Summary Of The Missionary Roots Of Democracy

Ideologies, identities, and ideas are what causes a democracy. This is easily shown in the differing religions, ethnicities, and beliefs found in both modern democracies, and those of the past; democracy was the creation of a group of people who wanted the state to be centered around their idea of how the world should be. This is exemplified in Protestantism and how their ideology has influenced stable democracies and capitalism as written by Woodberry and Weber. An ideas based democracy can also been seen partially in accordance with interests, institutions, global context, which can all be boiled down to a certain set of ideas and beliefs about the world. Looking in depth into the ideas that base different democracies is helping to understand current political climates in different countries. In Woodberry’s “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy,” he lays out the

“Previous quantitative research consistently suggests that countries with more Protestants are more democratic and have more stable democratic transitions (Woodberry pg. 245, 2012).” He then looks closely as to why the conversionary Protestants have been successful and determines it comes down to their ideology, to spread their religion. Woodberry say that they were “a crucial catalyst initiating the development and spread of religious liberty, mass education, mass printing, newspapers, voluntary organizations, most major colonial reforms, and the coordination of legal protections for nonwhites in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Woodberry pg. 245, 2012).” All of these components are important to a stable democracy; this shows that the ideas of the Protestants, in wanting others to convert and that Protestantism was the way of the world, were what made democracy