While the formal separation of church and state is a vital element of America’s constitutional order, the success of our long-running experiment in self-government has always depended on a healthy interdependence between republican freedom and religious faith. So argues Jonathan Rauch in his new book Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. “In American civic life, Christianity is a load-bearing wall,” writes. “When it buckles, all the institutions around it come under stress, and some of them buckle, too.”
On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Rauch joins host Brink Lindsey to discuss secularization and the rapid decline of organized Christianity in recent decades — in Rauch’s words, the combination of “thin Christianity” in the mainline denominations and increasingly “sharp Christianity” among self-described evangelicals. They examine the underlying causes of these developments, how they stoke polarization and undermine democratic values and institutions, and what a healthier “thick Christianity” might look like.
Transcript
Brink Lindsey: Hello, everybody. For the next hour or so, you’re going to be treated to the man bites dog spectacle of an agnostic and an atheist, lamenting the decline of organized religion and hoping against hope for some kind of revival of religious faith. My guest and fellow dog biter today is Jonathan Rauch, whom I’ve had the great pleasure of knowing for something like 25 years, and learning from for more than 30. Jonathan is a longtime journalist who is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, where he has been for some time, and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He’s the author of a bunch of great books and seminal articles on a wide variety of topics. His current book which we’re going to talk about today, is Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. We may also talk about his most recent book before this one, which is called The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of the Truth.
Jonathan, welcome to the show.
Jonathan Rauch: I’m happy to be here. Thank you.
Lindsey: So, let’s start with how I started off. It’s so weird to have an atheist and an agnostic talking plaintively about the decline of religion. I call myself an agnostic. In the book, you call yourself an atheist. This is a weird thing to be. While it is true that spiritually “none of the aboves” have soared up to a pretty significant fraction of the American public, we are still a very weird minority in that group, having no interest in or faith in any kind of version of the supernatural. Most of those “none of the aboves” still believe in some higher power or angels or crystals or reincarnation or something. But you and I are untouched by that somehow or another.
How did you get to be that way? And then I’ll tell you how I did.
Rauch: Part of the how I got to be that way was reading your marvelous, important, articulate and visionary series, The Permanent Problem…-
Lindsey: No. How did you get to be an atheist in the first place?
Rauch: Oh. Well, that was not from reading The Permanent Problem.
Lindsey: No.
Rauch: I was born an atheist as far as I can tell. Most people are just naturally spiritual or religious. This is perhaps the most common of all human cultural traits. But I knew from an early age, I sensed three things about myself. One, of course, I knew I was Jewish, and that made me a member of a small minority. And I am Jewish. My atheism is in tension with that, but they coexist. The second is that I felt a very strong attraction to boys and men as far back as I can remember, age five. And that became, of course later on, I understood that that made me gay. Then the third was that the idea of some supernatural daddy in the sky that created this vast cosmos, yet had time to minutely regulate our lives and care about prayer, I thought that was silly. It didn’t make sense to me as a young kid. I went to religious school, Hebrew school, 2 to 3 days a week. I was Bar Mitzvah-ed. I even tried at one point when I was 14, to believe. And I just couldn’t. It just seemed ludicrous.
Lindsey: You were Bar Mitzvah-ed?
Rauch: Yeah.
Lindsey: Okay.
Rauch: That has never changed about me. And I have come to see-
Lindsey: In adult life, you never had any crisis or anything, or you met… You mentioned that you had a friend at college who was a Christian, who really walked the walk, and that impressed you. But never any brush with faith in adulthood?
Rauch: Correct. When I was in college and quite young, I was contemptuous of faith. I thought it was an unnecessary crutch. When I encountered Mark McIntosh, college freshman year roommate, later went on to become a very distinguished and prolific Anglican priest and theologian, and author. I saw for the first time a Christian who actually was infused with Christianity in his whole life and being, and not in a hypocritical, judgmental, and bigoted way, which is all I had experienced until then.
But I myself never came close to believing and still don’t, and I’ve come to think of that as a shortcoming in myself. That there’s a dimension of life, a spiritual dimension, which I think enriches most people who feel it and who worship together. But I feel like in that way, I’m a little bit color blind…
Lindsey: Yeah, that’s an interesting metaphor. So for myself, I have a will to believe. I like believing. I believed in Santa until I was almost nine, longer than I had any kind of sense that I might believe in the divinity of Christ. But it just didn’t…
I’ll get to why it didn’t appeal to me, but I wanted to believe. Then, a couple of years after Santa, there was this huge wave of UFOs in the early ’70s. In the ’73, ’74. I was just totally bought into that and was a big enthusiast for that. And then a couple of years after that, I read Ayn Rand, and that took over my brain for years and propelled me on my path of being a professional libertarian. So, I’ve had that yearning to find the answer. But as a kid, I was in love with science and history. I was just a total… I went totally crazy about the Apollo moon program, and that obsessed me. I also loved history from the earliest age. And both of those just seemed to preclude or make completely unthinkable to me that I could believe any stories that had miraculous things in them. It just didn’t cohere with my scientific worldview at all. And if those religious stories were true, then history as I loved it, was completely impossible, because it’s just all about all the wrong things.
If those stories are true, then all the secular history we write is just preposterously incomplete. So, I could never wrap my mind around a propositional faith where I had to accept that certain historical events happened that are in contravention of scientific possibility.
