The goal or aim of the early struggle after democracy was the overthrow of human inequalities. Men were thought of in terms of individual units, and the units were declared to be intrinsically equal. The contention was made that they all had, or ought to have, the same rights and privileges. This equality-note has, too, dominated the social and economic struggles of the last seventy-five years. The focus has been centered upon rights and privileges. Men have been thought of, all along, as individual units, and the goal has been conceived in political and economic terms. Democracy is still supposed, in many quarters, to be an organization of society in which the units have equal political rights. Much of the talk concerning democracy is still in terms of privileges. It is a striving to secure opportunities and chances. The aim is the attainment of a social order in which guarantee is given to every individual that he shall have his full economic and political rights.
I would not, in the least, belittle the importance of these claims, or underestimate the human gains which have been made thus far in the direction of greater equality and larger freedom. But these achievements, however valuable, are not enough. They can only form the base from which to start the drive for a more genuine and adequate type of democracy. At its best this scheme of “equality” is abstract and superficial. Nobody will ever be satisfied with an achievement of flat equality. Persons can never be reduced to homogeneous units. There are individual differences woven into the very fiber of human life, and no type of democracy can ever satisfy men like us until it gets beyond this artificial scheme and learns to deal with the problem in more adequate fashion.
A genuinely Christian democracy such as the religious soul is after can not be conceived in economic terms, nor can it be content with social units of equality or sameness. We want a democracy that is vitally and spiritually conceived, which recognizes and safeguards the irreducible uniqueness of every member of the social whole. This means that we can not deal with personal life in terms of external behavior. We can not think of society as an aggregation of units possessing individual rights and privileges. We shall no longer be satisfied to regard persons as beings possessing utilitarian value or made for economic uses. We shall forever transcend the instrumental idea. We shall begin rather with the inalienable fact of spiritual worth as the central feature of the personal life. This would mean that every person, however humble or limited in scope or range, has divine possibilities to be realized; is not a “thing” to be used and exploited, but a spiritual creation to be expanded until its true nature is revealed. The democracy I want will treat every human person as a unique, sacred, and indispensable member of a spiritual whole, a whole which remains imperfect if even one of its “little ones” is missing; and its fundamental axiom will be the liberation and realization of the inner life which is potential in every member of the human race.