Taming the Infallible People: Sensus Fidei, Democracy, and Populism

ABSTRACT A structural correspondence is found between the process whereby Catholicism prevents the infallibility of the people of God (sensus fidei) from becoming schismatic by appealing to the final authority of the magisterium, and the way democracy disables the immediate power of the acclaiming people, opposing the People’s direct participation by means of the mediation of a variety of institutions. The exigency of an unmediated, individual access to God’s voice found in both Pentecostalism and the Prosperity Gospel, on the other hand, is structurally analogous to the populist rejection of the symbolic character of the democratic “People” and the rejection of any mediation between the faction-people and the gifts of the Spirit.