Rauch: That makes sense.
Lindsey: I just couldn’t get there.
Rauch: We’re similar in that regards.
Lindsey: Yep. But then interestingly, in junior high, my mom switched churches from Presbyterian, which had no appeal to me at all, to the Episcopal Church. And it spoke to me. I like the stained-glass windows, and the kneelers, and the incense. And I absolutely loved the beautiful Thomas Cranmer language of the Book of Common Prayer. And so I went to communion class, and then I… I was, at that time, in middle school, undergoing some fairly nasty hazing for being a smart kid who had just come in from a private school. And so in confirmation class, I met a whole bunch of kids that were from completely different schools. And I could have a completely different social identity, so I got involved with the church youth group and all of that.
So, between ritual and community, I found a home in the Episcopal Church while I was a red-hot Ayn Randian atheist. So I’ve always had religious sentiments, but I could just never… And I believe in the power of ritual and the power of religious community. I’ve always sensed that, but I just couldn’t do the belief thing.
Rauch: And where does that leave you today?
Lindsey: In the same boat. So, an outsider respectfully looking in.
Rauch: I think you said agnostic.
Lindsey: Yeah. I think that human beings are clearly orders of magnitude more intelligent than beetles, but it may be just a little bit less preposterous to expect human beings to understand the transcendent ultimate meaning of everything than it would be to expect beetles. So, I just am quite comfortable with the fact that ultimate truth is utterly beyond our capacity, and there are big mysteries.
Rauch: So you leave a little room for God, spiritual beings.
Lindsey: Sure. Sure, I do. I just don’t have any reason to believe in them.
Rauch: Well, I think that actually makes you an atheist in my view. But-
Lindsey: Yeah. I mean, operationally, I operate as if there’s no God, but I entertain the possibility that there are things far beyond my understanding.
Rauch: Do you share my sense that you’re, in some sense, missing out? Not in a way that’s a handicap in any way, but just that there’s something other…
Lindsey: Yeah. I made a run at believing in my 20s. I read a bunch of C.S. Lewis, and that’s a good way for an intellectual to try to get in. But it just didn’t take. But no, I’m fine with the way I think. I’m an outsider and an oddball in a whole bunch of different ways. This is only one of them.
Rauch: Yeah, you and me. And I guess, at some point, you realized that Ayn Rand was a false God, too.
Lindsey: Yeah, there you go. That’s right. Pretty early. So just briefly, your career, you were a journalist for a long time. You were at a publication, National Journal, which now just seems like something out of another universe. You were there for a long time writing long-form journalism.
Tell me a little. Just give a quick sketch of your career up to now.
Rauch: I am a journalist. As in present tense, I identify as one. I practice and commit journalism, but I’m a weird kind of journalist because I do theory as well as reportage and storytelling. In fact, I’m not that good at reportage and storytelling. But my kind of journalism is to go around the world, looking for right answers. And when I find a right answer, I try to explain it and clarify it. And maybe, even add to it.
And so, I’ve written a series of books. My principal preoccupations have been what’s now called LGBT equality, especially same-sex marriage, and defending liberalism. And the two branches that I defend are liberal democracy. Thus, this book, which is actually really about that. And then its relationship with Christianity and our scientific and epistemic system for finding truth, which is the most important single system we’ve got.
Lindsey: I first heard the name Rauch… I joined the Cato Institute in 1992 in the spring. And sometime in the fall, I believe, you wrote a piece for National Journal called Demosclerosis. I was doing regulatory policy for Cato. And so, your… This was a popularization of Mancur Olson’s theory of how collective action problems allow small groups to exert influence at the expense of apathetic majorities. And you wrote a piece about how that was characterizing the growing sclerotic nature of federal government operations. And that caught my eye.
And I believe… I don’t know when you met and became friendly with David Boaz, the Cato vice president. But I think soon after that, I knew that the two of you knew each other. And I don’t know when we met, but it wasn’t too long after that.
Rauch: Yeah, it must go back a long way. And our preoccupations turned out to be similar. And I identified you then, and of course, still do. As someone who is heterodox even in the libertarian world, you did not recite the standard tropes and mantras which some libertarians did. And that made you an intellectual resource to me, and you still are.
Lindsey:
I say I had a genius for self-marginalization. First, I identified as a libertarian, which put me in this weird camp. And then I was a sort of soft, wet incrementalist libertarian. So, I was a marginal version of that identity. But you never were a red-hot progressive, a red-hot conservative. You were always this cool, studied, skeptical voice of moderation, at least in my view.
Do you consider yourself having stuck to a steady, ideological temperament all along? So, how it seems to me is that I came in full of wanting to believe and wanting to think I had the answers and over… I’ve had a decades-long process of smoothing off the cognitive rough edges until I gradually have a brain that works kind of like yours. But you seem to be there from the start.
Rauch:
Well, I am, especially earlier in my career, I’m not without passion. And Kindly Inquisitors, which is my breakthrough book, and I think I can safely now call it a classic because it’s…
Lindsey: And published by Cato.
