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Landry Ayres: Welcome back to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I’m Landry Ayres.
For much of American history, Christianity has played a crucial role in shaping the nation’s moral framework. But as political and religious identities become more entangled, has the church strayed from its traditional role as a moral anchor? And can it find its way back?
To explore these pressing questions, Berny Belvedere sits down with Jonathan Rauch, author of the new book, Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. Together, they examine how the historic relationship between Christianity and America’s liberal democracy has fractured—and what that means for the future of both.
We hope you enjoy.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Berny Belvedere: Hi, I’m Berny Belvedere, senior editor at The UnPopulist, and I’m joined by Jonathan Rauch, who is a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and the author of many excellent books, including his latest, Cross Purposes, which was released a few weeks ago.
Hi, Jon.
Jonathan Rauch: Hi, good to be here.
Belvedere: One of the aspects of our modern malaise—or postmodern malaise, if you prefer—that you’ve focused on in your work is that of our current epistemic crisis. An earlier book of yours, The Constitution of Knowledge, tackles this crisis head on, and details what the epistemic norms and processes are that are conducive to arriving at truth. Now, I don’t think I’m guilty of oversimplifying the vast sweep of intellectual history when I say that, since time immemorial, there have always been crises of an epistemic nature for us to overcome. And although there’s a bit of perceiver bias on my part here, what is it about our current epistemic crisis that seems worse or more fraught than past ones? What is our epistemic crisis and why is this iteration of it so formidable, in your view?
Rauch: Well, I think I would first challenge the premise that we’re always in some sort of epistemic crisis. I don’t actually think that’s true. We’ve had a number of them over the years and they come and go, but we’re usually not in an epistemic crisis.
So, defining what that means: an epistemic crisis is when a group or a society or a country is no longer able to agree on how to decide what’s factual and what’s fictional. Of course, people always disagree. Large numbers of people never agree on facts. They’re always disputed. We call that science. But they generally agree on how to establish facts.
There have been disruptions in the past. The printing press was one of them. Late 19th-century journalism in America became something of a crisis and went down a sinkhole of hyper-partisanship and fake news. And we’re in one now. It’s characterized by the rise of social media and other digital platforms. They’re not just indifferent to truth, they’re actively hostile to truth. They basically monetize eyeballs, and eyeballs are not necessarily attracted to truth. They’re attracted to outrage and titillation.
So, we’ve got that going on, and meanwhile, we’ve got mainstream media, real news media, just falling apart, losing its business model. Many areas now don’t even have local coverage.
And then you’ve got the third and most devastating force, which is that the president of the United States and his MAGA movement have no compunctions about engaging in mass disinformation. That’s lies, exaggerations, half-truths, and conspiracy theories. And that’s opened the floodgates. When you add those things together, it’s a pretty challenging situation.
Belvedere: A central focus of your new book, Cross Purposes, is Christianity. In the early days of the Christian church, one of the catalysts for determining which books should be conceived of as being divinely inspired was the presence of heretics who would specify certain books that church leaders did not find authoritative. And it was said of one particular heretic: “If he hadn’t existed, we would have had to invent him.” The idea was that this individual’s heresies were in a sort of perverse way serving the cause by forcing it to take certain actions conducive to its own development.
I want to fast forward to our own time today. Right after the election, you wrote a fascinating piece for us in which you said:
We must be prepared politically and psychologically for a period of political marginalization, public ridicule, and self-doubt. The Tocquevillian engine of majority opinion has turned, if not against us, then at least indifferent to us. In order to defend democracy in America, we will have to turn it back.
Now, that was not the moment for anyone to have a fully detailed roadmap for putting everything back together. That would have been inconceivable so soon after the Calamity of November 5 (my own private name for the last election). So, Donald Trump is unquestionably a plague on our nation. But do you nevertheless think that liberalism might find a way to use this period in the wilderness to reemerge stronger than it was before? And what would that look like?
Rauch: Well, right now I’d be happy for it to reemerge at all. I don’t know about “stronger.” This is the most frontal and aggressive attack on liberalism that the United States has seen since the Civil War. And so far it’s been very successful. Trump and his movement are moving very quickly to replace our procedural form of government with a patrimonial form of government, which means that the government, the state, is the personal property and family business of the person in charge.
