Jonathan Rauch would seem to be an unlikely defender of American Christianity. The eminent author, Brookings senior fellow, and Atlantic magazine contributing editor is a gay Jewish atheist — “I won the marginalized trifecta,” he observes — who grew up deeply suspicious of Christianity and its potential for (and past history of) oppression.
As he describes in his recent book Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, his attitude began to change at college, when his freshman year roommate was a Christian believer who exemplified the best aspects of the religion. But Rauch also came to appreciate that as the country has become increasingly secular — with the percentage of Americans identifying as “practicing Christians” down by half since 2000 — the religious impulse has found expression in other channels, including an increasingly toxic partisanship and polarization. And Rauch also came to appreciate that while the Founders rejected the establishment of a state religion or any other formal church-state alliance, they believed that republican government would be impossible without the underpinnings of religion and morality. In Rauch’s words, “Christianity turned out to be a load-bearing wall in our democracy, and right now it is caving in.”
In this podcast discussion, Jonathan Rauch argues that Protestantism in America increasingly has taken on forms that ended up importing religious zeal into secular politics and exporting politics into religion. One of these forms is what he calls “Sharp Christianity,” in which white Evangelicalism (in particular) increasingly has taken the form of conservative culture warfare and partisan politics. Another is “Thin Christianity,” in which mainline Protestant churches have lost cultural and theological distinctiveness and become akin to a consumer choice.
But Rauch is hopeful about the potential for what he calls “Thick Christianity,” in which sincere Christian believers support rather than oppose constitutional pluralism, for theological and spiritual reasons rather than merely strategic or expedient ones. In the unexpected form of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Rauch finds a religion that seeks to base itself on a theology of “how Christ wants us to behave in our public and political relations. And how is that? It’s patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation.” And he’s hopeful that Christians who follow this path will enter into good-faith negotiations with Americans who do not share their beliefs, “and look for solutions that will expand the space for us to get along together.”
Transcript
Jonathan Rauch: So when politics is made into a religion and religion is politicized, neither one works and we become ungovernable. And that’s why it changed my mind. Christianity turned out to be a load-bearing wall in our democracy, and right now it is caving in.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice for the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to be joined today by Jonathan Rauch. He is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. And he’s the author of many books that have done so much to influence the national discussion, including his most recent book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, published in January by Yale University Press. Welcome, Jonathan!
Jonathan Rauch: Good to be here, thank you.
Geoff Kabaservice: Really I should say welcome back, since you were one of my early guests on this podcast way back in the summer of 2021. And you now are, in fact, the first of my honored guests to make a reappearance on this podcast.
Jonathan Rauch: I hope many more to come. I always enjoy our conversations, public and private.
Geoff Kabaservice: Same here. So just to remind both of us, when last we spoke, you had just published your incredibly important book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, in which you wrote about how the growing illiberalism of left and right was amounting to an epistemological crisis in which Americans increasingly are unable to tell fact from falsehood. And that book now strikes me as a work of prophecy, alas.
Jonathan Rauch: Alas, yes. Well, I wrote my first book in that area in 1993, and it was called Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. And it saw a lot of what’s happened coming thirty-two years ago. A lot of it has been in the offing for a long time.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes it has. The last time we spoke, the January 6th insurrection had happened only a few months earlier. But Joe Biden had won the election and Donald Trump, loath as he was to acknowledge that fact, had been defeated and seemed to have been extinguished as a political force and threat. And now, of course, as we are speaking, Trump is back in the White House. It’s clear that his second term will be far more radical than his first, and the constitutional outrages that he has inflicted so far in the first weeks of his term no doubt will pale in comparison to the outrages that will have been committed by the time this discussion goes online. So part of the reason that I wanted to have you back on the podcast, Jon, was just to ask, well, how are you doing?
Jonathan Rauch: Well, how am I doing is not all that important right now. It’s how the country is doing, I think, that matters more. I am alarmed and discouraged. Of course, I was alarmed and discouraged when Mr. Trump won the election in November, although not all that surprised. It was clear that Vice President Harris was the underdog in the race. This is the third election in a row in which the incumbent party was tossed out. That’s happened worldwide in every election in 2024.
America’s becoming ungovernable. Its population is becoming impossible to satisfy with really any reasonable form of government. And that’s being exploited by the current administration, although I fully expect, if the pattern continues, that they too will be turned out in 2028. But this is a very unhealthy cycle. And of course the Trump Administration the second go-around is doing everything it can to defy law with impunity, expand its own powers at the expense of Congress, and Congress seems completely unable and unwilling to do anything about it. So this is really a change in the order — of a revision of, effectively, the Constitution. This is not an administration change only. This is a change of regime, a change of system of government in that respect.
Geoff Kabaservice: I fully agree with you about the seriousness of the current situation. But I do wonder whether you think that the Democrats could have done more to head off Trump’s reappearance in office?
Jonathan Rauch: What kind of more do you have in mind?
Geoff Kabaservice: It seemed to me that in many ways the Democratic brand had been tarnished, particularly through their inaction on public disorder and issues like immigration, crime, inflation — you could kind of go down through the list. It seemed to me that part of what we saw here was the Democrats really fully becoming the college-educated class, and really in many ways quite insulated from and isolated from the rest of the country. And when you have a leadership class that has that kind of alienation from the public, you’re going to get a counter-reaction.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, I suppose, Geoff, one has to distinguish moral culpability from political analysis. And where political analysis is concerned, of course you’re right, the Democrats have allowed themselves to lose credibility with the working class, which was their traditional base, and they got too far to the left on culture war issues, and, and, and, and, and… There is no shortage of ands there.
