—culturally, politically, and physically—of Native Americans. It is of the utmost importance for a nation to acknowledge all of its ancestors, even those who have perpetuated racial oppression and violence. Acknowledging them would entail witnessing, grieving, and taking actions that seek to address the cruel harm caused by these ancestors. Of course, a nation must also recognize and honor those ancestors who courageously opposed such historic harms as the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Some European ancestors would no doubt be among these courageous ancestors. However, it would be especially important for the United States to listen to and honor the voices of Indigenous ancestors who suffered from and resisted violent settler colonialism. One cannot assume, of course, that Indigenous ancestors would choose to participate in a U.S. intergenerational, democratic dialogue. But if some did, one might hear, among other things, the stories of Indigenous ancestral dystopia, the exploitation and elimination of their peoples and lands. Perhaps one would hear of their Indigenous fantasies, too: dwelling in a land where they experience political and cultural sovereignty, which includes the ability to exercise care for and accountability to the more-than-human. If we can hear or imagine the voices of future descendants in dialogue with past ancestors and present descendants, such an intergenerational dialogue could bring visions of potential future dystopias but also of ethical change based on the reception of past, present, and future voices. The ancestral voices of the once enslaved, among others, could be prominent in such an intergenerational dialogue. It may be part of a modest step toward Black and Native American reparations, and toward “the radical innovation that decolonisation demands,” for example, the return of land.20 In spiritual democracy, being receptive to ancestors must entail witnessing, grieving, and taking specific actions that would endeavor to respond to the ruinous, unjust deeds of the past. To be receptive to ancestors is to witness the past, to listen to the future, and then to co-create (or be interwoven in) a different kind of world. 6. The More-than-Human Informing Spiritual Democracy Thus far, I have mainly discussed “the entire community” in terms of humans and ancestors. Yet spiritual democracy advocates receptivity to not only human communities and ancestors but also to the more-than-human. Insofar as the seemingly powerless and voiceless—among humans and the more-than-human—are excluded from democratic regard and care, a democracy neglects its responsibility to include and consider the entire community. Just as co-creating a new future with the ancestors requires receptivity to them, opening ourselves to them and their stories, so too with the various presences of the more-than-human. What might it mean to truly listen to the stories of the more-than-human, to be receptive to them, and in turn to co-create with them? Leslie Silko’s work depicts the profound struggle and resilience of Indigenous peoples as they work to establish home and belonging under conditions of displacement and loss of sovereignty. And that struggle and resilience is supported by engagement with, and assistance from, the more-than-human. Silko presents an Indigenous perspective of the palpable, powerful otherness and agency of the more-than-human: “otherness,” because the more-than-human are distinctive presences and forces that cannot be reduced to anthropocentric needs, wishes, or projections; and “agency,” because more-than-human beings and forces purposefully inhabit and shape the world in both individual and interdependent ways. Although “other,” these non-human agents interact with humans, often intimately, and some even have kinship relationships with human communities. This attention to the more-than-human intersects with—though is by no means reducible to—distinct but related strands of Euro-American ecological and political theory, from Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory to Donna Haraway’s sympoietic multispecies ethics and Timothy Morton’s ecological mesh.21 These perspectives have powerfully challenged human-centered accounts of political life.22 Spiritual democracy is informed by these authors’ emphasis on relational entanglement, even as it seeks to locate such entanglement within an explicitly democratic, sociohistorical, and ancestral orientation. In this shared conceptual terrain, there is an overlapping intuition: a democracy that is inattentive to non-human presences impoverishes its own ethical and political imagination.23 If we are to be co-creators, fostering just transitions and seeking justice and caring relations with the more-than-human, then democracies need to be open and receptive to the powerful otherness and agency of the more-than-human. While it is humans that are accountable to justice and goodness, the scope and reach of justice and goodness extend beyond the human. Spiritual democracy seeks to cultivate a caring attentiveness to the webs of life in which we are embedded; without this lens of attentiveness, humans remain oblivious to the intricate more-than-human life and agency all around us—that of trees and plants, animals and fish, rivers, and mountains. We move through the world seeking control and domination over that which we deem as dead and inert and without agency. All the while, as we ravage and exploit the more-than-human, we trash the earth and its atmosphere for gains so short-term that their span of time can be measured by a single ancient tree. Spiritual democracy, then, seeks to cultivate a creative attentiveness to the ways of the more-than-human, including them in democratic deliberation, institutions, affect, and practice. We must learn to listen even to the stones, for stones have much to teach us. The non-human agency of stones challenges the human illusion that we are at the center of all things, sovereign and independent, forever dominating and controlling. If we can learn to listen to stones, we may be able to hear much else as well. Stones and ancestors, on this account, are among the members and teachers of a spiritual democracy. From the start, democratic life has required more than procedures, elections, and formal rights. It entails cultural, affective, and relational practices that enable people to listen across differences, to tend to the places and histories that are shared, and to respond to the harms that too often go unseen. Spiritual democracy names one such orientation, namely, a democratic way of life that highlights interdependence, ecological embeddedness, and ancestral presence. It does not lay down one moral framework or claim that one version of the good life should