Do we emerge stronger? I don’t know. Liberalism has been written off many times. It’s had many obituaries and it’s survived them all. But right now, I think that American liberal democracy is in very deep trouble. The public has proved not to be reliable custodians of, for example, the rule of law. Political scientists tell us that that’s really not the public’s job—it’s the job of elites. And they, alas, at least on the Republican side, are even less reliable. So that leaves an out of power rump defending liberalism right now. I have no forecast, Berny. I think it’s a dire situation.
Belvedere: I’ve heard the argument that the problem that liberalism faces is that it is not reaching people in the way that ideologies hostile toward liberalism are—with social media, with new media. Liberal values, by contrast, are being transmitted through outdated forms of communication and technology. I know you said you have no forecast, but is a big part of liberalism’s capacity to reemerge simply a matter of becoming better at conveying the message of liberalism?
Rauch: Of course. We got lazy, we got complacent. We assumed after the Cold War that liberalism was ascendant, that its principles were self-evident. And that is not true. Liberalism is a profoundly counterintuitive form of government and a profoundly counterintuitive way to run a society. You have to be willing to trust total strangers all over the world with basic processes like trading in economic markets and in your country with voting in politics and with vetting claims about truth. It’s much more intuitive to trust the people in your tribe or in your group or the same color as you. This turning the big engines of society over to rules is extremely difficult to get people to do. And it requires a lot of socialization and a lot of institutional development. We forgot to do those jobs. We just took for granted, Well, we won, it’s all good. We neglected making our case. And my work since Kindly Inquisitors in 1993 has been about making the case and trying to remind people that we owe our peace, our prosperity, our knowledge, and our freedom to liberalism, and that there is no other system that even comes close to being able to provide those things. But we gotta say that.
Belvedere: So, I loved Cross Purposes, your new book. My background is: I’m a college instructor in philosophy, and your book delves into so many different discussions of important philosophical matters. There are subsections on free will, the nature of God, political philosophy; there’s some metaethics in there. It covers a lot of metaphysics and epistemology in a really accessible way.
I want to discuss its central framework here with you, which is easy to remember because it’s got three sections and all of them have the word “Christianity” in them. But to distinguish them, you use a key qualifier in each section. So the first is “thin,” as in Thin Christianity. The second is “sharp,” as in Sharp Christianity. And then the third is “thick,” for Thick Christianity. I wonder if you can unpack what you mean by these.
Rauch: Let me lay a little bit of groundwork. The subtitle of the book is Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. So, first, what’s the bargain? And then, how did it break?
The bargain is that the American Founders gave us a Constitution and a framework for republican self-government, but they all warned us very explicitly: None of this will work if there isn’t virtue in the public. And they also told us: We are not providing the virtue in the Constitution. That has to come from somewhere else. Where it comes from is civil society—family, community, civic groups, and religion, which, in America, means Christianity primarily, though of course not only.
So what they were basically saying is: Our job is to give you a liberal framework for government. But we depend on, among other institutions and key among those institutions, Christianity to uphold its end of an implicit bargain by socializing and moralizing people on the core virtues—like being honest and truthful and respecting the rule of law and being civil with each other—that a republic needs.
Now, of course, I’m not saying that Christianity or any other religion reliably upholds all of those things on any given day, but over the last 200-plus years, it actually did a pretty good job of socializing people into some basic core moralities and creating a social environment where people felt reasonably well connected and fairly strong communities. It was pretty good at that. Back when I was a kid, the way people introduced each other was not just by saying, “Where are you from? or “What’s your job?” It was, “What church do you go to?” Because everyone did—70% of Americans right through the last century were members of churches.
What happens when the church becomes so much like the surrounding culture that it loses its cultural distinctiveness and stops being countercultural? That’s what seems to have happened to the ecumenical churches in the 20th century. They got so watered down in terms of their theology and unmoored from Scripture, and they weren’t really asking much of people except to donate and show up at church. They drifted into left-leaning politics. That was uninspiring to people. And we saw something which you could pretty fairly call the collapse of mainline Christianity in the last century. That’s what I mean by thin religions. Thin Christianity is when it doesn’t have the countercultural strength, the cultural distinctiveness, and the cultural power to shape morality. And that seems to be what happened there.