But morally speaking, the fault for the election of Donald Trump lies with his voters. They voted for him. They didn’t just vote against the Democrats, they voted for him. He expanded significantly his total among many groups in 2024. These were people who knew exactly what he was all about. Many of them — I think the large, large majority of them — knew that he had tried to overthrow the Constitution. And they looked at that, and they decided, “That’s okay.” So that’s not the Democrats’ fault.
Geoff Kabaservice: You’re right. Let’s turn to your book, and let’s get the obvious joke out of the way first… Your book, Cross Purposes, is a kind of salute to straight Christian believers from one who is none of those things.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, yes, a gay Jewish atheist or atheistic Jewish homosexual, take your pick — I won the marginalized trifecta. I suppose you could say I’m very much an outsider to Christianity. I grew up with a bad attitude toward it, and for good reason. People like me were just regularly abused and oppressed by bigoted and cruel Christian teachings. And so this book represents a real change of course for me.
Geoff Kabaservice: It does indeed. I first caught wind of this book, actually, back in I think October of 2023, when Paul Edwards of Brigham Young University wrote a piece about what he called the “stunning” series of three lectures that you had delivered the month before at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. How did the invitation to deliver those lectures come about, and what made you want to speak about this general subject of how a deterioration in American Christianity was threatening America’s pluralistic democracy?
Jonathan Rauch: Well, I’ll focus mostly on the second question, which is how I got to this point — because the first one, how the lectures came about, is not particularly interesting. It was suggested by an editor at Yale and then seconded by some folks — James Davison Hunter and his team at UVA — and we settled on a topic and off we went. Nothing very exciting there.
The other question that you asked, how I got here, is a combination of getting to know Christians in a deeper way than I had in the past, and empirical evidence. On the first count, as I mentioned, I grew up with a very bad attitude toward Christianity. I thought it was basically hypocritical, and bigoted, and cruel — and of course it was to people like me. And when I got to college, I began what would turn into a very long journey.
I roomed with a man named Mark McIntosh. We were both eighteen years old, but he was the first Christian I encountered who really walked the walk, didn’t just talk the talk. But he really believed and really shaped his life in the image of Jesus Christ. He wasn’t a plaster saint. You know, he had a temper, and a sense of humor, and all those things. But Mark McIntosh, who went on to become a very distinguished Anglican priest and theologian, opened my eyes to the fact: “You know, maybe there’s something to this. Maybe it isn’t just all hogwash.”
I’m not a believer, I never became a believer. And as recently as 2003, I was writing for The Atlantic what I called “the dumbest thing I ever wrote” — and I include in that, Geoffrey, my 2015 Atlantic article confidently predicting that Donald Trump would never be president. That might be number two, but number one was an article in praise of what I called “apatheism,” which is a joke — apathy and theism — people not caring about God. That’s really secularization. And I said, “Isn’t it great that religion is just fading from our culture? Because it’s a source of division and dogmatism. And when it’s gone, we’ll all be like Scandinavia, and we’ll be enlightenment liberals, and we’ll just all get along better.”
What I didn’t realize in 2003, a mere twenty-two years ago mind you, is that the nation was embarking on precisely that experiment: a wave of secularization unlike anything we’d seen in the past — really the collapse of Christianity as we knew it. The number of adults never attending church or a religious service approximately doubled in fourteen years before 2022. That’s 40 million people who were added — that’s more people not going to worship than came into Christianity in all three of the Great Awakenings. We saw church membership, which was 70% at the turn of the Millennium and had been around 70% since polling began in the days of FDR and Truman — that plunged to 47%, under half, only twenty years later. The percentage of Christians, people identifying as Christians, dropped a percentage point a year — which, as you know in social science, that’s just seismic. And those people, where did they go? They became nones, N-O-N-E-S, unaffiliated with any religion.
So we tested my hypothesis, and the result was not that we became a more peaceable, easygoing society, but that we became more lonely. We had a mental health crisis, we had a disconnectedness, social anomie. And worse than that, we had the rise of substitute pseudo-religions. Some were kind of harmless, like SoulCycle, but others were things like radical wokeness and MAGA and QAnon: really toxic ideologies that people invested their identities in.
And maybe the final thing — I’m sorry, you wound me up here, but I’ll stop in a moment — but maybe the final thing was that we saw an exchange of DNA between white Protestant Christianity and Republican politics. So partisanship became a source of almost religious identity. Politics came to seem an apocalyptic conflict between good and evil. And white Evangelicalism effectively merged with the Republican Party, and brought a lot of those culture-war, power-based, fear-based ideologies into the church. So when politics is made into a religion and religion is politicized, neither one works, and we become ungovernable. And now, pausing for a long breath for you to get a word in edgewise, that’s why it changed my mind. Christianity turned out to be a load-bearing wall in our democracy, and right now it is caving in.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think that’s a formidable thesis, Jonathan. But let me unwind you for a second, because when last we spoke in 2021, I hadn’t yet discovered the pleasures of being able to ask my podcast guests prying questions about their origins, and biographies, and personal lives. So what can you tell me this time around about where you grew up, where you went to school, how you came to be the person you are now?
Jonathan Rauch: Oh no, you’ve just wound me up again. I should give short, pithy answers. I was born in 1960 in Phoenix, Arizona, back when it was Tatooine, at the very far fringes of the Empire — which is a great thing. And I grew up next door but one to Sandra Day O’Connor, and Barry Goldwater’s house was in sight of mine. And there was a lot of kind of libertarianism in Phoenix in those days, and I picked up some of that.
I very quickly learned about myself, I think when I was… My earliest memories include three things. Of course, I knew I was Jewish, which I am. I knew I couldn’t believe in God. I did try at various points, and it just never made any sense to me that you had supernatural beings in the universe. God made no more sense to me than Santa Claus. And very early on, starting in grade school, in the early grades, I developed obsessions with boys and men, and fantasized about them. And I knew there was something terribly wrong with me. I didn’t know what it was; that would take many years later. But for all those reasons, I was kind of an outsider. I was an outcast — at least that’s how I felt about myself. And that shaped me growing up, and I guess still does.
