Core liberal democratic institutions have been under attack by politicians around the world since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Many rulers seek to avoid the constraints of strong legislatures, autonomous judiciaries, independent media, and well-established opposition parties.Footnote ¹ Scholars and policymakers often project fatalism in describing the unchecked rise of illiberal regimes.Footnote ²

But liberal democracy has some brave advocates. Consider the case of one Zambian organization that repeatedly stood up to President Edgar Lungu’s attacks on liberal democratic institutions between 2015 and 2021. When the government introduced a bill to reduce the power of the legislature, this organization educated members of parliament about the bill’s implications. When the administration shuttered independent newspapers and TV and radio stations, it spoke out against the closures. When the police arrested the main opposition leader on charges of treason and threw him in jail for four months, it mobilized popular opinion against the arrest and facilitated talks between the president and the opposition leader that led to the latter’s release. This organization did not mince words in its advocacy against the attacks on liberal democracy, pointing out to Zambians, “Our country is now all, except in designation, a dictatorship and if it is not yet, then we are not far from it.”Footnote ³

Which organization took this bold stance? Popular accounts often emphasize the role of young activists and novel social movements in defending democracy.Footnote ⁴ Scholars of democracy tend to give special attention either to representatives of the working class, such as trade unions, or capitalist interest groups, including business associations.Footnote ⁵ But the organization that spoke up so forcefully in response to the attacks on liberal institutions was none of these. Interestingly, it was the Zambia Conference of Catholic Bishops that did this work, sometimes acting alone and sometimes acting in partnership with other church groups.

From many perspectives, this activism by the Zambian Catholic bishops is puzzling. Why would an organization that is primarily focused on saving souls stick its neck out in defense of liberal democratic institutions? Why would a religious group support democratic processes that empower men to decide laws when their own religious texts are believed to provide the foundation of governance? Church leaders may seem more likely to align with autocrats who promise them religious monopolies than to embrace liberal democratic institutions that promote the individuals’ right to oppose authority.

And certainly, for every example of a church standing up for liberal democratic institutions in the contemporary period, as in Zambia, there are multiple examples of churches remaining silent or even explicitly supporting rulers’ attacks on liberal democracy. For instance, on the same continent, the Catholic Church in Benin failed to speak out forcefully in the face of democratic backsliding after President Patrice Talon took power in 2016. The Catholic bishops there did not comment on the political manipulations that prevented any opposition party from contesting the 2019 legislative elections and only issued calls to stop the violence and find a peaceful solution when angry citizens took to the streets after the elections to protest their illegitimacy.Footnote ⁶ Similarly, the historically influential Lutheran churches in Namibia have not spoken up in support of liberal democratic checks on the ruling party’s power in the postindependence period. They were notably silent when the country’s constitution was changed to allow President Sam Nujoma a third term in 1997.Footnote ⁷ The leaders of the largest Lutheran church even released a pastoral letter in 2007 attacking local human rights organizations for their efforts to hold Nujoma accountable for past actions against opponents.Footnote ⁸

As a result, an adequate explanation for why some churches engage in advocacy for liberal democratic institutions must also explain why other churches do not. Churches are contingent, rather than inherent, activists for liberal democracy.Footnote ⁹ This book explains the logic of why some churches decide it is in their interest to engage in activism for these institutions.

Many existing theories of religious politics cannot explain this variation since they start from the premise that any political engagement by churches is a detriment to democracy. As a result of their presumed prioritization of religious teachings as a basis for law, churches are often viewed as inherent opponents of democratic institutions, which instead empower citizens to make laws.Footnote ¹⁰ Church political engagement is thought to make democratic compromise on issues more difficult.Footnote ¹¹ Indeed, in nineteenth-century Europe and Latin America, the Catholic Church was one of the main opponents of the introduction of liberal democracy, with Pope Pius IX declaring it an error to think “that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism and modern civilization.”Footnote ¹²

Some recent scholarship indicates that the tension between church goals and liberal democratic institutions may no longer be as stark. Groundbreaking new work documents the importance of internal institutional innovation within the medieval Catholic Church in creating the foundations for the rule of law and representative assemblies.Footnote ¹³ And church views on religious liberty and human rights have evolved in the past century, particularly in the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.Footnote ¹⁴ Research demonstrates that liberal democracy does not as an empirical matter require full separation of church from politics and governance.Footnote ¹⁵ Scholars show that some church leaders have both theological and material motivations for engaging in political activism for human rights, with examples of Catholic or Protestant churches supporting opponents of autocratic regimes in the late twentieth century in settings as diverse as Chile, the Philippines, Poland, and South Korea.Footnote ¹⁶

But existing scholarship generally stops short of offering a positive explanation for varied church advocacy for liberal democracy as opposed to its advocacy for human rights more broadly. Likewise, Christian scriptures contain teachings relevant to human rights but do not contain explicit tenets about the value of democracy as a form of government. As a Nigerian Catholic bishop reminded the audience in a lecture series on the relationship between the church and multiparty democracy in Africa, Jesus did not live in a time or place of democracy.Footnote ¹⁷

We lack an adequate explanation for why some churches engage in advocacy for liberal democratic institutions specifically. Why do some church leaders mobilize around the quality of elections, rulers’ violations of the constitutional limits on their power, and the rights of political opposition, while other church leaders remain silent on these issues or even support these power grabs? With this book, I seek to explain why churches may pursue activism for liberal democracy as a strategy for advancing their more fundamental interest in spreading the teaching of the gospel.