Rauch: Published by Cato and the University of Chicago, thanks to David Boaz who made that happen. The late David Boaz. It’s a young man’s book. It is full of passion. And I was full of passion to try to understand and defend against postmodernism, and creationism, and all kinds of other things. The system we rely on to make knowledge and truth. So, I brought passion to that.
Lindsey: Yeah. No, that’s true. I agree with that.
Rauch: No. I did not, and do not, buy into prefabricated ideologies. And early in life, I guess when I was 25, in my mid 20s, when I was still searching for my identity, I wrote down a little mantra, a little bromide. And that was, “I don’t want to be a hot shot and I don’t want to be a big shot. I want to be a deep shot.” I’m not even sure where that came from. Maybe, some of my role models.
Lindsey: I like that.
Rauch: But I just decided early on that I did not want to chase the fad of the moment, and that I would try to make serious contributions in a fairly deep way. And that drives you toward reality.
Lindsey: Yes.
Rauch: And reality is less extreme, and radical, and polarizing than the templates that we impose on it.
Lindsey: No, I’ve been cognitively improved by continually stubbing my toe on reality. Now, I’m trying to learn from it.
So you start your book, Cross Purposes, talking about the dumbest thing you ever wrote. Describe it now. Describe that thing like you don’t think it’s dumb. And then, explain the process of how you came to your current view of it.
Rauch: I still cringe a bit. This is the dumbest thing I ever wrote, and I include my confident prediction in 2015 in The Atlantic that Donald Trump would never be president. This is worse. So, I’ll pick up my journey in college. I become aware that there is a kind of Christianity which is real, and ennobling, and different, and rare. I lose my hostility to Christianity, yet still, in 2003, I write an article for The Atlantic celebrating what I call apatheism. A joke, a play on apathy and theism, which is basically a paean to secularization.
Isn’t it great that Americans are just losing interest in religion because religion is divisive and dogmatic? And so we’ll be like Scandinavia, the temperature of our civic life will just come down. We’ll be cooler and more harmonious, and this will be great. Well, there were two things I did not know then. The first was that in 2003, we were just embarking on the most radical and unprecedented secularization that America has ever lived through.
Lindsey: Right.
Rauch: It’s just a different magnitude than anything in the past.
Lindsey: We had a bump or a slide in the ’60s and ’70s, but not of this magnitude. Then, it held steady for a long time.
Rauch: Correct. In the 20th century, right from the beginning of polling in the ’40s to the year 2000, roughly 70% of Americans attended church or were members of a church. In just the 20 years after that, the first 20 years of this century, that falls to 45%. Less than half. In that same period, of the 85 million people who… I’m sorry, the number of Americans who never attend religious services doubles from 45 million to 85 million. It’s called the Great Dechurching. I could go on. The numbers are just staggering.
That’s the first thing that happened. So I guess, I wasn’t wrong to talk about secularization in 2003. I underestimated its magnitude. But what I got so wrong was saying, “Well, won’t this be great?” Because all kinds of indicators went south at the same time. Mental health, depression, anxiety. But especially the variables related to social connectedness, loneliness, isolation all went haywire. We began to see the rise of secular pseudo-religions. And some of those were harmless but inadequate, like, SoulCycle and self-improvement and crystals and Wicca. But they can’t substitute for the deep moral teachings and transcendent messages of any of the great religions. Worse than that, we saw the rise of toxic, aggressive pseudo-religions. That includes, in my opinion, radical wokeness, radical environmentalism, MAGA, QAnon… and more. And these were actively toxic. These were actively making people antisocial, angry, conspiratorial. And then possibly worse than any of those things even, is that people begin to look to partisan politics as the source of their identity and meaning in life. Partisan politics becomes like religion. And religion, especially white evangelicalism which is what my book is about primarily, religion becomes politics. These things blend, and that means neither can do its job. When you invest politics with apocalyptic significance, a battle of good and evil, the next election may be the last before the end of the world, politics just cannot bear that strain. And the country, I now believe, has become ungovernable or almost ungovernable in large part because of the crisis of Christianity. I do say Christianity-
Lindsey: Yeah. I believe it was Ross Douthat who said it, but I’m not sure when he said it. That if we didn’t like the religious right, hoo boy, wait for the post-religious right.
Rauch: Yeah. Well, here we are. That is the world we now occupy, and it happened with just startling speed.
Lindsey: So before we go any further, I just want to lay out the very simple structure of your book, this very nice, crisp, nimble argument with three concepts. Thin Christianity, Sharp Christianity, and Thick Christianity. The first two are basically the problem, the last one’s the solution. Walk through those and tie them into… I think we’ve set up to where you can now march through that argument.
Rauch: All right. I’ll do this as briefly as I can, but this is the main argument of the book.
Lindsey: Take your time. I have a bunch of questions, but I’d rather you just go through it first.
Rauch: Okay. Then it might be a 3 to 5 minute answer, but we’ll see. So step number one, the founders told us that they were giving us a constitutional liberal democratic republic, and they gave us a structure for that. But they also warned us that the values underlying that structure, the moral system has to come from outside that structure. It has to be provided by civil society. They called what needed to be provided, republican virtue. And that included things like being civil, honest, truthful, lawful, tolerant, being well-educated about the affairs of the time and so forth. And they said, without those things, our Constitution and our form of government will fail. And they said where you go to get this civil society, and that means family and community and schools, but it very importantly means Christianity. And that means, specifically, white Protestantism, which is the founding faith and predominant faith of our country.