Geoff Kabaservice: So speaking about the libertarianism of Phoenix… Barry Goldwater of course was the conservative standard-bearer in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, the senator from Arizona, from one of the families who had come to Arizona when it was still a territory. But he also was of Jewish descent and experienced some anti-Semitism, even despite his eminence and his family’s, in Arizona. And there’s the famous story about how Goldwater once went to a country club, hoping to play eighteen holes of golf, and was told in somewhat apologetic tones, “I’m sorry, Senator Goldwater, we don’t allow people of your faith into our club.” At which point he replied, “Well, my father was Jewish but my mother was Episcopalian, so I’m only half Jewish. Can I play nine holes?”
Jonathan Rauch: I’d love to believe that that’s true. Goldwater, of course, was himself Episcopalian. He didn’t identify as Jewish at all, as far as I know. And I don’t recall when I was growing up that he was thought of as a Jew. But I remember that in those days, the Phoenix Country Club did not admit Jews. My father, who was a New Yorker — grew up in The Bronx — migrated to Phoenix in the early 1950s, because although he graduated from Yale Law School, he was not in the top half of the class and he was excluded from the East Coast firms by the Jewish quotas which were in effect. To get a job, he had to migrate all the way to the Southwest and open up a practice out there. It worked out well — he loved the Southwest. My mother hated it. But yes, I grew up in a quite different world from today’s.
Geoff Kabaservice: What do you regard as having been some of the major turning points in your life?
Jonathan Rauch: Well, should they be in order? Should I just throw them out there?
Geoff Kabaservice: Throw them out there.
Jonathan Rauch: Possibly the biggest was finally, at age twenty-five, after fighting it tooth and nail, and distorting my personality, and believing that I was a truly stunted person, never capable of love — when I was twenty-five, I acknowledged that I was homosexual. And I liken that to coming, after living in a photographic negative, entering the world of a photographic positive, where suddenly everything makes sense.
Another turning point was when I was twenty-nine — well, really almost twenty-nine — the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, a death sentence, against Salman Rushdie. I had always been a believer in free speech since adolescence, because I was a minority and there were people who wanted to shut up people like me and make us go away. But when I saw the laziness and fecklessness of the response from the West to Rushdie’s fatwa — you know, “Well, Khomeini shouldn’t order the death of Rushdie, but Rushdie shouldn’t write nasty novels that provoke Muslims” — I was alarmed. And I left my job and went to work on a book about free speech, and where knowledge and truth come from. That’s a book called Kindly Inquisitors — I mentioned it earlier. It’s now a classic. It took me four years and was darn near impossible to get it into print. But that was a big turning point, a big commitment in my life.
Another turning point was the same-sex marriage campaign that begins, sort of floats into my view, when Andrew Sullivan at The New Republic writes an article — I think it was 1989, possibly — called “Here Comes the Groom.” And I immediately recognized in same same-sex marriage the cause that could normalize homosexuality, bring it in from the cold, join us to our communities and to each other, as well as being a civil rights issue. And I also saw a way to strengthen marriage, which I’d come to understand had fallen apart. My parents were divorced; it was an ugly divorce and an ugly marriage, and that’s a really bad thing for children. So that became a cause of my life after Hawaii looked like it would adopt same-sex marriage in 1994. So that was a turning point.
Another is the one I mentioned: it’s going to college 2,000 miles from home and finding as a roommate someone who I did not think could exist, which was a really good Christian. And as I say, that began a long journey and a slow journey, but that has matured into some deep relationships with Christians, and deeper understanding of their world, and a certain amount of wistfulness on my part that they’re aware of, they’re sensitive to things. They receive frequencies that I really don’t — spirituality and connection to the transcendent — that I don’t have. So those are some of them. There are more.
Geoff Kabaservice: You and Mark McIntosh, your freshman year roommate, would’ve arrived at Yale, what, in the fall of ‘78 or thereabouts?
Jonathan Rauch: Mm-hmm.
Geoff Kabaservice: And it strikes me as interesting that you mentioned that he was thought of as being part of “the God Squad,” and that was not a positive term at Yale in those days. And in fact only, I guess, five years before that, there was a famous incident where Wes Lockwood, who was then a junior at Yale, had been kidnapped by his father and taken to be deprogrammed, because he had fallen into what his father regarded as a Christian cult. And that memory would have been still fairly vivid, at least among the faculty, at the time that you arrived.
Jonathan Rauch: Yes. I didn’t know that story, but I did know that then, as today, Christians and people of faith were perceived as strange. It was not part of mainstream culture. And that’s something I complain about in my book. I think we secular liberals — and I certainly include myself — have not done all that we need to, to make sure that welcoming and diversity and inclusion extend to people of faith. And we need to do better.
Geoff Kabaservice: I never knew Mark McIntosh, but I realized after reading your book that I had read some of his works on Christian mysticism as well as his writings on C. S. Lewis, particularly Lewis’ Christian apologetics, and also that we had both had Jaroslav Pelikan as our professor at Yale. He was a professor of ecclesiastical history and also medieval intellectual history.
Jonathan Rauch: Yes, a titanic figure at Yale at the time. Did you and Mark overlap? He graduated in 1982 with me.
Geoff Kabaservice: No, I wasn’t even at Yale at that point. But on the other hand, you paint a picture of him as just a terrific human being.
Jonathan Rauch: Yes, he was. We lost him three years ago, and that’s still a blow. The book is co-dedicated to him and another great Christian pastor, Tim Keller, who we lost a couple of years ago.