African Churches as Majors Actors in Advocacy for Liberal Democratic Institutions

The Zambian bishops’ campaign described in the opening pages of this chapter is not exceptional. However, to date, we have not had a clear sense of how frequently churches engage in activism for liberal democratic institutions due to an absence of data. Among the tasks I undertake in this book is to show that churches are significant actors in advocacy for liberal democratic institutions and that there are significant differences among them in whether they choose to engage in this kind of activism, with considerable variation both within and across countries. I present new evidence from original data collected across sub-Saharan Africa to highlight the degree to which churches engage in activism for various aspects of liberal democracy. But before turning to the data, I offer some examples that highlight the range of activities in which African churches engaged when they chose to participate in democratic activism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Numerous Catholic and Protestant church leaders in Africa participated in democratization campaigns at the end of the Cold War. For example, high-ranking Kenyan clergymen opposed President Daniel arap Moi’s efforts to further centralize power and spearheaded efforts to protect the secret ballot in elections in the 1980s.Footnote ¹⁸ Leaders within the Kenyan Presbyterian and Anglican churches were the first public voices calling for the introduction of a multiparty system in early 1990, with politicians only subsequently taking this position.Footnote ¹⁹ Similarly, churches in Malawi set off that country’s transition from one-party rule when the Catholic Church released a critical Lenten letter – read in all parishes in the country – in March 1992, breaking the silence around the country’s political institutions.Footnote ²⁰ Catholic and Presbyterian churches subsequently supported the country’s democratic transition through a coordinated dialogue with opposition groups and the government.Footnote ²¹

Further, and less widely recognized, a considerable number of African churches continue to advocate for liberal democracy in the twenty-first century as elected rulers have sought to eliminate checks on their power. For example, the Burundian Catholic bishops raised early opposition to President Pierre Nkurunziza’s circumvention of the country’s constitutional two-term limit in 2015, releasing a statement in all churches that clarified that the constitution limited the presidency to two terms.Footnote ²² Following the subsequent crackdown on opposition supporters and the independent media, the bishops withdrew church representatives from the electoral commission in protest of the unfair conditions under which the 2015 election was being held.Footnote ²³ In the run-up to the 2018 constitutional referendum that further eliminated checks on the president’s power, the bishops publicly opposed these changes.Footnote ²⁴

Similarly, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Catholic bishops played a key role in protecting checks on the power of the executive as President Joseph Kabila’s second term came to a close. The bishops released multiple public statements opposing constitutional changes that would permit Kabila a third term.Footnote ²⁵ In addition, the bishops convened and mediated a conference to agree on rules that would limit Kabila’s power when the country lapsed into an extra-constitutional period in December 2016, hammering out a deal that stipulated that the existing constitution and electoral laws would govern this period, that a prime minister from the opposition would be appointed during the transitional period, and that numerous political detainees would be released.Footnote ²⁶ When Kabila continued to drag his feet in implementing the details of the accords, the bishops issued a powerful pastoral letter that called on people “to stand up” for their rights “in public spaces” and then legitimated a series of Sunday protests organized by a Catholic association, the Comité Laïc de Coordination (CLC), demanding that elections be held.Footnote ²⁷

In another example, Catholic and Lutheran bishops in Tanzania spoke out against the stifling of liberal democratic rights under President John Magufuli. When numerous opposition party members and political activists in Tanzania were attacked or disappeared, individual church leaders spoke out during Christmas sermons in December 2017. During the Lent and Easter seasons of 2018, Catholic and Lutheran churches alike issued collective pastoral letters against this suppression of democratic principles.Footnote ²⁸

Turning again to Zambia, Catholic and Protestant churches there successfully helped to defend that country’s democratic institutions multiple times in the twenty-first century. When President Frederick Chiluba announced that he would consider a bid for a third term in 2001, the umbrella bodies of the major churches, including the Zambia Episcopal Conference (representing the Catholic Church), the Christian Council of Zambia (CCZ, representing mainline Protestant churches), and the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia (EFZ, representing many evangelical churches), joined forces through the Oasis Forum to provide public education in support of term limits, organize peaceful demonstrations against a third term, and coordinate with anti-third term politicians inside the governing party.Footnote ²⁹ When President Edgar Lungu introduced a constitutional amendment in 2019 that proposed reducing the power of the legislature and the judiciary to check the president, these organizations again engaged in civic education against the bill and participated in lobbying efforts directed at parliamentarians, helping to ensure enough votes to defeat the bill.Footnote ³⁰