Belvedere: And Sharp Christianity?
Rauch: So the big framing story in my book is secularization. We just discussed Thin Christianity’s secularization in the ecumenical side, losing its cultural distinctiveness. There was a different form of secularization into what I call Sharp Christianity among white evangelicals. Now, white Protestantism is the founding faith of our country. It’s always enjoyed special cultural privileges. It’s just super important in setting cultural expectations. And in the 20th century, it looked like, okay, the mainline churches which got so watered down are declining, but the evangelical church, it may be quite conservative politically, but it’s maintaining its cultural distinctiveness. It’s very much rooted in Scripture. It’s more committed to church life. And it was growing. And people said, “Okay, so what’s happening is people are moving into the evangelical movement.” What happened in this century was a reversal of that process. And by reversal, I mean fast and hard. We have seen people streaming out of the white evangelical movement.
The result of that, combined with the decline of the mainline churches, has been what amounts to a near collapse of American Christianity. I’ll give you a few quick statistics. There many more, but these will give the flavor. I mentioned that right through the last century, roughly 70% of Americans belonged to a church. As of 2020, it was 47%, a minority of Americans. Among Americans in 2007, which is not that long ago, 78% identified as Christian. Fourteen years later, only 63% did. That’s a drop of a percentage point a year. We’ve never seen anything like this rapid of a decline.
“This is the most frontal and aggressive attack on liberalism that the United States has seen since the Civil War. And so far it’s been very successful. Trump and his movement are moving very quickly to replace our procedural form of government with a patrimonial form of government, which means that the government, the state, is the personal property and family business of the person in charge. Do we emerge stronger? I don’t know. Liberalism has been written off many times. It’s had many obituaries and it’s survived them all. But right now, I think that American liberal democracy is in very deep trouble.” — Jonathan Rauch
This gets to the sharp church. What seems to have happened on the evangelical side is that starting in the ’80s and ’90s, the evangelical movement began to associate itself with Republican Party politics. It made the gamble that it could influence the Republican Party more than the Republican Party would influence it. And it lost that gamble. Increasingly, the white evangelical movement became a kind of auxiliary of Republican partisan politics to the point where now, in every election, 80-plus percent of white evangelicals vote for the Republican candidate, whether the person on the ballot is a Mormon or Donald Trump.
That merger has had two effects. One, it has made the church smaller because, once again, the church is not being countercultural. If you want to be involved in politics, you don’t have to give up a Sunday to do that. And a lot of people who wanted the teachings of Jesus kind of drifted away. It also gets more politicized and changes in complexion as it becomes more political.
Here’s a fact that is so peculiar: 20 years ago or so, the percentage of white evangelicals who did not attend church ever—non-churchgoers who said they were evangelicals—was vanishingly small. It was like 3 or 4% or something. Today, it’s 1 in 8. So, what you saw was a migration of people into the evangelical world who are really there as a political brand—because it’s part of being a conservative, a Republican, all of that. That means that now we have two branches of Christianity that are for different reasons secularized and not doing the job the Founders intended.
Over the same period, you see rise in loneliness, isolation, anxiety, depression, especially among young people. You see the polarization of politics as people import religious zeal into the political realm. Politics is supposed to be about compromise and persuasion. Well, you can’t do that if you think the other side is Satan. You see the importing of politics into the white evangelical church, and when politics becomes religious and religion becomes political, neither can do their job. That’s where we wind up: a church that’s too thin and a church that’s too sharp.
Belvedere: I want to poke at the Founders’ assumption here a bit and ask why religion is so important in our social flourishing. You write in the book about how you at one point thought that religion may not be necessary. But you also have this really thought provoking part in your book where you discuss your view today, which is that the religious impulse is a kind of inescapable feature of society, a kind of irremovable fixture of the human heart. Humans simply will seek out a source of deep meaning—and that has traditionally been located in a religious tradition.