dominate all others. Rather, it points toward a more capacious democratic culture—one grounded in our ties to one another, to place, and to the wider living world. In this article, I have proposed spiritual democracy as a cultural practice and way of perceiving democratic life that can help sustain democratic life in the face of ecological crisis, resurgent authoritarianism, and the fragility of democratic achievements. By employing democratic second nature, by revisiting Whitman’s account of democratic vision and culture, and by honoring the roles of hope, wildness, ancestors, and the more-than-human, I have tried to show how the orientation of spiritual democracy can nourish democratic life. If democracies are to endure—and to become more just—they will require not only institutional offices and protections but also vibrant aesthetic and cultural forms and practices centered on reciprocity, critique, care, and relational flourishing. Spiritual democracy, in this sense, helps sustain the cultural ground on which democratic life depends. These reflections return us to the lived conditions in which democracies are threatened each day. Justifiably, there is great distress about reactionary movements and forms of culture that are fostering fascism, oligarchy, and other anti-democratic energies in the United States and around the globe. Against these, we need to generate not only arguments but opposing movements and forms of culture: ways of being, feeling, thinking, listening, attending, caring, mobilizing—the modes of attention and action that mark spiritual democracy. A challenge, however, is that those on the left, those committed to progressive democracy, tend to be suspicious of anything like spiritual democracy. They are commonly skeptical about all forms—even progressive forms—of Gemeinschaft, that is, shared ways of being and belonging, cultivated dispositions and practices, public rites and ceremonies. Yet if we could resist the impulse to relegate all forms of Gemeinschaft to a bygone era—or to the exclusionary politics of the Right—and stop treating it as an outlier within modernity itself, then perhaps we would find ourselves less troubled by the very notion of spiritual democracy. That is, we might be more open to those integrative modes of knowing and being—wisdom and practice, affect and gratitude, reciprocity and care—that move through the “we” and the “I” of democratic interwovenness. Here, the “we” is a capacious collective that includes the marginalized, the ancestral, and the more-than-human; and the “I” is an expansive self, formed through relation and open to difference and the ongoing reciprocity of selves and world. If we can be open to spiritual democracy, we may find ways to turn some of our fears into shared sources of hope and action. Published on August 8, 2026 * Mark Cladis is Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University * 1. Kyle P. Whyte, “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1:1–2 (2018): 224–242.↩ 2. Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” in Thoreau: Walden, The Maine Woods, Collected Essays and Poems, ed. Robert Sayre and Elizabeth Witherell (New York: Library of America, 2007), 739.↩ 3. The ever-changing nature of spiritual democracy’s second nature suggests that we pluralize “nature” and refer to “second natures,” or perhaps better still, refer to second nature, third nature, fourth nature, and so on. I am grateful to Bonnie Honig for this suggestion—and for so much more.↩ 4. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Free Press, 1997).↩ 5. See, Mark Cladis, Radical Romanticism: Democracy, Religion, and the Environmental Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2025); and Mark Cladis, “Religion, Secularism, and Democratic Culture,” The Good Society: The Journal of Political Economy of the Good Society 19:2 (2010): 22–39.↩ 6. Anthea Butler, “Nationalism, Race, and the End of Democracy” (lecture, Brown University, Providence, December 4, 2024).↩ 7. Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” in Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 977.↩ 8. Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 941.↩ 9. Think of these not as rigid historical stages but rather as aspects of a democracy that mutually develop and reinforce each other.↩ 10. Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” 956; emphasis added.↩ 11. For more on Du Bois on hope, see Mark Cladis, “Du Bois and Dark, Wild Hope in an Age of Environmental and Political Catastrophe,” European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment 11:2 (2020): 216–24.↩ 12. Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Ian Small, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2:140; Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3–5; and Xine Yao, Disaffected (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 3–5.↩ 13. W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Souls of Black Folk, ed. Brent Hayes Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 191; emphasis added.↩ 14. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 202.↩ 15. Kyle P. Whyte, “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene,” 224–42.↩ 16. Kyle P. Whyte, “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene,” 229.↩ 17. Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead (New York: Penguin, 1992), 603–604.↩ 18. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Penguin, 1986), 2.↩ 19. I associate the term “critical piety” with Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), especially Chapter One, “Character and Piety from Emerson to Dewey,” in which Stout distinguishes between an uncritical piety (unwarranted “deference to a hierarchy of powers,” p. 25) and a critical piety (“a just or appropriate response to the sources of one’s existence and progress through life,” p. 20).↩ 20. Sarah Maddison, “Agonistic Reconciliation: Inclusion, Decolonisation and the Need for Radical Innovation,” Third World Quarterly 43 (2022): 1320.↩ 21. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).↩ 22. Latour, in particular, stresses the need to deconstruct the pernicious dichotomy between nature and society, and then to reconstruct political life such that the collective incorporates humans and nonhumans alike (Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004]).↩ 23. Morton’s account of hyperobjects—entities that are of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they exceed human understanding—illuminates how forces and agencies beyond the human press upon our thinking, and this by extension suggests that a democracy inattentive to non-human presences risks diminishing its capacity for ethical discernment (Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013]).↩ |