The success of these church campaigns for liberal democratic institutions varied from case to case but in all instances, rulers viewed the threat as sufficiently large to merit venomous responses. Ruling party leaders accused the Zambian bishops of spreading misinformation, Tanzanian authorities threatened Catholic and Lutheran religious leaders with travel bans and legal action if they did not walk back their criticism, violent mobs attacked Catholic clergy and property in the wake of the Catholic bishop’s mediation efforts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the ruling party in Burundi called for bishops to be defrocked following their statements in support of opposition rights.Footnote ³¹

Of course, for every example of a church speaking out in favor of political liberties and democratic institutions, there are multiple instances of them failing to act. The anecdotes above provide examples of how churches have mobilized in support of liberal democratic institutions, but they do not provide a full assessment of the extent to which churches are major actors in advocacy for liberal democracy in sub-Saharan Africa. To consider this, I collected original data on activism for liberal democratic institutions by churches as compared to other civil society advocates in sub-Saharan Africa, including though a systematic review of newspaper reports. My data collection effort is described in detail in Chapter 4.

In Figure 1.1, I use this original data set to compare church activism to trade union activism given the acknowledged importance of trade unions in democratic mobilization in existing cross-national and regional literature.Footnote ³² I collected this data from two distinct periods for the thirty-four countries on the continent with significant Christian populations.Footnote ³³ The first is from 1988 to 1998, which represents the wave in which multiparty elections were introduced across sub-Saharan Africa around the end of the Cold War. The second is from 2009 to 2018, which was a period of presidential power grabs and executive aggrandizement.Footnote ³⁴ The data codes churches and trade union federations as engaging in advocacy for liberal democratic institutions if they made a public statement demanding improvements in the quality of elections, checks on the power of the executive, or the rights of the political opposition. I then aggregated the data to the country level to account for the varied number of trade union federations and churches in each country; the data in the graph measures whether each country experienced any activism by trade union federations or churches in the decades under consideration.

Figure 1.1 Proportion of countries with union or church activism for liberal democracy

Note: Bar graphs indicate proportion of countries in which at least one union or church in the country advocated for liberal democracy in each decade.

Source: Baldwin Reference Baldwin2025a.

Figure 1.1Long description

For union activism, during the 1988–1998 period, approximately 55% of countries exhibited union activism.This proportion decreased slightly to 50% in the 2009–2018 period. For church activism, in the 1988–1998 period, around 59% of countries experienced church activism. This proportion increased to around 71% in the 2009–2018 period.

As Figure 1.1 illustrates, trade unions have often been involved in advocacy for liberal democratic institutions, with at least one trade union federation engaging in democratic advocacy in 55 percent of countries between 1988 and 1998 and in 50 percent of countries between 2009 and 2018. Churches have been even more frequent advocates for liberal democracy, with at least one church engaging in democratic activism in 59 percent of countries in the earlier period and in 71 percent of countries in the later one. In the earlier decade, countries were about equally likely to experience church versus union activism for democracy, but in the later period, they were almost 50 percent more likely to experience church activism. The figure also demonstrates variation across countries in whether churches engaged in activism for liberal democracy; there is no church advocacy in 41 percent of countries in the first period and in 29 percent of countries in the second.

In this book, I focus on advocacy for liberal democratic institutions, which is a more demanding concept than electoral or majoritarian democracy because it encompasses both quality elections and institutions that limit the power of elected rulers. In the past four decades, most countries in sub-Saharan Africa have institutionalized elections that formally permit political competition as a means of selecting leaders. Far fewer have established institutional checks and legal limits on the power of executive rulers.Footnote ³⁵ Elected rulers frequently wield unchecked power due to weak legislatures, captured judiciaries, censored media, and hobbled opposition parties. The issue is not primarily one of presidential versus parliamentary constitutional designs, but rather one of weak institutional and legal restraints on presidents and prime ministers alike. Liberal democratic institutions remain weak across sub-Saharan Africa.

Figure 1.2 breaks down church advocacy between 2009 and 2018 by whether it was for free and fair elections (including the independence of the electoral commission and the fairness of election rules); checks on the ruler’s power (including the existence of presidential term limits, the protection of legislative powers, and the independence of the judiciary); or the right to express nonviolent opposition to the ruler (including the right to peaceful protest, freedom of the media, and the issue of political prisoners). Church advocacy for free and fair elections is the most common form of democratic advocacy, occurring in 59 percent of countries. But churches also frequently advocate for checks on the power of the president, occurring in 32 percent of countries, and for the rights of opponents of the ruler to express and organize dissent, occurring in 44 percent of countries. Thus, some churches in sub-Saharan Africa have advocated for both free and fair elections and liberal democratic institutions that restrain the power of elected rulers.