You survey some of the literature on this and note how in a society that is trending away from religious identification, other religion-like substitutes are coming in to play that role for people. So, we have wellness culture, techno-utopianism, radical social justice, among other alternative quasi-religious accounts. You then go on to say something that I want to ask you about here. You write: “Secular movements have their benefits. I am not here to condemn them, but it turns out that none of them is capable of replacing the great religions, where anchoring moral codes maintaining durable communities and transmitting values are concerned.” And you include this quote, which I think is really well said: “A soccer team can’t provide spiritual solace in the face of death. It probably doesn’t have a weekly charitable call and there’s no sense of connection to a heritage that goes back generations.”
Okay, setting aside the fact that in my country of birth, Argentina, they absolutely do worship soccer and even have a Church of Maradona, which actually has weekly services and everything. No, this quote really drives home what’s missing from some of these would-be religious substitutes. But here’s my question: I get why a soccer team can’t meet the religious need. But why hasn’t secular humanism been able to replicate some of this, or to fulfill some of these spiritual yearnings?
In your book, you mentioned one of the great pre-cancel culture attempts at cancellation—unsuccessful, I might add. It was when John Lennon really stuck his foot in his mouth and said that the Beatles had become more popular than Jesus. But now let me bring in another Lennon moment, his vision in “Imagine”—the idea being, Well, this is the only world we’ve got. Let’s take care of it. Why hasn’t a tradition that seeks the gradual betterment of the world been able to be a replacement religion in your view?
Rauch: As I understand it, secular humanism was an attempt to set up atheism and agnosticism as their own sort of religious or pseudo-religious creed. And the claim was that secular humanism could provide values at least as well as the great religious traditions. Classical liberalism, on the other hand, does not make those strong claims. It says: “Look, we can give you a structure for governance, but you need to pick up the virtue somewhere else.” Secular liberalism has always understood that it is incomplete.
The reason I think that neither is sufficient, though both have their place, is that there are a couple of very fundamental questions which humanism and liberalism can’t really answer. One is: Why am I here? What’s the purpose to my life? Why do I matter? Am I more than just a clump of molecules that randomly came together and then in the blink of an eye randomly fall apart? A lot of very great liberal philosophers have taken a crack at that and they’ve made some headway. But at the end of the day, they don’t have the kind of transcendent answer to “Why am I here?” or “What’s my purpose?” that religions can offer. Religions have an account of a transcendent value of human beings serving a creator God. Now, I don’t believe that. I seem to be okay without believing it. But I think most people feel their life is more complete if it has an account of the fundamental source of meaning, and I can’t provide that.
“So here I find myself, Berny, in this awkward position—or interesting position, I don’t know, you tell me—of being an atheistic, secular homosexual chastising white evangelicals for not being Christ-like enough, but also saying that the principles that are needed to heal our politics and also potentially to heal the church are right there in the gospel. They’re the core principles of Christianity. So I’m just asking Christianity to go back to those principles.” — Jonathan Rauch
The second thing that secular humanism or liberalism can’t provide is an answer to the question: What is the source of our morality? Is there an anchor, a foundation, for distinguishing good from evil that is more than just human preference? Again, great philosophers, Kant, Hume, these titans of liberal thinking, approached that question and did a lot of good work on it. John Rawls is another. And yet, ultimately, they don’t have the kind of fundamental answer that religions can give about the nature of good and evil.
So the Founders were right in a very fundamental way that liberal politics and religion need each other. They’re always in tension because they’re such very different outlooks and yet they’re both incomplete. Liberalism can provide a pluralistic governing framework. It can give us markets and science and democracy and the fantastic material benefits that come from that. Religion can provide the source of meaning and morality. And those two things are much stronger together than they ever are separately. I use a metaphor. If you take a plank, it won’t stand up by itself, but you can lean it against another plank. And that’s a metaphor to me of how liberalism and, in America, Christianity—our founding and predominant faith—have to rely on each other.
Belvedere: I’m a Christian and I found Cross Purposes to be a really religion-positive book and that is very commendable from someone who is also very upfront and clear that you’re an atheist. You talk about there being a division of labor between Christianity and liberal democracy, that if each side handles their duties well, it enables society to be firing on all cylinders. What’s different about your book, on this particular topic, is that a lot of other attempts to compartmentalize Christianity and to relate it to other important social bodies or institutions—Stephen Jay Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria comes to mind, his thesis of the interrelationship between religion and science—have been attempts to intellectually situate religion in a kind of culturally diminished role, to come to grips with religion’s fading influence. “You play over there and let us handle the serious stuff.” But you’re essentially saying, “No, religion—and for America’s liberal democracy specifically, Christianity—is really important and needs to be upholding its end of the bargain. And this is not to chastise it out of some animus, but because we really need it to be doing its part for the good of everyone.”