And so, they expected… They did not found America as a Christian nation per se. They specifically rejected that. But they did assume that Christianity would do a certain job of socializing people into the morals, the kind of moral framework that’s needed to run a republic, and providing the transcendent values in life, the mission in life. The purpose of life that the Constitution, for example, cannot. So that’s step one.
Step two. In the 20th century, you see what I call the thinning of Christianity. I should say this book is about Christianity. It addresses Christians. It’s about the message of Christ. It’s not a generic book about religion. Thin Christianity is what happens to the main line, the ecumenical church. And starting in the mid-century and then accelerating, it secularizes. It loses its anchoring in the countercultural message of Jesus and in the scripture. And it becomes more like a social movement. It drifts to the left and it becomes about social justice. It loses its distinctiveness. Increasingly, people say, “Well, if I want to be engaged in social justice, I don’t have to give up my Sunday morning for that.” They drift off. And by the end of the century, the main line churches are culturally really almost irrelevant, which is astounding. Because the world I grew up in in the ’60s and ’70s, the first thing people often asked each other when they met is, “What church do you belong to?”
Lindsey: Yeah.
Rauch: And they meant one of… They meant the Episcopal Church or the Methodists or the Lutherans and so forth. These were the absolute pillars of society. So, those churches are then no longer able to do this foundational work of providing meaning, providing morals, transmitting those to younger generations, socially organizing us into communities where we’re exposed to very different kinds of people worshiping together, giving together. Those things begin to fade.
The crisis really comes with the arrival of Sharp Christianity, chapter two of my book. Sharp Christianity is a second wave of secularization, which happens to the white evangelical church. So the story of the late 20th century is the ecumenical churches are dying out, but the evangelical church is taking up the slack.
Lindsey: Right.
Rauch: The evangelical church retains its countercultural edge. It’s different from the message of the surrounding society, much more socially conservative, for example. It retains its anchor in scripture. People flock to it because it seems to transmit these values, the sense of community. It’s serious about worship, about showing up in church, about Bible study, about all of those things. And then starting in the 21st century, that process goes into reverse. And it looks like a big reason for that, maybe the big reason for that, is that the white evangelical church, starting in the ’80s and ’90s decides to dabble in partisan politics. It says we’ve got some problems to solve out there. We need some power to solve the problems. And it becomes, over the course of that period, attached by an umbilical cord to the Republican Party. That accelerates in the 21st century to the point where starting in the 2000s, 80 plus percent of white evangelicals vote for the Republican candidate no matter who that is. White evangelicals become effectively the backbone of the Republican Party. Many of the positions become indistinguishable.
White evangelicals make the gamble.
Lindsey: What percent of the vote is that now?
Rauch: Oh, I don’t know. I’d have to check. I should know, but I forget. It’s a lot. I think it’s like 25%.
Lindsey: Yeah, that sounds about right.
Rauch: Yeah, I think it’s about a quarter. Check me on that. So, the white evangelical church makes a bet that it can influence partisan politics, but partisan politics won’t influence it. And it loses that bet in a big way.
Lindsey: All right.
Rauch: That then turbocharges under Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. Trump says… Wonderful detail here, Brink. I’m sorry, I hope I’m not going on too long, but-
Lindsey: No. Keep going.
Rauch: Okay. Giving you the whole book here. You probably know that Donald Trump said that his supporters are so loyal that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and they wouldn’t mind.
Lindsey: Right. That’s-
Rauch:
You may not know where and when he said that. Dordt College in Iowa, this is an evangelical school. He’s talking to an evangelical audience. And in the same speech a little bit earlier, he says, “If you elect me, I will give you power. Remember that.”
So the proposition he’s laying before them is, “I will give you power-“
Lindsey: That’s a great detail. I’d completely not remembered it until I read it in your book.
Rauch: No one knows this. He says… It’s all there. “I will give you power. And in exchange, you will give me unconditional loyalty.” You may remember that in the Gospel, Matthew 4, Jesus begins his ministry after being baptized by going into the wilderness for 40 days and nights. Where he encounters Satan, who takes him to the highest mountaintop in the world, shows him all of human dominion and says, “You can rule all of this if you’ll bow down and worship me.” It’s the same deal and Jesus rejects it.
Lindsey: Yeah. Get thee behind me, Satan.
Rauch: Get thee behind me, Satan. The white evangelical church accepts that deal. And in doing that, it embraces a style of politics and cultural engagement which is profoundly anti-Christian. In many ways, rightly perceived as hypocritical. People begin fleeing the white evangelical church over the course of only 15 years. In this decade, the percentage of Americans identifying as Christians drops by 15 percentage points. That’s a point a year. Where are they going? You mentioned it earlier. They’re becoming nones, N-O-N-E-S, unaffiliated from any religion.
So now, you have the two great branches of American Christianity no longer able or no longer willing to do the job the founders needed, which is socializing people into republican virtue. People go elsewhere for that. Those other places either can’t provide it or do the exact opposite and socialize them into demagoguery, hate and fear.
And here we are. So, last chapter-
Lindsey: What does healthy 21st century Christianity look like?
Rauch: I’m sorry?