Figure 1.2 Proportion of countries with church activism for aspects of liberal democracy

Note: Bar graphs indicate proportion of countries in which at least one church in the country advocated for aspect of liberal democracy between 2009 and 2018.

Source: Baldwin Reference Baldwin2025a.

In conceptualizing liberal democracy, I focus narrowly on its core political institutions. In my usage, liberal democratic political institutions are not synonymous with American presidential democracy, capitalist market systems, or a philosophical commitment to individual choice in the pursuit of happiness.Footnote ³⁶ A political system is more liberal democratic to the extent that the ruler’s power is limited by elections, institutions, and legally enforceable rights for political opponents.

Similarly, I describe churches as engaging in liberal democratic advocacy when they engage in activism for free and fair elections, institutional limits on the power of rulers, or the legal rights of the ruler’s opponents. In measuring advocacy for liberal democracy, I exclude activism for closely associated liberal ideas that some churches have a more direct interest in promoting, such as religious freedom and property rights.Footnote ³⁷ I also exclude activism for individual liberties that churches frequently oppose, including those related to sexual orientation and gender equality. When I say that a church is an advocate for liberal democracy, I mean only that it has engaged in activism for institutions that ensure limits on elected rulers’ power, not that it espouses liberal views that promote individual liberty in all spheres of life. Indeed, church advocacy for liberal democratic institutions in sub-Saharan Africa is a puzzle worth explaining precisely because most of the churches that have become advocates for them are not otherwise liberal in their views.

Liberal Democracy as an Institutional Guarantee of Church Autonomy

Why do some churches engage in activism for liberal democratic institutions? The existing literature on democracy provides limited guidance in explaining this phenomenon. Scholars of democracy have extensively debated which group is more important in driving democratization – the lower class, the middle class, or regime insiders – providing theoretical explanations for these actors’ positions on expanding the franchise and increasing political competition.Footnote ³⁸ But even if the involvement of churches in democratic movements is sometimes descriptively acknowledged by this literature, it is rarely explained.Footnote ³⁹ In contrast, scholars of religion have provided insight into when churches are more likely to advocate for human rights and to seek changes in government but rarely explain church advocacy for liberal democracy specifically.Footnote ⁴⁰

In seeking to understand the decision to advocate for liberal democracy, I build on the literature on the determinants of liberal democratic political institutions, which is scant compared to the ample literature on the conditions that favor a minimalist version of electoral democracy.Footnote ⁴¹ The potential of liberal democratic institutions is that they provide reinforcing mechanisms for limiting the power of the ruler. Historically, liberal democracy’s limits on the power of rulers were viewed as a means of securing property rights for the economic activities of the industrial class. As a result, it was the rising industrial class that had incentives to advocate for liberal democratic institutions as a means of restraining the grabbing hand of the state.

But unchecked rulers pose threats beyond property expropriation.Footnote ⁴² They can quash a wide variety of activities in pursuit of their political goals. All-powerful rulers are particularly likely to curtail activities that spread dissenting ideas within society, given the threat such ideas present to their political control.Footnote ⁴³

In that way, unchecked rulers pose a threat to churches, which are defined by their commitment to their specific theologies. Religious groups differ from most other organizations in that their boundaries are defined in significant part by members’ beliefs; consequently, their primary goal is to disseminate their associated worldviews. A church of unbelievers is not nearly as desirable as a church of believers. Thus, churches have a core interest in spreading their own ideas and unchecked rulers pose a threat to them insofar as they may restrict churches from disseminating their beliefs.Footnote ⁴⁴

Historically, churches around the world have tried to spread their worldviews through alliances with rulers committed to the same religious views, which I call a coalitional strategy.Footnote ⁴⁵ Under this strategy, churches offer political support for a party in return for policy concessions. For example, in nineteenth-century Europe, the Catholic Church sought conservative allies who opposed the secularization of the state that had been proposed by liberal parties.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the mid twentieth century, European churches sought alliances with various Christian democratic parties that supported key policy goals.Footnote ⁴⁷ In the United States, evangelical leaders have had a coalitional alliance with the Republican Party since the 1970s with goals including securing tax breaks for Christian institutions and rolling back abortion rights.Footnote ⁴⁸ This type of alliance is not risk free, as politicians may defect on promises to churches in their efforts to win the popular vote and church reputations may be muddied by their involvement in politics.Footnote ⁴⁹ But a coalitional strategy is a conceivable option where potential partisan allies exist.

