From Theocracy to Democracy is a sweeping historical and theological argument that challenges Christianity’s reliance on fear-based authority while calling the Church back to the grace and love at the heart of Jesus’s message. What compelled you to connect the history of the papacy with the psychological effects of fear and obedience?

As a psychologist, I recognized that the anxiety about the gods that motivated obedience to authority and justified the ideology of all the theocratic empires throughout history mirrored the infant’s response to its fear of abandonment by its mother or caretaker. As a theologian and historian, I knew that this same theocratic worldview shaped the papacy after it gained control of the Christian Roman Empire. As a consequence, the liberating characteristic of grace preached by Jesus was never unambiguously taught by the Church or joyfully appreciated by Christians.

The First Communion story is deeply affecting. How did that memory shape the emotional and theological direction of the book?

In that childhood event, I remember clearly the anxious speed with which the nuns removed the girl from the Eucharistic celebration. I eventually appreciated how those nurturing women had had to suppress their human feelings in order to obey the Church’s law.

You argue that grace is central to humanization itself. How do you hope readers will understand grace differently after reading your book?

Grace is the vision of existence that sustains our right to define our humanity not merely to defend preordained divine rights. By liberating us from fear of divine retribution and abandonment, unlike the “puppet people” who execute a preordained divine plan, grace is whatever enables us to develop and enjoy our lives to the best of our cherished insights and ethical judgments.

For readers who may resist your critique of papal authority, what would you most want them to sit with before drawing conclusions?

I would ask them if they experienced any anxiety about this issue when they think about their God and to understand how theocracy’s claim that “all authority comes from God” has dominated humanity’s development and history.

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