Lindsey: So, what does healthy 21st century Christianity look ?
Rauch: It looks like all kinds of things, but it returns to the three core messages of Christianity, which turn out also to be three of the most important of the republican virtues. They’re right there in the gospel and they’re right there in James Madison. Number one, don’t be afraid. That is the most frequently repeated injunction in the Christian Bible. Some say in the whole Bible. It says, “Be afraid of God, but don’t let fear dominate your life. Have some faith that God has a plan for you.” The Madisonian equivalent is, “You might lose an election. It’s not the end of the world. Don’t lie about it. Don’t try to steal the election. Learn from it. And don’t believe demagogues who try to tell you that the world is so scary, you need to give them power, ‘Only I can save you.’”
Second core Christian precept, imitate Jesus. Jesus’s ministry is about treating everyone with absolute equality as a person of dignity and ministering to the least of these. Judge yourself by how you treat the marginalized, the weak, the poor. That translates directly over into liberalism, is always use people… Excuse me. Never treat people as a means to an end, but always as end in themselves. Treat them as equal. All men are created equal and endowed by their creator, et cetera. And protect the rights of minorities and the weak. There’s some things majorities just can’t do.
Third core Christian precept, forgive each other. This one’s really hard. This translates over into Madisonian liberalism as forbearance. When you win an election, you’re not trying to crush the other side, drive them out of society and dominate forever. You’re going to share the country as they will when they come to power. You can’t run a liberal democracy without those three virtues, and they’re all right there in the gospel. So a healthy Christianity is, first of all, more Christian. And second of all, better aligned with those core virtues. I call that Thick Christianity because it’s able to provide that sense of community, uplift, transcendence. It’s able to make demands on its followers and be countercultural in terms of spiritual life while also supporting republican virtues as it did for many years…
Lindsey: And in a fascinating decision, you do a deep dive on a model of Thick Christianity, or at least, constructive Christian engagement in American democratic life: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormonism. Tell us a little bit about that, but the capsule version.
Rauch: The capsule version, yeah. I’m not doing so great on capsule, but I will do my best. This was actually an inspiration for the book. So, why I think Christianity went so far wrong and got into the mess is it lacks a civic theology. At least, it lacks one that it’s been able to project to its members. And the civic theology says, how does Jesus want us to behave not just in our church life, our family life, and our community life, but in public life? Which means, basically, on social media and in politics. And the civic theology says emulate Jesus there, too. And it turns out that one church in America that worships Jesus is doing exactly that. It has articulated a full-blown civic theology. And it says the way Jesus wants us, all people, not just its church members, to behave in civic life is what they call peacemaking, otherwise known as patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation.
In other words, participating in politics with a strong point of view but looking for ways to expand the space to get along by working out our problems through compromise and negotiation. That, of course, is the exact message of Madisonian constitutionalism.
Lindsey: And they got your attention doing this with respect to gay marriage, after a previous episode of anti-gay marriage activism on the part of the church.
Rauch: Yeah, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is very socially conservative. It is against homosexuality and it can excommunicate you if you have a gay marriage. So, we are not talking about weak noodles here. And yet, they started out on the same road as white evangelicals. They opposed same-sex marriage. They got very involved in a referendum campaign. And then after both an internal backlash to that of thinking, “What are we doing?” and an external backlash, they did a rethink. And they said, “Wait a minute. Maybe we can be more constructive about this.” So in 2015, they worked with Equality Utah, the LGBT group in the state, and conservative Republicans in the legislature to do a landmark compromise bill that extended anti-discrimination protections to LGBT people in the state and also improved protections for religious liberty. For all religious groups that want to be able to defend their own different way of doing things.
That got my attention big time. It was radically different than anything that we’ve seen from the US Conference of Bishops, for example, or the main part of the white evangelical church who were really much more about the culture wars. In 2022, they do it again. Even more remarkably, they become one of the moving forces behind the Respect for Marriage Act, which enshrines my marriage to my husband in federal law in case the Supreme Court ever changes its mind. And couples that to more super important now, federal religious liberty protections, that basically renounce the federal government’s ability to weaponize tax breaks, nonprofit status, and federal contracts to pressure churches like theirs into agreeing to same-sex marriage. So these are win-wins, right? This is expanding the space to live together. It’s what in secular life is called deconflicting. And this to me is a model of a different path that Christianity can take.
Lindsey: So, I’ve cut you off a couple of times. I want to make sure you’ve run through your argument to your satisfaction before I go on various tangents.
Rauch: I have not.
Lindsey: Keep going.
Rauch: My book is very critical of the white evangelical church. There’s a whole school of people called post liberals who blame me for the crisis of Christianity. They blame you.
Lindsey: Yes.
Rauch: They say, “Secular liberalism has done this. This is a case of assassination.” It’s impossible to have faith, family, patriotism, nationalism, traditional values. You can’t have those in the liberal society because liberalism is, in fact, a kind of totalitarian movement.
Lindsey: Yeah, I wanted to get to that a little bit later.