Geoff Kabaservice: McIntosh was an Episcopal priest and Keller was a Presbyterian pastor and preacher. They were both theologians. So you went on into journalism after graduating from college, and I believe you were at the newspaper in Winston-Salem that you had mentioned in The Constitution of Knowledge. And from there, you went on to National Journal and The Atlantic and other outlets. I don’t want to single out one of your past books for praise above others, but I just have to mention that you wrote a book that was first published in 1994 as Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government, which was then republished in revised form in 1999 as Government’s End: Why Washington Stopped Working.
And I feel like in a lot of ways the political-intellectual community has, two decades and more later, gotten around to where you were back then. Because this issue of insufficient state capacity — and government’s ineffectiveness, and its inability to deliver — is actually at the center of our political conversation, not just here in the United States but also in Great Britain, and Germany, and many societies around the world.
Jonathan Rauch: I need to get back to that line of work, Geoff. I drifted away from it, worked on same-sex marriage, and then worked on the current political crisis. And I’m still working on that; that’s what this new book on Christianity is about.
But the thesis of that work was that the reason that government is not working as well as we want is… It’s not just because we’re voting for the wrong people. You don’t fix it with an election. It’s because over time, societies become thicker and denser with interest groups and client groups that accumulate. They’re hard to form, but once they do form, they stick around. And these are everything from the AARP and elder benefits, and veterans’ groups, all the way to things like the sugar lobby, and the cotton lobby, and the maritime lobby that’s defended maritime subsidies since literally the age of the Constitution. And these things build up in society over time. And all their benefits, and programs, and cartel-like arrangements, and sweetheart deals build up over time. You can’t get rid of them. And so government becomes sclerotic. It becomes stuck with all of this legacy material.
So the reason that’s relevant now is that I look at, for example, Elon Musk coming along and saying, “Well, we need to zero-base government. We need to just start slashing away at stuff like USAID, and that will solve it.” And then we look at Trump who says, “Well, we need to go with an America First strategy, so we’re going to block ourselves off from immigration and we’re going to block ourselves off from trade. We’re going to be Fortress America.”
Now, these things they’re doing are exactly the opposite of what actually works. If you just start chopping away and laying off civil servants, you don’t get rid of the client groups that are the reasons the subsidies exist. And you don’t get rid of the programs themselves. You just make them even more inefficient and poorly administered, and the public won’t like that. You’ve got to go in there and pass some laws, and eliminate and reform a bunch of these programs — and every single one of them is there for a reason, because someone defends it.
So this is hard work. It’s doable, and it has been done, and America’s actually pretty good at it. But this is not what Trump is doing. They’re just walking in the door and laying people off. The people they’re laying off are, in many cases, the competent people that are necessary to prevent disasters from happening, so that will come back to bite them. And then the best way that you fight the client groups themselves is subjecting them to competition, and that weakens them. That brings in innovative technologies, and new kinds of thinking, and different people, and of course foreign trade. All of that puts competition on these vested interests.
And over time, the more open a society tends to be, the better it is at resisting sclerosis. The worst thing you can do is build a wall around your country and let the special interests just go to the trough and hog it up. So unfortunately, what I predict will happen is that four years from now, things will be in worse shape in terms of sclerosis, and dysfunction, and capacity than they are today. And the public will be even angrier, and the cycle of public retribution against its government and governing class will just get worse. So what do you make of that?
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. I have an interest in this, but I do hope that you come back into this dialogue, because your perspective is even more important now than it was back when you were first coming out with these initial insights. You know, I am regretting the fact that we’re talking before I get a chance to hear your podcast with Andrew Sullivan. I listen to Andrew’s podcast — I don’t know if “religiously” is the right word — but I listen to every episode. But he’s somebody who has always put religion at the center of his political analysis in a way that I haven’t, even though I actually am a fairly regular church attendee and it’s something that I’ve paid attention to over the years.
Jonathan Rauch: You’re a Christian?
Geoff Kabaservice: I am, yeah.
Jonathan Rauch: Denominational?
Geoff Kabaservice: I started in Catholicism and have sort of drifted over into Episcopalianism, I would say. Probably the church that I attend most enthusiastically is Grace & St. Peter’s, which is an Anglo-Catholic Episcopal church in Baltimore, complete with a statue of Charles the Martyr off to one side. But I have to tell you that the time I was the most regular attendee of church services was when I was at Harvard and Peter Gomes was the minister at the Memorial Church on Harvard’s campus. And I was there basically every Sunday.
Jonathan Rauch: A very charismatic figure, and a big influence on our mutual friend, Rich Tafel.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, Rich Tafel was Gomes’ assistant at Harvard, back at a time when actually Gomes first announced publicly that he was homosexual in response to conservative attacks on gays and lesbians at Harvard. And I should add that Rich Tafel is still in the religious business. He is the Swedenborgian pastor at The Church of the Holy City in Washington, D.C., and I really ought to go to his services more often. But yes, Gomes was just a tremendous preacher, a tremendous thinker, someone who made Christianity seem very appealing just in the way he lived his life, I would say, as well as the quality of his intellect and humor.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, Geoffrey, I’ve known you for many years, and until today I had not realized that you were a person of faith and a Christian. And that tells me something. I’m not suggesting that you’ve been in the closet or hiding this fact, but it does tell me something about the near-invisibility of faith in people of our educated elite class.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, and it’s always sort of a bit of a recessive trait, I suppose, in people that we know. But I have paid attention to it over the years. Just as an example, I see that you cited in your book the work of about a dozen years or so by Jody Bottum, An Anxious Age. I reviewed that actually for one of the smaller conservative publications, The University Bookman I think. And I was really struck by that book, because Bottum very persuasively said that one of the most consequential political changes to have occurred in this country in the past century and a half has been the death of Mainline Protestantism, which is to say the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians — these major Protestant nominations which once upon a time, in his view, unified and defined the country.
