A quarter century ago, author Jonathan Rauch wasn’t very worried about the prospect of Christianity declining in public influence.
But in his latest book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy, Rauch admits to changing course. “I was smug,” he writes, “about secularization.”
Rauch describes watching apprehensively “as the country sank into chronic anomie and discontent” and “the public turned to dysfunctional and sometimes dangerous alternatives to religion.” Eventually, he “began bending an ear to warnings that Christianity’s crisis is democracy’s, too. I came to realize that in American civic life, Christianity is a load-bearing wall. When it buckles, all the institutions around it come under stress, and some of them buckle, too.”
Cross Purposes assesses the damage and suggests a pathway to repair. Characteristically succinct and sometimes reminiscent of Rauch’s remarkably prescient 1990s title Kindly Inquisitors, it’s a nuanced and honest addition to contemporary conversation around secularization, civic discord, and the social benefits of church.
For those in need of an efficient introduction to these topics, Cross Purposes is a worthwhile read. Rauch is rare in his ability to discuss complex questions in clean, accessible prose without ever talking down to his reader.
But who is that reader? This is the question I kept asking—and couldn’t quite answer—throughout the book.
The necessity of Christian America
It is relevant to mention up front that Rauch is, as he describes himself early and often, an atheist, homosexual Jew. He was involved in the fight to legalize same-sex marriage and remains a dogged scientific materialist. He is not an evangelical preaching to godless liberals that they need us; he’s a godless liberal telling evangelicals that, actually, our help is required.
Americans today “live in a society which, on both left and right, has imported religious zeal into secular politics and exported politics into religion, bringing partisan polarization and animosity to levels unseen since the Civil War,” Rauch writes. If “American Christianity is no longer able, or no longer willing, to perform the functions on which our constitutional order depends,” we are all in deep trouble.
As John Adams famously wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” and historically, the religion in question was Christianity. So the whole country suffers when American Christianity is, in Rauch’s terminology, too thin (culturally weak, in numerical decline, losing theological conviction and distinction) or too sharp (“politicized, partisan, confrontational, and divisive”).
But Christianity is only part of the American bargain Rauch has in view. The other part, despite the titular mention of democracy, is really liberalism, and his defense of it may be the best part of Cross Purposes. Rauch doesn’t mean liberalism in the sense of progressive policies associated with the Democratic Party. He means “the modern tradition of freedom, toleration, minority rights, and the rule of law on which the American republic was founded”:
Some people use the term classical liberalism, but I want to indicate something even broader: the tradition, dating back to the seventeenth century, which grounds ethics in the proposition that all humans are created free and equal; politics in the proposition that the people are sovereign and government’s powers are limited and consensual; and authority in the proposition that everyone follows the same rules and enjoys the same rights.
This is the kind of liberalism that undergirds my politics too, and it was a pleasure to read Rauch’s tidy demolition of the post-liberal critique that’s presently in vogue. Post-liberals tend to argue that “liberalism is inherently self-undermining because it cannot help but destroy the [private] institutions and norms it depends on,” in Rauch’s summary, by embracing “an all-pervasive cult of individualism.” But Cross Purposes makes a strong case that liberalism never promised to supply those norms or institutions. It promised to create a society in which they could flourish without threat of persecution and other coercion, and it did exactly that.
Also praiseworthy is Rauch’s affection and humility in speaking about Christianity. His attitude toward our faith is visibly shaped by friendships with kind and faithful Christians, not least the late Tim Keller and Mark McIntosh, to whom Cross Purposes is co-dedicated. This book stands out among secular acknowledgments of Christianity’s social benefits; it is exemplary precisely because Rauch doesn’t try to claim cultural Christianity for himself, à la Richard Dawkins. He knows he is observing from across a gap that’s not to be minimized for political expedience.
Who will take heed?
Yet for all that care and familiarity with Christianity, and for all Rauch’s insight about religion’s relationship to liberalism, my constant question was about his intended reader.
Over the course of the book, he speaks of four groups: mainline Christians, secular liberals, evangelical Christians, and Latter-day Saints (as many Mormons now prefer to be called). In many ways, mainliners feel like the natural readership, particularly given some of the writers Rauch cites. Lots of evangelicals read Jesus and John Wayne author Kristin Kobes Du Mez, for example, and many are appreciative of her work. But in terms of cultural coding, citing Du Mez probably puts him more in the market for exvangelical or mainline readers than for conservative evangelicals.
Rauch does have a critique for mainliners; he briefly discusses, along the lines of Joseph Bottum’s argument in An Anxious Age, how these Protestants’ commitments became “increasingly social, not theological.” But he doesn’t envision a mainline revival—whether spiritually or in terms of elite cultural influence. Nor does he address mainliners in his concluding exhortations.
