What if Our Democracy Can’t Survive Without Christianity?

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This is “The Opnions,” a show that brings you a mix of voices from “New York Times” Opinion. You’ve heard the news. Here’s what to make of it.

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david french

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I’m David French, and I’m an opinion columnist for “The New York Times.” I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about American democracy and the role Christianity plays in our political systems. As a lifelong evangelical and political conservative, I was alarmed and very surprised, quite honestly, that white evangelicals have followed Donald Trump with such passion and intensity.

But I’ve also wondered why I was surprised. After all, I grew up in evangelical America. I have been a churchgoer my entire life. I was a pro-life activist in evangelical America. I was a religious liberty attorney in evangelical America.

And I did not see this embrace of Donald Trump coming. And now we finished a third consecutive presidential election, when evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for one of the most immoral and cruel men ever to run for president.

This experience taught me something, and it taught me that sometimes critics outside a community can see the community more clearly, in some ways, than those who live inside. They can see its virtues, how it interacts with the rest of the public in ways that we would admire and want to emulate, and we can also see the flaws that can demonstrate moral failings.

And so this has all led me to Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the upcoming book, “Cross Purposes — Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy.” I’ve talked with Jon a lot over the last several years, and I’ve been struck by his commitment to understanding the role that Christianity plays in our politics, even though he’s not a Christian. His work has taught me things, and I think that his work can teach y’all things about what Christianity can do to redeem our democracy. Jonathan, thanks so much for joining me.

jonathan rauch

Thank you, David. It’s good to be here. Your work has been an inspiration, literally.

david french

Well, I appreciate that so much. The feeling is very mutual. But let’s just dive in right at the start. You’re an atheist. You don’t believe in God. But one of the points of your book is for American democracy to flourish, you argue that we need better Christianity. You are not making a pitch that says, we need no Christianity.

In other words, you’re not trying to say that the solution to the crisis in American democracy or problems in American democracy is becoming an atheist, but it’s actually about maybe a better version of Christianity or Christianity living up to its ideals. And I found that fascinating. And I got to ask, why? Why is it that you took this approach that said, a better Christianity is the answer, not no Christianity?

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jonathan rauch

[LAUGHS]: Well, I wouldn’t even say better. The way I think of it is that what really needs to happen to get our country on a better track is for Christianity not to become more secular or more liberal, but to become more like itself, to become more truly Christian.

So I came to that for a few reasons, but one of them is knowing people, like you and other Christians, who showed me that the three fundamentals of Christianity map very well onto the three fundamentals of Madisonian liberalism. And one of those is, don’t be afraid. Number two is be like Jesus, imitate Jesus. And number three is forgive each other.

And those things are very much like how you want a constitutional republic. You can’t be afraid of losing all the time. Sometimes you’ve got to let the other team win. You have to trust in the system. You have to believe in traits like the basic dignity and equality and humanity of everyone, even the people you oppose.

And you can’t be so judgmental that you think if you lose the next election, everything is over, and the bad people win, and you’ve somehow got to drive them out of the country. And when I saw that, I thought, well, there it is. It’s in the scripture. So why aren’t Christians doing that?

david french

What are we really talking about here? How does the failure of American Christianity translate into a failure of American democracy?

jonathan rauch

It turns out that Christianity is a load bearing wall in democracy, and the founders told us that. They didn’t specify that you have to be a Christian per se. But they said that our liberal, secular Constitution, it’s great as far as it goes, but it relies on virtues, like truthfulness and lawfulness and the equal dignity of every individual.

And they understood that those have to come from an outside source. The Constitution won’t furnish them. And the source that they relied on, principally, was religion to teach those things and to build and transmit those values. And it turns out that for most of our history, Christianity has been pretty good at that — I mean, lots of exceptions, of course.

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But what I didn’t realize 20 years ago is how right they were, and that once Christianity begins caving in, people begin looking other places for their sources of values. They go to wokeness or QAnon or MAGA, and those turn out to be not the kinds of values that you can use to underpin a democracy. And that’s the situation that we seem increasingly stuck in.

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Your book divides American Christianity into three chunks. There’s thin Christianity, there’s sharp Christianity, and then there’s thick Christianity. And thin Christianity is deficient in its own way. Sharp Christianity is deficient in its own way. And then thick Christianity is what we’re aiming towards. That thick Christianity is healthy within our Democratic Republic. What is thin Christianity? And why is that a problem?

jonathan rauch

Thin Christianity is my term for when Christianity becomes secularized, and it becomes a consumer good, a commodity. People just shop for churches, and they like what they hear. And they’re not really challenged in church.