Nevertheless, these sorts of alliances are difficult to find in the contemporary world and in postindependence Africa in particular. This book moves beyond the scope conditions of previous scholarship by illuminating the strategies churches employ when they cannot count on partisan allies. Specific historical legacies have limited the incentives of rulers to tie themselves to specific denominational churches in sub-Saharan Africa, even if these rulers sometimes invoke religious imagery to legitimize their personal power. Countries with significant Christian populations are all denominationally or religiously diverse so that an alliance with one specific church could easily alienate a majority of voters. In addition, most churches were headed by foreign leaders at the moment of national independence, which made political alliances with them unpalatable to politicians at the time.

As a result, postindependence politicians in sub-Saharan Africa generally avoid founding religiously oriented parties and African churches do not enjoy credible partisan allies. Church interests cannot be secured by bolstering the power of one political faction over another. The major risk to churches is that autocratic institutions will allow unchecked rulers to use state power to impinge on the spread of ideas within society, including church efforts to teach their worldviews.

In this context, liberal democracy offers a means of protection for churches. Churches can use institutional and legal restraints on the power of rulers to ensure that all-powerful rulers do not use the state apparatus to limit the dissemination of church beliefs. Independent-minded legislators, autonomous judges, and legal limits on the power of rulers provide churches with protection against excessive state intervention, even in the absence of partisan coalition partners. Liberal democracy is a means of preventing state suppression of their freedom to share the messages of the gospel. Counter to conventional wisdom that churches are a threat to democracy due to their strong commitment to specific beliefs, the protection liberal democracy affords can give churches the motivation to defend it. The importance of ideas to the fundamental mission of churches provides an interest-based explanation for their activism.Footnote ⁵⁰

Thus, churches may become advocates for liberal democracy as a means of securing limited governmental intervention in the activities they undertake to spread their worldviews.Footnote ⁵¹ Why do they need to accept liberal democracy as a means of securing limited government interference? There are inherent analytic and contingent historic reasons for doing so. Analytically, limited government is difficult to achieve without democracy because the lack of turnover in autocratic regimes makes it easier for rulers to centralize power and eliminate dissent.Footnote ⁵² In contrast, liberal democracy can be self-enforcing because it gives multiple actors the ability to criticize and restrain the centralization of power.Footnote ⁵³ Historically, liberal democracy has come to denote a specific bundle of institutions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with international advocacy networks forming in support of this type of government over the past fifty years.Footnote ⁵⁴ As a result, churches can mobilize broader groups in support of liberal democracy than they can for other forms of limited government.

Of course, there is great variation in whether churches speak out in defense of liberal democracy. Although most churches could be said to have an interest in freedom of expression insofar as they are in the business of advancing their worldviews, church gospel-spreading activities are differently at risk of crackdown by autocrats based on the spheres in which these activities take place. Depending on the activities through which churches spread the gospel, they are more or less likely to have their instruction impinged on by autocrats intent on centralizing power and eliminating dissent. As a result, churches are exposed to different levels of autocratic risk, defined as the risk that an institutionally uninhibited ruler could shut down the dissemination channels in which a church has invested.

For example, even under highly illiberal regimes, Sunday worship within congregations is rarely at risk of being shut down. Catholic and mainline Protestant churches that rely on services in houses of worship to spread their worldviews have limited risk of having that mode of instruction suppressed under an illiberal regime.Footnote ⁵⁵ Such regimes are much more likely to assert control over church social service activities; rulers have the regulatory tools to do so and greater incentive to take control of these activities because they are also considered state responsibilities. As such, church-run media, health care clinics, and charity work are all subject to greater autocratic risk than congregational worship. Church education systems are particularly at risk of having their autonomy quashed by unchecked rulers, as I elaborate in the next section.

My argument emphasizes the historic investment of churches in different modes of disseminating their worldviews to explain variation in church democratic activism. In making this claim, I emphasize path dependencies in investments in activities that give their historic decisions influence over contemporary outcomes. There is institutional stickiness in the types of activities in which churches are interested in engaging. Over time, churches develop specialized staff, bureaucracies, and clientele around particular activities, entrenching their interests in them. As a result, churches that have historically invested in activities that are subject to higher autocratic risk cannot quickly shift away from them; to protect them, they may advocate for liberal democracy.

My argument highlights the varied regulatory power of the state over different church activities and how this variation explains church activism for liberal democratic institutions. But states can also exert financial influence over church activities, and this plays a secondary role in helping to explain church activism for liberal democracy. Churches may depend on the state to provide operational financing for activities. In some contexts, states provide direct transfers to churches that can be used to support all their operational activities. In a wider range of contexts, states subsidize particular activities, such as church-provided social services and education. Churches whose activities depend on government subsidies will weigh the cost of reduced financial support against any benefits gained from mobilizing in defense of liberal democracy in deciding whether to speak out. For example, there is little benefit in advocating for democracy in an effort to defend the medium-term autonomy of an activity if that activity can be shut down instantly through withdrawal of the state subsidies on which it depends.Footnote ⁵⁶

Thus, the theory’s main hypothesis is that churches that have historically invested in dissemination modes over which the state has greater regulatory power have greater autocratic risk exposure. These churches are more likely to engage in liberal democratic activism to protect these activities from overreach by an unchecked ruler. A second hypothesis is that state financing of activities can mitigate the incentive to speak out in support of liberal democratic institutions.