And Bottum likened them to a great river at the heart of American public life — our cultural Mississippi — and was saying even a dozen years ago that that river had run dry as the mainline churches had seen a real collapse in their numbers and influence since their peak in the mid-1960s. What I think is different now, which you are alluding to, is that it’s not just the mainline churches that have collapsed, but also that the evangelical churches have seen a big falloff in their numbers as well.
Jonathan Rauch: Yes. I owe a debt to Jody Bottum’s thinking. I remember hearing him talk about that book at the American Enterprise Institute when it came out, and thinking, “This must be right.” The core of his thesis is that the energies that were channeled through the mainline ecumenical churches did not go away when the churches themselves ceased to be appealing. Those energies instead were translated into the language of politics, activism. They became environmentalism, often a kind of radical brand of environmentalism. We didn’t have the phrase “wokeness” at the time, but we did have political correctness and its offshoots, the kind of radical postmodern movements that were taking off in universities and spreading into the culture.
And he pointed out that many of those beliefs were kind of religious in structure. They were all about salvationism and confession — you had to admit that you were evil and that you would do better — and they brought this kind of apocalyptic worldview. And he said that the politics of our society cannot really support that kind of zealotry in the political realm. I think what he didn’t know twelve years ago (or fourteen or whatever it was), because none of us did, was in those days it seemed like the mainline churches were in decline, but the evangelical church was thriving. And the difference was the mainline church had kind of drifted away from anchoring itself in the teachings of scripture and being countercultural, dedicated to Jesus, and had sort of become a lifestyle choice or a consumer good. And that just wasn’t enough —that was the story that sociologists tell.
But the rest of that story is the evangelical church is grounded in scripture, still fiercely countercultural. Yes, it’s conservative, but it’s providing some rigorous ideas about life, and was thriving. Well, it’s not thriving anymore. You’re exactly right. We have seen in the last fifteen to twenty years the same kind of decline — I’d say bordering on collapse — in the evangelical denominations that we had seen a generation earlier in the ecumenical denominations. There are now striking data from Pew: the percentage of white Americans who identify as mainline Protestant is now 13%; the percentage of white Americans who identify as evangelical is also 13%. So the evangelicals have caught up. And that energy too went into politics. It just went into the other side.
Geoff Kabaservice: And what we have now, you say, is the mainline churches taking the form of “Thin Christianity,” and the evangelical churches taking the form of “Sharp Christianity.” Can you tell me what you mean by those terms?
Jonathan Rauch: “Thin Christianity” is what happens when Christianity loses its cultural and theological distinctiveness, just blends into the culture, becomes a consumer choice — and something like that is what sociologists say happened to the mainline churches. “Sharp Christianity” is when Christianity dedicates itself to the culture wars and ideological partisan politics; when it becomes divisive, sharp, and above all fear-based, when it foregrounds the fears of white Evangelicals that they are losing their country, subject to demographic decline, under siege from wokeness and socialists and the left, and generally the subject of discrimination and hatred.
They become fearful and angry, and they begin making a political bargain, which is: “We’re going to go with politicians who promise power in this world — not the next world, not transcendence, not preparing for the hereafter, but power right now.” And that’s what Donald Trump offered them in 2016. He famously offered them power. In 2024, he went to the Christian broadcasters and said, “If you vote for me, you’ll have power like you never had before.”
People don’t know this, Geoffrey — well, you probably do. You know that famous line of his about how he could probably shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters would not abandon him? So that line is from January 2016, at a speech he gave at an evangelical university in Iowa. Also in that speech he says, “You guys have been stupid. You’ve been voting for people who don’t really support you. If you elect me, you will have power.” So what he’s saying in that speech, if you juxtapose those things, is he’s saying, “Hey, Evangelicals, I’ve got your number. I understand that if you give me power, I can do anything with that power that I please. You won’t stop me. You want power.” Now, this is a classic Mephistophelian bargain, right? “You give me power and you lose any right to judge my character.”
Geoff Kabaservice: There’s actually a part of the Bible where the Devil takes Christ up to the mountaintop and makes him precisely this offer.
Jonathan Rauch: And Christ, as it happens, turns it down. That’s right. So that was the bargain that Evangelicals struck in 2016, and they doubled down on it in 2024, and here we are. The problem is there’s nothing the slightest bit Christ-like or Christian about it, and it’s driving a wedge between liberal democracy and Christianity. And that just makes everything else harder.
Geoff Kabaservice: You know, I think it’s probably pretty obvious to most people listening to this podcast what the threat of this Sharp Christianity is to American democracy. But you also criticize Thin Christianity for running afoul of what you call “the implicit bargain between American democracy and American Christianity.” What do you mean by that?
Jonathan Rauch: The founders gave us a constitutional system and liberal democracy — a republic, a democratic republic — and they did so with a warning. They put it right there on the label, on the outside of the package. Right after it says “Use with care and machine-wash gentle,” it also said, “This system does not come with its values, its moral foundations pre-supplied.” It relies on a substrate of what they called “republican virtues,” which have to be brought to it by the people who are citizens in the society. Republican virtues are things like truthfulness, lawfulness, civility, making sure you’re educated about public issues — all the things you need to run a democracy.
We know this because they all told us — Madison and Jefferson and Washington and Hamilton, Adams for sure — they all said that those things are going to have to come from civil society, by which they meant family and civic organizations and, most particularly, the church. They were not saying… I am not one of those people claiming that this is a Christian nation founded on Christian principles. They deliberately excluded references to Jesus and Christianity from the founding documents. That was a choice they made, a controversial choice at the time.
