Rosa, H. (2022), Demokratie braucht Religion, München: Kösel Verlag. 

Hartmut Rosa argues that contemporary societies are trapped in a “frenetic standstill”: they must constantly accelerate and grow just to preserve the status quo (“dynamic stabilization”). This systemic demand—felt in politics, the economy, education, and daily life—forces ever-greater expenditures of physical, political, and psychological energy merely to maintain what already exists. The result is ecological damage, social aggression, polarization, and widespread burnout. Crucially, the modern promise that acceleration would deliver prosperity, knowledge, free time, and a better future for our children no longer convinces; people now run faster simply to avoid decline.

Rosa frames this crisis as a crisis of our relation to the world. The dominant mode has become instrumental and aggressive (“What can I control, optimize, get out of this?”), which corrodes democratic life: opponents are treated as enemies who must be silenced rather than fellow citizens to be heard. Democracy, he contends, requires not only many “voices” but also ears and a listening heart—a readiness to be addressed by others and to be transformed by what they say (drawing on Max Weber’s intellectual probity and Hannah Arendt’s notion of natality).

To name an alternative relation, Rosa elaborates his concept of resonance—a responsive, reciprocal way of being in which we are affected by something, can answer it, are transformed through the exchange, and cannot force the outcome. Resonance has four features:

1. Being called/affected: something interrupts us and bids us listen.

2. Self-efficacy/response: we can answer and establish connection.

3. Transformation: the exchange changes us and feels enlivening.

4. Indisposability: resonance cannot be produced on command.

Rosa’s central claim is that religion—and the Church in particular—still offers invaluable resources for cultivating resonance, and thus for sustaining democracy:

• Temporal and spatial forms that suspend the optimization impulse (e.g., liturgical time; sacred spaces not organized for control or consumption).

• Rituals and bodily practices (sign of the cross, blessed water, Eucharist) that train attention, receptivity, and mutual attunement—resonance across three axes: among people, between people and things, and between people and the encompassing Other.

• Narratives and symbols (e.g., Trinitarian “perichoresis”; biblical images of being called by name and given the breath of life) that promise a “vertical resonance”: our existence is addressed by a responsive reality rather than a mute, indifferent universe.

Rosa acknowledges pluralism, secular critiques, and the Church’s perceived anachronism, yet maintains that a society losing the capacity to be called—to stop, listen, and respond—will be lost both spiritually and politically. Because the Church preserves practices, spaces, and ideas that awaken a listening heart, democracy needs religion: not to impose doctrine, but to sustain the resonant dispositions without which democratic dialogue and renewal cannot occur.