Operationalizing the Theoretical Variation: Church Education Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa

In the context of sub-Saharan Africa, I gain traction on church autocratic risk exposure and dependence on state subsidies by narrowing my focus to one important sphere of activity: church education systems. Historically, education has been the main point of contestation between church and state.Footnote ⁵⁷ Churches provided a huge portion of formal education in colonial Africa, as Chapter 3 details. In the newly independent, economically poor, and administratively weak states of postcolonial Africa, most rulers had a great deal of interest in and some capacity to control the formal education system, but limited interest in and low capacity to regulate church congregations.

Church education systems are at particular risk of having their autonomy stifled by unchecked rulers. Many churches place high value on providing formal education to young people because they want to shape the worldviews of the next generation. Political rulers are also interested in the content of education for young people for overlapping reasons. For at least the past 100 years, state authorities have viewed education as legitimately within their purview due to both the economic salience of it and its capacity to inculcate particular belief and value systems.Footnote ⁵⁸ As a result, church education systems have often been the focus of conflict between church and state.Footnote ⁵⁹ Rulers have greater interest in and more tools for controlling church education than most of the other activities undertaken by churches. As a result, churches that are more engaged in running schools have greater exposure to autocratic risk than those that have smaller educational investments. Without institutional constraints, rulers will typically try to increase their control over instruction in church schools for reasons I elaborate in Chapters 2 and 3.

In addition, in sub-Saharan Africa, state subsidies for church educational systems are the most consistent financial transfer between the state and churches. States in sub-Saharan Africa provide minimal financial support for church operational activities outside of social services.Footnote ⁶⁰ As a result, in this context, I can capture the greatest sources of variation in autocratic risk exposure and dependence on state subsidies by narrowing my focus to church educational activities.

It is well known that early missionaries in Africa used “the school as the nucleus to church planting.”Footnote ⁶¹ What is less appreciated is the high level of their continued involvement in education in many countries. For example, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Lesotho, Rwanda, and Uganda, the majority of primary schools are still church affiliated. Even in countries such as Tanzania and Zambia, where governments fully nationalized most former mission schools, churches still run a sizable portion of the country’s secondary schools due to gaps in the government’s ability to fulfill the demand for them. Furthermore, in countries where older churches founded schools in the colonial era, newer churches sometimes establish education wings because of local expectations that education provision is a church matter.Footnote ⁶² As Chapter 3 demonstrates, there is considerable variation across countries and within denominations in how much education churches provide.

Applying my theoretical argument to the educational sphere leads to the following predictions. Other things being equal, education provision tends to increase the benefits of liberal democracy to churches. Churches with higher numbers of schools are more exposed to autocratic risk because rulers introduce regulations that restrict church school autonomy more frequently than they do regulations that restrict worship in congregations. Liberal democratic institutions support mission-critical activities for education-providing churches.

But there is another aspect of church educational systems that also influences the likelihood of a church engaging in democratic activism: financing. In some cases, parents are the main source of church school operational financing while in other cases, it is the state. Church school financing varies by country and within countries over time due to strategic and exogenous factors. Churches whose schools depend on state subsidies will weigh the cost of reduced financial support against any benefits of mobilizing to oppose autocracy in deciding whether to speak out. As a result, churches with fiscally independent schools are the most likely to speak out against autocracy as a means of protecting their autonomy over the education they provide, while churches without significant involvement in schooling and churches with schools that are fiscally dependent on the state are less likely to do so.

In providing evidence for this argument, I show that these two aspects of church education systems explain variation in church leaders’ democratic activism across countries in sub-Saharan Africa. They explain cross-national variation in activism across churches that have similar political theologies or that may even belong to the same global church, as in the case of Catholic churches. It is true that Catholic churches tend to provide more education and to advocate for democracy more frequently than other churches, but the characteristics of church education systems explain variation in democratic activism by Catholic churches across countries that is otherwise difficult to explicate.Footnote ⁶³ Differences in church education systems also explain differences in democratic activism between churches that otherwise have similar membership sizes and organizational capacity.

My argument applies most directly to older, institutionalized churches. Institutionalized churches have historic commitments to sets of teachings and governance structures that set church direction. As a result, they can be seen as having institutional goals beyond the personal aspirations of founding leaders. This is an important scope condition because my theory implies that churches act on institutional interests distinct from the interests of individual church leaders. In contrast, in newer, less institutionalized churches, church leaders are less constrained in bending church teachings to serve the interests of political rulers and as such, they are more likely to be co-opted. The theory thus explains the behavior of Catholic and mainline Protestant churches, as well as some older independent and Pentecostal churches, but does not as easily apply to new (mainly neo-Pentecostal) churches that have been founded in recent decades.