So they’re not saying you have to be a Christian to be a good American. But what they are saying is, “Look, we’re making an implicit bargain here. This is the first country ever founded on complete religious freedom. The state will not interfere with religion. But implicitly we assign religion a certain job to do, and that’s to promulgate and propagate the values on which our society depends: train the next generation in these values of truthfulness and civility and kindness and lawfulness. We’re going to need that, and you guys need to do some of that.”
So that’s all by way of preference. Thin religion… When Christianity just becomes, you know, you show up now and then at church — and it doesn’t really demand more of you, and it really doesn’t do much more for you — it’s not really capable of providing that level of moral direction and support, of really socializing us into liberal democracy. And then, when it weakens to the point that people are going out and finding pseudo-religions, those things are… If they’re like SoulCycle and the fitness movement, those don’t even try to inculcate the Republican virtues. They simply can’t do it. Or, worse than that, people turn to these other things like wokeness and QAnon and MAGA, which inculcate the opposite of Republican virtues. They inculcate anger, intolerance, polarization, fear, falsehood, and all the rest. So that’s why I say Christianity is a load-bearing wall.
Geoff Kabaservice: I have a question for you about something that happened just a few weeks ago, obviously after the publication of your book. And this is when Bishop Mariann Budde at the National Cathedral in effect gave a sermon to Donald Trump, who was sitting in the front row after his inauguration, and she asked him to show mercy toward immigrants and LGBTQ children. What kind of reactions do you have to that?
Jonathan Rauch: I’m tempted to ask you to go first, I’m so curious about your unvarnished reaction. Do you want to or should I go first?
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, I’ll go first, that’s fair. I have mixed reactions, to be honest. Because obviously mercy is a quality that you would like to have in a president, right? I mean, this is one of the great virtues of humanity. The Shakespeare line from The Merchant of Venice: “The quality of mercy is not strained… It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings, It is an attribute to God himself.” And you know, something else that really bothers me about Trump is that one of the ways in which you can define conservatism is the axis between civilization and barbarism. And mercy, in my mind, is closely connected to empathy, and there’s that Hannah Arendt quote that “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”
However, the difficulty that I have with Thin Christianity, in your description, is that it’s politics with sort of a drapery of religion around it. And in a way, it seemed to me that Bishop Budde’s sermon was nothing you wouldn’t expect if a Democratic politician were put up on the lectern and asked to give Trump a message. I don’t object to the message itself, but the problem precisely with the Episcopal Church and other mainline churches is that they have become little more than Democratic political sloganeering. So that’s my mix of complicated emotions about this episode.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, that’s very fair. And you mentioned Andrew Sullivan’s podcast. I’ve recorded that recently, and it’ll probably be out by the time people hear this. And Andrew Sullivan was very exercised about Bishop Budde’s comments and thought they showed that the mainline churches had essentially become woke and left-wing, and he took me to task in the book for not devoting ink to that. There’s a lot about white evangelicals and their capital-r Republican partisanship and very little about the mainline churches, and that’s a deliberate choice I made for various reasons. He takes me to task for that, and exhibit A for him is Bishop Budde.
You know, when he brought that up, I hadn’t actually heard her sermon. So of course, I went and listened to it, and my feeling was that I didn’t have a problem with it, in the same way that if Joe Biden had been sitting in the front row of a Catholic Church and a twenty-minute sermon had wound up with plea on behalf of mercy to the hundreds of thousands of children who are killed every year in abortion, I would’ve said, “Okay, well, that is a church that is expressing a view of politics that grows out of its theology, and that’s a legitimate thing for it to do.” You can argue about whether it’s appropriate to the circumstances and all that, but it didn’t strike me as woke, or outrageous, or anything of that sort. That said, the point you made seems right, which is the larger context behind it — not the specific words spoken at that moment, but the larger context of the church becoming more of a vehicle for politics. I think that’s true, and that’s a problem.
Geoff Kabaservice: And there’s something else that I worry about here. A very bright young friend of mine named Mana Afsari wrote a piece recently for an online publication, The Point, where she talked about having gone to two conferences here in DC last summer. The first of them was the National Conservatism (or NatCon) conference, which in many ways is trying to put an intellectual framework around Trumpism. And the other one, the one where you spoke at and I attended, was “Liberalism for the 21st Century,” that was put on by Shikha Dalmia and her UnPopulist magazine.
And I think Mana, being a young person, noticed this more than I did, but the NatCon conference attendees were mostly young white males — but, like, very young. The audience skewed very young and very male. That was not the case at all at the conference in defense of liberal democracy. Her killer quote from that was at that conference, “There are white heads shaking in disapproval on every other panel, like parodies of nineteenth-century conservatives — staid, unaware, too furious at the incomprehensible incomprehension of the young toward their legitimate authority to understand their own decline.”
And part of what she’s criticizing is that the NatCon conference, for all the failings of the post-liberals and other kinds of very theological conservatives gathered there — people who do embody this kind of Sharp Christianity you’re talking about — at least had a sense that young people do need ideals, they need aspirations, they need a vocation. And it did feel at that moment that the people defending liberal democracy were deflated, that they were in need of some reinvention. And that’s something that I worry about in the context of this National Cathedral controversy as well.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, you’ve hit on a big topic there, Geoff, and one that we’ve had occasion to talk about and need to talk more about. There is no question that small-l liberalism — I don’t mean left-wing progressivism, I mean the idea that all humans are born free and equal, and the ideas of democracy, and rotating power in office, and minority rights, and inherent freedoms, and all of the things that we get from John Locke and the founders and Kant — unquestionably are on the back foot right now, and unquestionably demoralized and deflated. And they have very good reason to be demoralized and deflated, which is that authoritarian populism and patrimonialism and other illiberal movements — what’s that Catholic one called…
Geoff Kabaservice: Integralism.
