Democracy and Puritanism
By Luthfi Assyaukanie
he history of democracy in America is the history of religious people’s endeavor to live properly with their faith and belief. Freedom of religion cannot live in a country like England in the 17th century, where it is only the monarch’s church (Anglican Church) acknowledged as the legal religion. In America, the puritans were free to express their religious doctrines.
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In a book called “God and Gold”, Walter Russell Mead notes that it was precisely out of the Protestant Reformation that today’s modern dynamic society grew. It was the Puritan “failure to establish a permanent theocracy in Britain that enabled British society to take the next step forward.” Similarly, Mead sees signs of the same thing occurring in Islam. “The reformers are unlikely to achieve their ambition to remake the entire religious landscape of the Islamic world.” There are too many rival traditions, deeply rooted in the souls of many pious Muslims. Furthermore, against the reformers’ drive for a more closed and narrow view of Islam, “the Internet is making the great works of Islamic scholarship available to tens of millions of Muslims, including women, who can and will be free to draw their own conclusions about what their faith means and how it should be lived. Theological diversity within Islam seems bound to increase.”
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