My argument is also temporally bounded in that it assumes an environment in which churches can mobilize broader coalitions in support of liberal democratic institutions than in support of policy positions that are important to them. As a result, my findings apply most easily to the past four or five decades, a time in which key international actors and networks have supported liberal democracy.Footnote ⁶⁴

Throughout this book, I focus on variation in Christian church involvement in formal education provision in sub-Saharan Africa. Islamic educational centers have also historically played a significant role in many countries but have had distinct relationships with the state. Islamic schools were rarely subsidized by colonial administrations. States have only very recently begun to formally incorporate them into their education systems in large numbers, and there is little variation across countries in their dependence on state subsidies.Footnote ⁶⁵ As a result, although pioneering research on these schools suggests that their founders share the concerns I elaborate about defending educational autonomy, Islamic education systems do not vary on the same dimensions as Christian church education systems.Footnote ⁶⁶ In addition, the lack of hierarchy within many Islamic communities in sub-Saharan Africa hinders national-level advocacy and allows for state-imposed and co-opted national-level Islamic organizations.Footnote ⁶⁷ Importantly, the exclusion of Islamic communities from the scope of this study is not the result of presumptions about the theological compatibility of Islam with liberal democracy; on the contrary, existing empirical research demonstrates high levels of support for democratic institutions among Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa.Footnote ⁶⁸

Contributions

With this book, I aspire to bring the study of church democratic activism into conversation with the broader comparative literature on the forces behind democratic and autocratic transitions. The literature on democratization fiercely debates whether regime insiders, the middle class, or the lower class are the main forces behind it. Only rarely do comparative scholars of democratization note that churches have become advocates for democracy in some recent contexts, emphasizing the change in Catholic political theology after the Second Vatican Council as crucial.Footnote ⁶⁹ This book provides a framework for understanding the contexts in which religious versus economic actors are likely to play leading roles.

In a largely separate literature on religion and politics, scholars seek to explain instances in which churches engage in broader forms of human rights activism, often emphasizing theology or religious competition as the key explanatory factor, but they do not theorize why churches engage in activism for liberal democratic institutions as a distinct outcome.Footnote ⁷⁰ Liberal democracy is different from other human rights, which often have clearer links to Christian theology and the messages of the gospel.Footnote ⁷¹ As a result, church positions on liberal democracy are likely to be highly instrumental and potentially driven by different considerations than its advocacy for other human rights. I provide a positive explanation for why churches may engage in activism for liberal democracy distinct from activism for human rights more broadly. This explanation emphasizes that the various activities of churches expose them to different levels of autocratic risk, thereby accounting for differences in activism among churches with the same theological commitments.

This book contributes to a growing literature that focuses on understanding the political consequences of service provision by nonstate actors, including churches and other religious actors.Footnote ⁷² Recent research demonstrates the implications of nonstate service provision for how citizens evaluate different political parties, candidates, and the government more generally.Footnote ⁷³ My work focuses instead on how nonstate service provision affects democracy and political institutions. Churches with educational investments care more about liberal democratic institutions and engage more in democratic activism because their activities are more exposed to autocratic risk.

This book also advances the understanding of religious politics in sub-Saharan Africa, demonstrating how religion in sub-Saharan Africa has political implications even if political parties rarely base their appeals on religious ideologies or win support from religious coalitions. Interestingly, social scientists have engaged very little in thinking about religious politics on the continent.Footnote ⁷⁴ The limited study of this phenomena is remarkable, especially when juxtaposed with the extraordinarily vast literature on ethnic politics in sub-Saharan Africa. My work demonstrates that many religious actors in sub-Saharan Africa do engage in political debates at critical moments and that their actions have political consequences. Precisely because they lack coalitional allies, some churches in sub-Saharan Africa advocate for liberal democratic institutions to guarantee their interests.

Plan of the Book

Empirically, the book is an example of mixed methods research, with different methods and research designs employed to understand different components of the relationship between church education systems and democratic activism. The main predictions about the relationship between education provision and democratic activism are best tested at the mesolevel and as such, I examine patterns across all significant-sized churches in sub-Saharan Africa.Footnote ⁷⁵

But many of the claims underpinning the theory are more naturally examined using within-case evidence, including process tracing of church influence on policymaking over time within countries, experimental analysis of the effects of church statements about democracy on citizens’ behavior, and cohort analysis of the effects of church education systems on citizens’ beliefs. For this analysis, I employ within-country studies, drawing on evidence from Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia. In each of the empirical chapters, I pair the main case of Zambia with a more religiously diverse second country to understand the scope conditions of the theory, with Christians making up 85 percent of the population in Zambia, 71 percent of the population in Ghana, and 55 percent of the population in Tanzania.Footnote ⁷⁶

In all three countries, churches ran the majority of schools at the time of independence, but their subsequent educational provision varies, with the highest contribution across time and churches in Ghana, varied contribution across both aspects in Zambia, and the lowest contribution in Tanzania. The cases of Zambia and Ghana offer possibilities for understanding how within-country changes in political institutions influence church policy given the significant over-time variation in the level of liberal democracy within each country. The cases of Zambia and Tanzania provide unique opportunities to trace whether and how church democratic advocacy mobilizes other actors given recent examples of churches speaking out in defense of liberal democratic institutions.