And the problem with that is that a lot of the benefits of belief to the soul and to the Republic come from taking it seriously and participating, joining with a community, giving of yourself to others, not just treating it as a consumer good.

A lot of this book is an apology for my own previous view that secularization is great. Religions become more like everything else, every other consumer item, and that will reduce conflict and reduce the amount of zealousness in the world. And we’ll all be better off.

And, boy, was I wrong about that because it turns out, when religion, especially Christian, when that becomes thin, people go elsewhere for their faith and for their sense of meaning in life, and they go to politics. And those are terrible sources of values. They don’t sustain the Republic — they undermine it.

david french

So you go from thin Christianity, this idea that Christianity is watered down to the point where it becomes indistinguishable from the rest of the culture, to something very different, but also destructive. And you call this sharp Christianity. And this is, to be frank, the element of modern American evangelicalism that I’ve encountered the most. So let’s talk about what is sharp Christianity.

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jonathan rauch

Well, you can attest, of all people, how sharp, sharp Christianity actually is. So this is a kind of Christianity that perceives itself increasingly as being at war with the culture around it. This is the Christianity that’s afraid that it’s losing its predominant cultural role in American society, that the next election is the one that will end Christianity as we know it.

And so it becomes smaller. It becomes more and more paranoid and frightened about its future. And as it does those things, it also becomes more political.

One sign of that is that, essentially, the white evangelical church in America has, more or less — not completely — but more or less merged with the Republican Party at 80 percent votes for the Republican presidential candidate, no matter who that is, and even if that’s a candidate who, in many ways, defies everything Christianity tells us about virtue.

david french

Well, one of the things — you’ve mentioned a couple of times that I’ve been inside this. And I was inside it, but I also couldn’t see it as clearly — I feel like as you could see it — outside of the community, I felt like some of the critiques that I’d heard much of my life about American evangelicalism that I discounted as coming from the outside were actually vindicated in the Trump era.

So, for example, we’re both old enough to remember quite well the battle over Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. And I distinctly remember, as many conservative Republican evangelicals were circling their wagons around the concept of character, that, look, even if we have peace and prosperity in the moment, that political leaders should maintain a particular standard of character.

And then Trump rolls around, and evangelicals very quickly fell in line behind him, in spite of accusations, and then later, court proceedings, demonstrating that he was, in fact, incredibly corrupt and predatory. How surprised were you at the exposure of evangelical hypocrisy?

jonathan rauch

[LAUGHS]:

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david french

I suspect you were less surprised than I was.

jonathan rauch

I was on a journey, which is why I chuckle. And in some ways, it’s a little bit analogous to yours. But yes, being gay and atheistic and Jewish, I always understood myself as an outsider to Christianity, and I always understood growing up, Christianity is fundamentally hostile to me. And I didn’t think Jesus was on my side.

And then I went on a journey — beginning with Mark McIntosh, college roommate who became a great Episcopal priest and theologian — and got to know people like you, and then eventually, Tim Keller. I came around, and I began to think, I think a lot of Christians are on the level.

david french

Right.

jonathan rauch

I also came to see, as I got involved in the world of public policy, that although the persecution of homosexuals per se was totally unjustified, that the so-called religious right, when they talked about family values, were onto something. And then along came Trump. And alas, after that whole long journey, my illusion was shattered.

And when certain Christians who said they never would support him, turned around and supported him, and when they continued supporting him, despite everything we knew, I kind of shamefacedly had to go back, figuratively speaking, to my skeptical friends and say, well, I guess you were right.

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david french

So there is this really fascinating turn you make in the book. So we’ve talked about thin Christianity. We talked about sharp Christianity. And then you talk about thick Christianity.

And your argument about thick Christianity isn’t that people need to be less Christian. You argue they need to dive more into, actually, the teachings of Jesus. And you talk about the Mormon Church, Latter Day Saints, the LDS Church.

For listeners who are not familiar with some of the distinctions between the LDS Church and evangelicalism, a lot of evangelicals would say, no, the LDS Church is heretical. It’s not even Christian. How is it that you came into this concept of thick Christianity through the LDS Church? And explain what that all means.

jonathan rauch

Well, there’s a lot there, but I should say that I’m not asking evangelicals to become Latter Day Saints or anything like that. I’m asking us as Christians, to look at what the Latter Day Saints are doing as a source of inspiration for a very, very different Christian Social compact.