Rauch: Oh, okay. Well, I’ll skip that part. But I will say that although I think they’re wrong, I end the book by calling out people like me. We neglected the importance of a healthy Christianity in our society. At times, we have been outright hostile to it and in various ways which we can discuss. I say, “Look, we secular liberals also, we have to do better. We have to learn to welcome and cherish religious life in this country. We have to stop demanding that every single cake baker, mom/pop Christian cake baker cater every single same-sex wedding. We really don’t need to do that. We need to be more welcoming and curious to people of faith, and universities, and the workplace, and newsrooms.”
I could go on, but I don’t let myself off the hook, at least I hope.
Lindsey: Sure, no. But still, your main message is to Christians.
Rauch: My main message is we need Christians to be more Christian. And boy, do we need that soon.
Lindsey: Okay. Let’s go back to a point you make, and then this post-liberal radicalization of that point, which is the non-self-sufficiency of liberalism. So when liberalism arose, it had absolutely no need to be self-sufficient. It arose as a peacemaking strategy during religious wars. So, liberalism assumes the existence of strongly held and rival thick belief systems, and then comes up with ways of ensuring cooperation across these great differences by creating a civic space in which we’re all civic equals and the laws only pertain to that common good that transcends our particular thick identities, and we leave those thick identities to communities. So, that’s how liberalism arose. You have a great way of putting…
And that dependence, though, we forgotten about it as society is secularized. You forgot about it in 2003, I had forgotten about it entirely. But then you have this great line that speaks to your realization that Christianity is a load-bearing wall for American democracy. That when it buckles, democracy goes under strain and bad things happen.
Rauch: Yes. I don’t want to filibuster anymore so I will just say yes.
Lindsey: So then, the post-liberal argument then is that yes, liberalism started with a pre-modern context. It was parasitic on this pre-liberal past. Once it finally ate through all of its pre-modern legacy, it will self-destruct or morph into some kind of dystopia.
So, that’s the basic argument. You reject it entirely, so do I. Let me hear your rejection.
Rauch: I don’t reject it entirely. I say of it what Charlie Schultze, the economist, one set of supply-side economics, which is there’s nothing wrong with it that wouldn’t be solved by dividing it by 10.
Lindsey: Okay, that’s fine. Yes.
Rauch: he part that’s true is yeah, it’s hard to be countercultural and religious, and keep your eye focused on the next world and on community when you’re bombarded with cell phones, and pornography, and a very, very secular culture and a lot of individualism. There’s a lot coming at you, and that is really hard. So, that’s true. That part is true. What part is not true is that it is impossible to have a thriving religion in the midst of all of this because first of all, in most of American history, we have. America was famous for its thriving religious sector. Tocqueville comes here and comments on it. It’s a point of pride for Christians right through the 20th century.
And second, Christianity is supposed to be countercultural. That’s the whole point.
Lindsey: Yes, that’s true.
Rauch: Jesus was profoundly countercultural. It’s not supposed to be easy, and Christianity is at its best when it is most countercultural, when it is striving to be the outsider, the exilic faith amid a culture which doesn’t get it. That’s when it’s most attractive, that’s when it’s most successful, and that’s when it’s most true to itself. So, I don’t think it’s my fault that Christianity wandered off message. And even if it were partly my fault that Christianity wandered off message, I think…
Tell me if you disagree, but I think it is definitely not my fault that among all the secular leaders that the white evangelical church could attach itself to including, I don’t know, Mike Pence.
Lindsey: Yeah, right.
Rauch: Solid on abortion, true evangelical man of God. They chose the most un-Christ-like figure in modern American history. And not only reluctantly. They didn’t just temporarily accept this as a necessary exigency. They embraced the most un-Christ-like figure and all that goes with it. The cruelty, the hypocrisy, the lying.
Lindsey: Yes. So yeah, I would say that liberalism, modernity is vulnerable to going off in very bad directions. That it has characteristic virtues, and characteristic vices, and inborn vulnerabilities. To say the grand sad dystopian endpoint of liberalism is today in dispirited, disillusioned, atomized, alienated 21st century rich countries – it’s just such a weird argument when 60 years before or 75 years before, you had a much better argument of liberalism self-destructing, which was totalitarianism. So, it survives that to have this second-time-as-farce endpoint. It’s just weird history.
And then the story that, okay, liberalism is rotten from its inception in the mid 17th century and it’s doomed to land us at our present discontents after multiplying the population of the humanity tenfold, making poverty all but obsolete within its borders, bringing about mass literacy, raising life expectancy from 30 something to 80 something, building towers a quarter mile high, going to the moon, splitting the atom, inventing thinking machines, then it failed. So, that’s quite a weird story of failure to me.
Rauch: It is indeed. Liberalism is… I think maybe my next book will have a title, like, Ungovernable: Why The World’s Voters Are Rejecting The Only System That Works, because there is no other system that works. And the post liberals haven’t proposed one. They won’t tell us what they’re actually for. They will claim to have discovered something new, that liberalism is at war with itself and that it’s not self-sufficient. And I look at that and I think, “Guys, the reason that you know that liberalism needs outside support from the civil society and things like Christianity is because we friggin told you. We’ve been telling you for 300 years. Guys, we are relying on you to do this job.”
And now, you come along and say you’re not going to do it, you can’t do it, and it’s our fault. I mean, that’s a little cheeky.