To understand all facets of the relationship between church democratic activism and education systems, I draw on an extremely wide variety of evidence. The research for this book involved more than seventy-five interviews; the implementation of original public opinion surveys in Zambia and Tanzania, including endorsement experiments designed to measure the efficacy of church democratic activism; and the construction of three original data sets on church education systems and church activism for liberal democracy covering up to thirty-four countries in sub-Saharan Africa over time.Footnote ⁷⁷ Additionally, I have reviewed hundreds of historical educational documents, read more than 150 pastoral letters from church leaders, reviewed thousands of news articles, tracked down obscure publications related to education policy and church schools, and analyzed a variety of existing data sources.

The book is divided into four parts. Part I provides the theoretical claims and the historical background regarding church educational systems and church advocacy for liberal democracy. Parts II and III empirically test my theoretical claims (see Table 1.1). Using data sets at the country-church–year level, Part II tests the core hypotheses about when churches engage in democratic activism. Drawing on within-country analysis from Ghana, Tanzania, and Zambia, Part III considers additional assumptions behind and implications of the theory. Part IV considers the broader implications of church education systems and the beliefs they foster for democracy.

Breaking down the chapters that constitute each part of the book, Chapter 2 provides a deeper explication of the theory. It explains how liberal democratic institutions provide a solution to the problem that rulers cannot otherwise credibly commit to preserving church control of their schools. As a result, churches with significant education systems have an incentive to speak out in support of liberal democratic institutions, although this incentive is mitigated when their schools are fiscally dependent on the government to operate. Chapter 3 concludes Part I by providing a brief history of church–state relations and church education provision in sub-Saharan Africa.

Part II empirically tests the main theoretical predictions about the effects of church education systems on church democratic activism. Chapter 4 draws on original data on church activism for liberal democracy and church education systems to demonstrate that churches with more schools are more likely to speak out in support of liberal democratic institutions across sub-Saharan Africa, independent of country-level or denominational trends, but the effects are mitigated when churches receive large public subsidies for their schools. Chapter 5 shows that the decisions of Catholic churches to speak out against autocracy depend on their reliance on state fiscal transfers. This chapter draws on a novel data set that measures the annual pro-democracy activism of churches through an examination of their public pastoral letters. An exogenous policy intervention – the introduction of universal primary education policies across sub-Saharan Africa between 1994 and 2008 – shows that churches reduce public advocacy for liberal democratic institutions when their schools become increasingly dependent on government transfers.

Part III draws on within-country evidence to empirically examine underlying assumptions behind the theory’s main predictions. Chapter 6 considers the political effects of church pro-democracy stances, contrasting the effects of church activism in Zambia and Tanzania between 2016 and 2021. Drawing on interviews, survey data, and combined endorsement/conjoint candidate experiments in both countries, I show how churches in Zambia have galvanized international actors, domestic elites, and public opinion in support of liberal democratic institutions while churches in Tanzania have had more limited success. Chapter 7 examines the policy influence of churches when liberal democratic institutions are stronger and weaker. The main analysis focuses on Zambia and Ghana, both of which have undergone numerous periods of democratization and autocratization. It shows how stronger liberal democratic institutions improve the ability of churches to accomplish their educational policy goals in these two countries and, suggestively, across sub-Saharan Africa more generally by giving churches greater influence over policymaking and protecting their agreements with the state.

Part IV considers the broad implications of church education systems and the book’s theoretical claims for democracy. Chapter 8 considers whether church education itself makes a difference to citizens’ democratic attitudes. Parochial schools are often thought to be inferior to public schools in inculcating democratic citizenship. But drawing on evidence from the handover of Catholic primary schools to the Zambian government in the early 1970s, I find limited effects of the handover on students’ political attitudes except that Catholic schools foster more conservative gender norms. In Tanzania, Protestant school attendance improves women’s citizenship on many dimensions compared to secular school attendance, but Catholic school attendance does not. Chapter 9 concludes by discussing the implications of the book for understanding democracy and democratic activism beyond churches in sub-Saharan Africa. It emphasizes that some churches in other regions of the world employ coalitional strategies to advance their interests and, in such cases, their attitudes toward liberal democracy are contingent on whether doing so will advance or hinder the power of their preferred parties. It also shows that some churches rely on liberal democracy as an institutional guarantee of their interests, suggesting that my argument applies to some churches beyond Africa. Last, it explains how the theory can be applied to other types of actors in other regions of the world.