Faith & Spirit Quote by Flora Lewis

Lewis is doing two things at once: defending democracy from the charge of being a Western export, and rescuing it from Western triumphalism. The line opens with a concession that sounds almost diplomatic - yes, modern liberal democracy “arose in the West,” tethered to Enlightenment language about rights, dignity, and freedom. But the pivot matters. By insisting it “isn’t alien,” she shifts the argument from origin story to moral genealogy: democracy isn’t a brand name with a single point of manufacture; it’s a political arrangement that can be justified through ethical vocabularies that predate, outlast, and exceed Europe and North America.

The subtext is a critique of two convenient narratives that dominated late-20th-century debate. One is the authoritarian claim: pluralism is culturally incompatible with societies rooted in religious authority or communal moral codes. The other is the West’s self-flattering corollary: democracy is proof of civilizational superiority, something to be “delivered” to others. Lewis refuses both. She implies that religion and moral philosophy, often caricatured as democracy’s rivals, also contain concepts of human worth, restraint on power, and accountability - the raw materials of democratic legitimacy.

As a journalist shaped by Cold War arguments and the postcolonial backlash to “universal values,” Lewis is staking a practical position: if democracy is going to travel, it can’t travel as a lecture. It has to be translated - not diluted, but argued for in local moral languages that people already recognize as binding.