Lindsey: Yeah. And in the big picture, I think of liberalism as the kind of middle way of modernity. It’s steering away from the extremes of the agrarian past and the totalitarian alternatives. It’s hard to keep this incredible dynamic history that we’ve been on of incredible change that modernity is. It’s hard to keep that on track. And liberalism is the effort to keep it out of the ditch, but we sometimes go in the ditch, and then they blame liberalism for doing that when, I believe, it is the rider on the unruly beast trying to keep things going the right way.
Rauch: I have a metaphor that I didn’t put this in the book, but it’s how I think about it. One of the things that I didn’t mention that the book talks about, which I think is actually an innovative argument, is that secular liberalism writ large and religion, which in America means basically Christianity, are inherently existentially interdependent. Always in tension. But it’s not just the convenience argument that it’s really good for society if people are religious because then they have… I don’t know. That’s good for their emotional support or whatever. It’s that their core questions, fundamental questions about human life that only secular liberalism can answer. But there are also core questions, the two biggest questions that, really, only religion can answer. And those are, why am I here? What’s the meaning of my life? Number one.
And number two, what’s the foundation for morality, good and evil, that’s greater than just human preference? And so I picture these two things as two planks, two boards, which cannot stand on their own but can stand leaned against each other. So, we liberals need functioning Christianity that lives up to its own teachings. Everything will just be much, much harder without that. And I think that’s inherent in the nature of the limitations of liberalism.
Lindsey: Yeah. I’m writing an essay right now, which will come out before this podcast, which is the second part. That’s a twofer called The Open Society and the Friends It Needs. And this one, I’m quoting your book and making this very point. Let me turn to a specific thing, your use of the Mormon Church as a model, and point out a key difference between the Mormon Church and evangelical Christian churches that you don’t mention in the book, but which I think may be decisive. And that is the different institutional construction of those churches. So the Mormon, the LDS Church is a functioning hierarchy with real authority. The people in charge of the church lead the church, the followers follow them. They have some real autonomy to make decisions. They don’t just do what their audience… There’s no audience capture in the LDS church.
By contrast, the evangelical church is all bottom-up. There’s all these non-dominational evangelical churches where a group just gets together, rents a storefront, hires a preacher. But even Baptist churches, congregations pick their preachers. If they don’t like them, they fire them. And so you have the capacity in the Mormon Church for farsighted leaders to grasp the message you’re making, whereas in the evangelical church, you have vigorous competition for parishioners. And maybe the most effective way to compete for them is to offer them this lousy version of Christianity that appeals to their baser instincts.
Rauch: Well, there are a few things wrong with that. Not entirely wrong, but pretty substantially wrong. The first and most obvious is that if you want to strengthen your church and appeal to people, adopting an approach which drives them away in unprecedented droves is not a very smart way to do it. So, what they’re doing now is not succeeding at that core function.
Lindsey: That’s fair enough.
Rauch: That’s number one. Number two, it is true that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is very hierarchical. It is not true that people at the top simply give orders and everyone robotically obeys. I do-
Lindsey: I didn’t say that. I said they had some autonomy. There wasn’t pure audience capture.
Rauch:
Right, you didn’t say that. But I’ll put that out there as a caricature. There is no doubt that-
Lindsey:
But there is absolutely nothing like it in evangelical America.
Rauch:
So hang on, hang on. I just want to do a little… Just a minute of sociology here. I went and visited with Dallin Oaks, the number two person in that church, soon to be probably the prophet. And the very first thing he said… I didn’t ask. He volunteered this, is that he’s keeping a very close ear to the ground because their peacemaking effort that I talked about, there is a lot of cultural pressure in that church from the grassroots to join the culture wars. And it’s not as if they can just dictate. And I’ll come back to why that point is important.
Meanwhile, in the evangelical church, it’s becoming smaller and sharper because so many people who are looking for spiritual message and the message of Jesus are fleeing. So, how does this all…
Lindsey: Yeah, but that’s being driven by parishioner pressure.
Rauch: Yes, it’s being driven by parishioner pressure. But I’m going to say… Here’s where I’m going with this, Brink.
Lindsey: The pastors are basically… The story you tell in the book is the pastors are trying to keep a lid on things, but the congregations are baying for blood.
Rauch: So, so that thing-
Lindsey: Or at least, elements of the congregation are baying for blood.
Rauch: Right. That is all true. So here’s the two words that I want to say, theology matters. The big element here that’s really important… I mean, you can look at the sociology, and the structure, and the economics all you want, but the teachings fundamentally matter. If the church doesn’t have a teaching in which there is a transcendent higher mission in life that is rewarding and fulfilling Christ-like if it’s a Christian Church, it will fail. So, my view is what they’re doing now, substituting partisan politics for that kid of civic theology, is failing. It will help. It may not solve the problem, but it will help if the church begins and goes about the work of creating a civic theology which is more Christ-like.
History has found that Christ’s message is surprisingly attractive. Christianity is the largest religion in the world on this profoundly countercultural message. I’m an outsider, so I don’t know if elevating the core messages of Jesus, which are also, in many ways, the core messages of Madison, will solve this problem and begin reviving the church. But it has to be better than what they’re doing now, right?