Jonathan Rauch: …integralism, yeah, and post-liberalism… These things are on the march right now. They’re feeling their oats. They’re full of the confidence of bad ideas that seem fresh, even though none of their ideas are fresh. And the generation seems kind of inured to the message of pluralistic liberalism. You’ve got this whole other contingent on the left which sees, for example, free speech as a plot against minorities by the well-heeled and by the privileged and by the white. And so, yes, there’s no question that liberalism is at certainly, I think, its low point since I’ve been alive in the United States.
That said, at that conference and after that conference, I also sensed a growing desire by liberals to fight back. I wrote an article about this in August, after that conference, saying basically that for all the problems of liberalism, we have been far too ready to acknowledge its flaws and undersell its virtues. Fukuyama was basically right in 1989: there is no other system of government that can govern large pluralistic societies and manage the extremely complex feats of coordination that are necessary in an environment of peace, freedom, prosperity, and knowledge. There simply isn’t. Communism cannot do it, theocracy cannot do it, and so forth. And we have just been too reluctant to toot our horn and make our case — and it is a strong case. There’s a thinker you may have had on this show, a guy named Alexandre Lefebvre, who wrote a very interesting book called, I think, Liberalism as a… Oh, no, what’s the rest of his title?
Geoff Kabaservice: I haven’t had him on my show and I don’t remember the title, but anyway go ahead…
Jonathan Rauch: Liberalism as a Way Of Life. And he argues that liberalism is not just a kind of blank, placid neutrality. It is itself a system of values, and they are awesome values. They’re things like cooperation, and care, and some of the sorts of things we mentioned earlier: truthfulness…
So then Trump gets elected in November and all the wind is knocked out of us once again. This is a famous victory for the forces of illiberalism. This is of a piece with the kinds of change that we’ve seen in places like Hungary, and Slovakia, and the things that are afoot in Germany. And in some sense, they’re of a piece with some of the changes even that we’ve seen in Russia over the years. I’m not likening Trump to Putin, but all over the world we’re seeing liberalism on the back foot, and this may be the most severe blow of all. So yeah, we are down in our luck, we are flat on our back, at the bottom of the ditch, looking at the sky. That’s where we are right now. I don’t think we need to stay there. But where do you think we are?
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, I think liberalism is in need of rediscovery. I don’t think it’s in need of reinvention as such, but the things that made it a fighting faith in the past need to be renewed for a younger generation. That’s part of how I feel about it. And let me from there, then, turn to the most optimistic part of your book, which is the description of “Thick Christianity.” Part of why the arguments of the post-liberals have traction with the evangelicals is that the evangelicals are afraid. They have been afraid that liberals, when they get in government, will use the power of the state to restrict their freedoms, maybe their very existence. And I think that’s been greatly exaggerated.
But on the other hand, they have some better ground to feel that liberalism — with its individualism, its materialism, its lures — actually is dissolving faith communities, and that that’s something that they need to fight back against for that reason. And the example that you give in the last third of your book is actually focused around the Church of Latter-Day Saints, vulgarly known as the Mormons, who are a distinctive, very faith-based culture that has survived and even thrived in a liberal society by in some sense coming to an accommodation with it. And I wonder if you could speak more about that?
Jonathan Rauch: One of the big ideas in my book is that the reason (or at least a reason) why politics — partisan politics and the anger, and the culture wars, and the fear that goes with that — has insinuated itself into the white evangelical church is the absence of a civic theology. Now, what the heck is that? So the church is pretty good at what they call “discipling” or “spiritual formation,” which is helping people imitate Jesus in their personal lives, and that means in their faith communities, in their families, maybe in their local communities. When the hurricane hits, the churches are still often fantastic. The question that they have not answered or even really tried to answer in white evangelical Protestantism is: How does Jesus want us to treat each other in our public lives, our civic lives? — that’s for example on social media and in the world of partisan politics.
And so a double standard has arisen, where you’re Christ-like in your personal dealings and the opposite of Christ-like in your public dealings; or, as David French memorably put it, “I may be a bit of an asshole on Twitter, but you should see me in the soup kitchen.” And Christians say, “That just doesn’t work. You have to imitate Christ in your entire life.” And you need a civic theology that disciples people in how to do that, and says, “Look, there are better and worse ways to behave in politics. This is not about what positions you take for or against abortion, or trans rights, or the environment, or anything like that. It’s about how you treat each other, and do you make room for each other in a pluralistic society?”
I look around America and discover that there is one in the United States: a quite white, very conservative church demographically. It looks very much like white evangelicals, but it’s going the opposite direction from the Church of Fear. And that’s the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, starting in just over ten years ago with a landmark compromise in Utah that they supported (that passed anti-discrimination rights for LGBT people along with religious liberty protections to make sure that churches had some boundaries, so that they could continue their own practices of not celebrating or recognizing that), right through to 2022 when that church helped to pass the Respect for Marriage Act, a law that enshrined my marriage to a man in federal statute, along with some new very important religious liberty protections that basically say the government will not use contracts and tax breaks and grant dollars to force a church to recognize a same-sex marriage. Hugely reassuring to the churches.
The Latter-Day Saints helped push that through. It turns out this is based on an entire theology that they have — it’s not a strategy, it’s a theology — about how Christ wants us to behave in our public and political relations. And how is that? It’s patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation. The idea is we enter a good-faith negotiation with Americans who are not of our faith and not of our beliefs, and look for solutions that will expand the space for us to get along together. In other words, it’s deconflicting. It’s the opposite of the Church of Fear, which instead is sharpening these disputes and emphasizing, “We can’t share the country, because if the other side wins, we lose.”
