WITH the Olympics over, we can get on with that other ancient Athenian invention, democracy. Election fever in the United States is warming up, stoked this week by the earnest schmaltz of the Republican convention. Iraq teeters on the verge of elections and closer to home the clever money is on a general election next year.

In all of this, the astonishing U-turn in Christian attitudes to democracy deserves to be noted. For 1,900 years of its 2,000-year history the Church opposed democracy, both in its own life and for politics in general. In 1848, a year of popular uprisings in Europe, Pope Pius IX fled Rome in disguise as the forces of democratic revolution swept through the Papal States. It turned him against democracy and it took 40 years before Leo XIII reversed Catholic policy with a grudging acceptance that Catholics might prefer democratic government, so long as they still affirmed Catholic teaching on the divine origin of political authority.

In Protestant Britain, Christian attitudes towards democracy were more complex because of the levelling influence of religious nonconformity which translated belief in the equality of all people before God into commitments to equality before the law and democratic representation in parliament. But even in Britain religious radicals were always a minority. In 1827 the Rev Jabez Bunting, leader of the largest English nonconformist Church, the Wesleyans, resisted democracy in church governance with the comment: “Methodism is as much opposed to democracy as to sin.”

That Christians thought this way about democracy should not cause surprise. Democracy broke with tradition, the Church fought to keep tradition alive. Democracy asserted the authority of the people; the Church asserted the authority of God. Democracy was primarily about the individual; the Church was primarily about community. Democracy required tolerance and pluralism; the Church required faith in the singular truth of Jesus Christ. The surprise is not that Christians resisted democracy until the late 19th century, but that they have since accepted it. Indeed, not only has the modern Church tolerated democracy as one of several legitimate forms of politics, but contemporary Christians speak as if democracy is the only legitimate form of politics, the end of history. Some Christians give only two cheers for democracy, but almost no one reiterates the Church’s historic antipathy to democratic government. Rather, with some justification, Christians want to take credit for the birth of democracy in South Africa, Poland and East Germany. And every time Britons go to the polls hundreds of preachers intone the verity that “it doesn’t matter who you vote for but it is a religious duty to vote”.

Democracy is the best form of government. But if Christians want to contribute to the future of democracy in an age of terrorism, American military supremacy and elections dominated by big money, we had better come up with a far richer Christian rationale for democratic politics than the facile assumption that Christianity and democracy go together like cheese and pickle. There are significant dissonances between the core values of Christian theology and those of democracy. Some of these can be resolved, but this can’t be done if Christians go on turning a blind eye to their anti-democratic history.

The future of democracy does not depend on the approval of the Church, but that doesn’t mean Christian citizens have no role to play. Democratic politics is in danger of losing sight of the truth that freedom and order are not opposites, but sides of the same coin. This is a truth Christians know a lot about. The Church, in turn, risks forgetting that for democracy to guarantee freedom of belief to Christians it must also guarantee the right to hold views at odds with Christian truth. This means that however committed Christian are to participation in democratic politics, some of the differences between Christian and democratic visions of society are never going to be easy to erase.

Stephen Plant is senior tutor at Wesley House and an affiliated lecturer in the University of Cambridge.