So that journey of discovery begins in 2015, when, to my astonishment, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, in Utah, leads a compromise with the LGBT rights community in that state to provide anti-discrimination protection to gay people, with some specific, targeted carve-outs for religious exemptions. And this is a bold move, and it passed almost unanimously in the conservative state legislature with the LGBT rights group, Equality Utah, and the legislature and the church standing side by side. And that got my attention.

And then I come across Dallin Oaks. He’s a former law professor and Utah Supreme Court justice. And he says that the church’s posture towards civic democracy needs to be based in patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation, and not for strategic reasons. He’s grounding this in the teachings of Jesus Christ.

And a light bulb goes on, and I say, this is what’s been missing. Christians have a teaching about how individuals should relate to the world around them. If there’s a hurricane in Asheville, the stories of what the church is doing are fantastic.

david french

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Yeah, incredible.

jonathan rauch

But they don’t have a teaching about how to engage politics as Christians. And that leads me to realize what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is actually modeling, is a whole civic theology. And that’s what Christianity needs more of — teachings about how would Jesus approach politics?

david french

So I do wonder about this, Jon — there have never been enough members of the LDS Church to create a sense that they can run America. And so as a kind of a necessity, the LDS Church has always been in this posture of, we aren’t going to run America, but we can still have to find a way to thrive in America.

And it feels like to me that that’s one of the big distinctions between American evangelicalism and the LDS Church, is that there are enough evangelicals and enough places [CHUCKLES]: to where you can actually — if you squint hard enough — see an argument or a way that evangelicals can become a dominant political force.

And let’s look at 2024. Without the evangelical vote, Donald Trump loses full stop, and it’s not even that close. In a weird way, it’s the sheer number of evangelicals working against them in their ability to take that Christ-like approach, or the very numbers of evangelicals presenting, in many ways, their own temptation.

jonathan rauch

Sure, of course. Sociologists who look at American politics right now say that a major thing that’s driving our politics — maybe the major thing among white evangelicals — is that this is the group that has always assumed it should have the predominant role in American society. It’s the founding faith. It’s what the founders were. Couldn’t even have a Catholic president until 1960, and we’ve never had a Jewish or Muslim one.

And it’s that very position of prominence that has created this sense of fear that white Protestants are losing that position of prominence. So they’re circling the wagon. And they’re rewarding politicians who are saying, as Trump did in so many words, if you vote for me, I’ll give you power. You’ll never even have to vote again.

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And, of course, the problem with that is, as you have pointed out on many occasions, is if you want to make the church smaller and less influential, this is a very good way to do it. Make it smaller, sharper, more partisan, more antagonistic to the general culture, and less in tune with the teachings of Jesus Christ. So what they’re embarked on is this self-defeating mission of becoming more powerful and shrinking the church. And at some point, that, of course, won’t work.

david french

So we’ve talked about how your views of religion have changed, in some ways, coming a version of full circle. But mine have changed as well, in part over the course of our conversations that we’ve had over these years, as we’ve wrestled together with some of these issues. And you’ve helped me think differently in ways that have really helped me understand my own faith in a new way.

So how hopeful are you that that give and take that we’ve had can translate more broadly? How hopeful are you that religious people will listen to an atheist, and that secular people can listen to people of faith?

jonathan rauch

I wouldn’t use the word “hopeful.” I guess, I’d use a term more like “prayerful,” even though I don’t know if God hears the prayers of an atheist. Here’s what I think. There’s some people who take a fatalistic attitude toward the church and say, it’s too far gone. It’s lost its audience. If you look generationally, every generation seems to be less attached to organized religion and institutions generally. And it’s all over, so give up.

But here’s what I say. I think I have learned that there are teachings at the core of Christianity which are beautiful and true. You don’t have to believe in Jesus to believe them. You can believe in James Madison to believe them because they’re similar. And that’s not coincidental.

And I think it can only do good and not harm to the country to Christian witness. If Christians can do the work of rediscovering and elevating those elements of the Christian faith which uphold our democracy and which uphold the teachings of Christ, I can’t see that any possible harm would ever result from that. And so what I come down to is addressing my Christian fellow citizens and saying, why not give Jesus a try?

david french

[LAUGHS]: Jon, thank you so much for joining me. I’ve learned a great deal, and I’ve enjoyed this conversation very much.

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jonathan rauch

I have too, David. God bless.

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