So here’s a church going the opposite direction, deeply countercultural. They put that at the center of their teaching. I was just at BYU, Brigham Young University, in Utah two weeks ago. I gave a speech there. The very day before one of the senior leaders of the Church had told the entire student body, 20-plus thousand, had reiterated the message that their mission is peacemaking — civic peacemaking. This is, to me, an example of how a church can be “thick” in that it’s very demanding, it’s very counter-cultural, it asks a lot of its supporters. It gives a lot in return. It’s very conservative, and yes, it’s very white. And yet it is not going down the road of fear. It’s going down the road of pluralism and compromise. And what that tells me is that Jesus Christ’s teachings are a lot more like Madison than MAGA, and it is possible to be a person of faith in America and take a very different course.
Geoff Kabaservice: It was fascinating to me that you centered Dallin Oaks in your third chapter on Thick Christianity. He is a leader — I guess the first counselor of the first presidency — in the LDS Church. But there was a line that stood out for me where he said, “We should not expect or seek total dominance for our own positions.” And that isn’t moderation as such, because they’re not moderating the LDS Church’s very conservative social views. But not seeking domination is what allows them to actually be a vital participant in the life of the American democratic republic.
Jonathan Rauch: And it allows them, in the name of Jesus, to walk into a room on Capitol Hill — and this actually happened — and negotiate with groups who have very different priorities and find a solution. And that’s pretty unusual right now.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. You know, I feel like that would be a good place to end, on that note of optimism, but I’m not feeling optimistic. So let me tell you something that’s been bothering me, Jonathan. I went back in a set of archives fairly recently, and what I found was a sermon that the National Council of Churches had printed up in 1945 to be used after World War II’s conclusion. And the National Council of Churches was once upon a time a very famous organization, essentially a sort of amalgamation of the mainstream Protestant churches.
And what I expected was a kind of victory celebration, and it was anything but that. It was definitely not triumphant. It did pay tribute to the efforts and sacrifices of the troops and the civilians. It offered thanks to God for the peace. But it also asked “forgiveness for our share in the sins that have brought the curse of war upon thy children; for our pride of nation, class, and race; and for our cruelty to the innocent, our trust in the weapons of war, and our ruthlessness in battle.”
Jonathan Rauch: Wow.
Geoff Kabaservice: And the congregants in this service declared before Almighty God that they would “strive even more mightily in peace than in war to bring a sense of dignity and worth to every member of the human race; to treat more reverently all the things of the earth, and sky, and sea that have been entrusted to our care; and to assume our full share of responsibility in the family of nations.” It just seemed like a document out of time, in the sense that this is a religious congregation getting forward to utter those sentiments, and that this was actually the mainstream of American religiosity at that time…
Jonathan Rauch: What was the date of that again?
Geoff Kabaservice: 1945.
Jonathan Rauch: After VJ Day?
Geoff Kabaservice: It was actually printed before VJ Day, but it was used in the churches across the country after we had won victory over Japan, basically. And you know, here’s what bothers me. Events, big events like World War II, are like stones dropped into the pond of history, right? And they have these big, rippling circles that go out from them, and people remember the lessons from those events.
But eventually, the circles die away and people forget. And in our case, I think we’ve now reached the point where there are almost no World War II veterans left among us. And there are people forgetting the lessons of World War II, and why it was necessary to have the post-World War II global order that we established at the conclusion of the war. And I don’t know how you actually get back from that — if it’s a matter of just having to commit the same errors all over again, or whether we can somehow find a shortcut that doesn’t force us to go through a global depression and conflagration.
Jonathan Rauch: Well, if we’re talking about politics, right now things look awfully bleak to me. And it looks like we’re going to have to learn the hard way, and I’m not even sure our constitutional order will survive what’s in store over the next four years. I hope it does. But realistically, I am aware we may be in that part of the movie Thelma & Louise after the car has gone over the cliff but before it lands.
If we’re talking about religion and Christianity, and whether it can find its feet and do what I hope, which is not become more conservative, or liberal, or secular, or Republican, or Democratic, but just become more Christian. Just return to those core doctrines of Jesus, which are also the core doctrines of James Madison. Those are: imitate Jesus; don’t be afraid; and forgive each other. If those things are applied in our public life, they will make our country stronger, and I think they will be far more attractive to humans than the Church of Fear and politics has been.
But if you ask me: Am I optimistic or pessimistic about a rebirth of Christianity? I say I don’t actually know. Scholars of Christianity and Christians point out this is a 2,000-year-old religion, and today is hardly the first time when it’s allowed itself to be corrupted by power, by power-seeking. And yet it has had rebirths. And they say…
For example, Russell Moore, who is the editor of Christianity Today and a very prominent evangelical dissident, says that what will happen if the church renews itself won’t be some apocalyptic battle between the MAGA Church and the Anti-MAGA Church in which somebody wins and somebody loses. It will be a grassroots process of gradual replacement from the bottom up. It will be younger people coming to the church, interested in the teachings of Jesus. It won’t look like the old, you know, our grandfathers’, grandparents’ churches with the big cathedrals and very set liturgies. It’ll be more customized. But they’ll be interested in Jesus. And pastors are very hungry to teach the Gospel; they have had it with the politicization. Church plannings — it’ll come from the small groups, which are the core of evangelical socialization, meaning that’s the Bible studies and the like. And it’ll come from the bottom up, which is what he says will happen, if it happens.
And all I can say is that I learned the hard way, after being quite foolish and quite ignorant, that if Christianity in America is radically out of alignment with the values of our Constitution and our liberal democracy, they’re going to tear each other apart. So I have learned that I have a stake in the success, the thriving of Christianity — and I mean actual Christianity, not the politicized Christian-nationalist version. And so I think I have some duty to try to help it succeed. And that’s as much as I can say.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, on that somewhat optimistic note, Jonathan Rauch, it’s just a pleasure and an inspiration to talk to you as always. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and congratulations again for your most recent book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.
And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always, to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingenieri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.