Lindsey: I see the decline in organized Christianity as part of two phenomena, much larger than that. One, our just general disconnectedness. We’re not spending time with friends, we’re not getting married, we’re not dating, we’re not having kids. We’re not making the effort to get up and go to church. Beyond that, this kind of mass adversary culture that took hold on the cultural-left first in the ’60s and ’70s, but now in the 21st century has migrated to the right with this deep suspicion of all authority mixed in. So put those two together, an ideological and then just a self-interested lack of interest in submitting to authority, we’ve leached away all of our most vital connections including our transcendent connections. And so, the decline in organized religion isn’t a decline in supernaturalism or in religious belief. It’s a privatization of that. And that’s occurring in this larger wave of just tuning out from other people and questioning any authority which gets in my way.
And so, I see the Mormon church maintaining its institutional integrity when institutions around them are failing right and left is a fairly remarkable thing, but it would be pretty hard to stand that up from scratch in the current cultural environment. And I do think despite your disagreement with me, that the different institutional structure makes it easier if you can convince a leadership of this and they really do have somehow or another maintained authority and maintain the integrity of their institutions. It’s easier to hold that line in the Mormon church. If some evangelicals participated in the efforts you were talking about on gay marriage, they just lose their congregations. It wouldn’t work. There’s no way to enforce it at all. So, I do think that institutional difference matters-
Rauch: Yeah, it matters.
Lindsey: … and the larger cultural climate against institution building matters.
Rauch: So of course, those things matter, but they’re not the only thing that matters.
Lindsey: Sure, no.
Rauch: The National Association of Evangelicals was also part of the effort with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And by the way, the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Orthodox Union, those are the conservative Jews in the effort to put through the Respect for Marriage Act. You do see arising in Christianity, answers to this felt need for, “Okay, how does Jesus want us to behave in public life? Because what we’re doing isn’t working.” You’re seeing the rise of this, oh man, Center for Christianity and Public Life, Michael Ayers’ group. You see the After Party Project. There’s more but I am not good at reciting lists off the top of my head. The most important thing though, and here’s a question. I don’t know the answer to this question, but Christianity has been in trouble many times in the past. It has revived itself without the command and control that one might think has been necessary.
And it’s done this – Russell Moore, editor of Christianity Today says, — in the United States, not with some mighty schism and a contest between the MAGA church and the anti-MAGA church for supremacy, but it arises from the bottom-up. It’s a grassroots movement of spiritual seekers who go a different way. This would be younger generations of parishioners and pastors. This would be church plantings. This would take place in the small groups. And we do begin to see inklings, just inklings, but we begin to see green shoots. The latest numbers from Pew suggest that maybe the flight from Christianity has finally bottomed out. And we do see these signs that younger Americans are getting more interested in the church and in the message of Jesus. This won’t look like our parents’ churches, the big MAGA churches and the cathedrals. It’s going to be more customized and personal and all the things that you write about so brilliantly.
But if it can be more attuned to the core messages of Christianity, then it can be more attuned to the messages of democracy. But will it happen? I don’t know. I agree with you, the challenges are profound, but I’m not ready to write off the church. At least, I hope I don’t have to.
Lindsey:
Yeah, me neither. I would say that the mainline Protestant churches mostly had hierarchies. The Episcopal church and Methodist church have bishops. Presbyterians have elders. Only the Baptist Church, and now those newer evangelical denominations and non-denominational churches are this kind of purely bottom-up phenomenon. Which anyway, it’s noteworthy.
So to me, one key vulnerability about Christianity in the modern age is that it is a propositional faith that really relies on a creed in a way that Judaism and Buddhism… Hinduism don’t in different ways. Very different ways. You can be a good Jew without believing much of anything. Just follow the law. You don’t have to have any supernatural beliefs to be a good Buddhist. But you’ve got to buy this creed in Christianity. And in the modern age, that is tough for a lot of better educated, more highly educated people who have been more secularized. And so, I feel that… And those people who used to be in the mainline churches and they used to go to church even through their doubts because it was the right thing to do, and that social expectation faded away and they left.
But I think American Christianity has lost a lot by losing its Protestant intellectual elite. And so when I dream about some kind of revival of Christianity, I imagine a liberal Christianity capable of appealing to people with doubts, but that has elaborate and rigorous expectations. That takes the Sabbath seriously, enforces weekly attendance checks on you if you don’t go. Lots of weekday social activity with a real community, a real orientation towards service. A church that expects a lot of its people ritually and behaviorally but more latitudinarian on the belief side, that seems to me… That’s what I would love to see, but I don’t see it yet.
Rauch: That’s a very good description of what I mean by Thick Christianity. On the one hand, that it’s demanding of its members and gives a lot in exchange. But on the other hand, it aligns itself in constructive ways with the surroundings, with the requirements of our liberal democracy. And I guess, that’s a tall order, but I don’t know.
Lindsey: So yeah, there’s being hopeful and there’s being optimistic. Optimism is, I think, an empirical judgment. I’m not very optimistic. Hope, I consider an ethical obligation. As long as you’re breathing, there’s grounds for hope and there are reasons for hope. There are green shoots that you point out. And I think there is a recognition amongst people like us that we got things wrong. I hope for the spirit to move the Christian communities in better directions. And I salute you as an outsider for having the guts to mount this analysis and critique. I think it’s an excellent book, I hope it gets a wide audience, and I’m very happy that you came on the show. Thank you so much.
Rauch: Wonderful conversation. Thank you.