One part of those exhortations goes to secular liberals, and this appeal (to protect religious liberty and generally be more respectful of religiosity) is well made. It’s the appeal to conservative evangelicals that doesn’t quite land.
Rauch’s diagnosis of American evangelicalism, which relies heavily on the work of CT editor in chief Russell Moore, is that our movement’s troubles in American civic life are mostly self-inflicted, particularly in the era of President Donald Trump. For too many, he argues, “party loyalty [has] elbow[ed] Jesus aside,” so much so that “evangelical Christianity [has] become, for many who affiliate with it, primarily a political rather than religious identity.” This is the fruit of “Sharp Christianity,” and Rauch describes it—rightly—as not only illiberal but “insufficiently Christian.”
But returning to the matter of sources, the kind of evangelical reader who readily receives Moore quotations as stirring encouragements to faithfulness is not the kind Rauch worries about. The Moore-friendly reader already shares Rauch’s concerns about partisanship, polarization, loss of institutional trust, and so on.
Meanwhile, it strains the imagination to envision Sharp-Christianity types taking Rauch’s plea seriously. Partly this is a case of the disease impeding access to the cure. But it is also possible to imagine, with relatively few tweaks, a version of Cross Purposes that would have stood a far better shot at reaching the edge-case reader, the evangelical whose faith is maybe a little sharp but not irreparably so.
What kind of tweaks do I have in mind? Well, for example, Rauch approvingly quotes a summary of core Christian guidance as “don’t be afraid, imitate Jesus, and forgive each other.” This isn’t bad; it hits some important and biblical notes. It also ignores the fact that Jesus already gave us such a summary, and his first and greatest instruction was to love God (Matt. 22:37–40). Rauch’s summary, by contrast, could be followed by an atheist.
Similarly, Rauch outright dismisses miracles—all miracles. It’s not clear to me how this serves the argument of the book, but it is clearly off-putting for Christians, as our faith can’t exist without the miracle of the Resurrection. As the apostle Paul wrote, “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (1 Cor. 15:14).
Rauch makes other counterproductive claims too. Take, for instance, his assertion that in the liberal public square, no one is “entitled to believe whatever we please—that 2 + 2 = 5, or that the world was created in six days, or any other illogical or empirically false proposition.” Or his contention that in answering questions about morality, religions “rely on a cheat, which they call God,” to disguise their relativism. These and similar passages do nothing to advance the core contention of the book and are likely to alienate Rauch’s most desired readers.
Yet far more consequential than any one passage is Rauch’s invoking of the Latter-day Saints (LDS) as a model of patient, diplomatic, and faithful engagement in American politics. The choice is understandable: Here’s a conservative religious group that has charted an unusual political course. They’ve scored some significant wins along the way, most notably Utah’s legislation combining LGBTQ antidiscrimination protections with religious liberty safeguards.
The problem for Rauch’s aim to persuade evangelical readers is twofold. First, as he briefly acknowledges, “some evangelicals do not regard Latter-day Saints as Christians.” I would venture to say nearly all evangelicals think that way, and many would label the LDS heretical, a cult, or both. The LDS beg to differ, of course, but that is the dominant evangelical view, and it matters more than Rauch seems to realize.
“No other church shares the Latter-day Saints’ theology, scripture, or hierarchy,” he grants. But that’s immaterial, Rauch argues, because “I am asking evangelicals to emulate what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does, not what it believes.”
The second part of the problem is that this is not a viable distinction when we’re talking civic theology. In addition to having other scriptures, the LDS believe the US Constitution is divinely inspired. This goes well beyond the way some evangelicals will speak about biblical principles and culture informing the Founders. The LDS view America’s governing charter as “established forever” by God. In their thinking, as Rauch says, “scriptural and constitutional values” are aligned “as an intrinsic element of God’s plan.”
Some strands of evangelicalism could independently produce a civic theology like that. Others couldn’t. But in any case, borrowing inspiration from the LDS is not a realistic path to better evangelical politics. Rauch proposes an imitation of behavior, not beliefs, but they are not so easily separated. Evangelicals cannot—should not—begin by admiring another religion’s function, then attempt to retrofit a workable substitute from our own resources.
That’s not to say Rauch is wrong in urging Christians to put our own house in order. Informed by Michael Wear’s The Spirit of Our Politics, he’s correct that discipleship in the American church should more often include Jesus-centered civic formation. I don’t think Rauch is close enough to evangelicals’ theology and subculture to make this pitch accurately, but the pitch itself is the right idea.
American Christianity’s problems now—as ever—would indeed be best addressed by the imitation of Christ. If Rauch would like to learn about this from the inside, he would be more than welcome.
Bonnie Kristian is editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.
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