There’s a part where you write: “My claim is not just that secular liberalism and religious faith are instrumentally interdependent, but that each is intrinsically reliant on the other to build a morally and epistemically complete and coherent account of the world.” I think that’s really well said. I want to ask you: Why is the religious side of things just not holding up its end of the bargain?
Rauch: We’ve been talking about religion, but let’s talk about the real subject of the book, which is Christianity. This is not one of those books that says that it would be better for society if more people were religious. This is a book anchored in the tenets of Jesus Christ. It is addressed to Christians about the specific role of Christianity in our culture. And, within that, it’s especially addressed to white evangelicals, which remain our predominant Christian group.
I follow many Christians who I quote in saying that the white evangelical church made a tragic wrong turn when it allowed itself to be subordinated to partisan politics, and when it went a step further and embraced the most un-Christ-like politician possibly in American history. One of the most famous polling results of this century was a poll that asked people twice, once in 2011 and then again in 2016, whether being a person of good character was essential to holding high government office. In 2011, of all religious denominations, white evangelicals were the strongest ones saying that character is essential in elected officials. Five years later, in 2016, among all denominations, they are the ones saying character is the least essential in public officials. Now, what happens in 2016 that you think might have led them to do this monumental flip-flop from two to one on one side to two to one on the other?
The answer is that they saw in Donald Trump and his MAGA movement as a path to power. They might not love the way he behaves, but they said, “We’re voting for a president, not a priest, and he will give us power.” That is what Trump promises.
This is such an interesting fact. I discovered this just just recently. You know that famous observation Trump made that his supporters are so loyal that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and they wouldn’t mind? That was at a speech in January of 2016 at Dordt College in Iowa, an evangelical school. He says that in the same speech where a few paragraphs earlier, he says, “If you vote for me, you will have power.”
So, look what he’s doing here. He’s saying, “I will give you power and you will give me unconditional loyalty.” That’s the deal. Now, when Christians take that deal, their witness as Christians is transformed. As you’ll recall from the Christian Bible, when Jesus, after he’s baptized, in preparation for his ministry, goes into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights, he encounters Satan, who takes him up to the highest mountaintop in the world, shows him all of human dominion and says, “If you will bow down and worship me, all of this will be yours.” Once again, he’s saying, “I will give you power if you give me loyalty.” And Jesus says: No dice. Go away, Satan.
When white evangelicals choose power over the gospel, it becomes almost inevitable that a lot of people are going to say, “Hey, is this thing on the level?” Russell Moore, the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today and former senior official of the Southern Baptist Convention, when asked why young people are fleeing the church, he says, “Well, if all we give them is a choice between secularization and paganization, we shouldn’t be surprised if they choose one or the other.” So here I find myself, Berny, in this awkward position—or interesting position, I don’t know, you tell me—of being an atheistic, secular homosexual chastising white evangelicals for not being Christ-like enough, but also saying that the principles that are needed to heal our politics and also potentially to heal the church are right there in the gospel. They’re the core principles of Christianity. So I’m just asking Christianity to go back to those principles.
Belvedere: I want to support a point you’ve made. You’re someone who is outside of the movement and calling for it to be truer to its inner principles. I’m someone in the movement, and I came from evangelicalism, and biblically and theologically there’s no license for the way that evangelicalism has has backed Trump to the extent that it has. And it’s a constantly spiraling relationship, getting worse and worse over time. You mentioned 2016—a lot of evangelicals in 2016 would “hold their nose” and vote for Trump or view him as a kind of necessary evil to fulfilling an agenda that they felt was biblical. Now? Nothing but pure Trump enthusiasm.
I mean, in the Bible, there are certainly times when God is said to use a non-believer to carry out his will—think, for example, of Pharaoh in ancient Egypt in the Book of Exodus. In the New Testament, Paul actually interprets the Pharaoh episode, and he says that the Pharaoh fulfilled an important function—a platform for God to showcase his miraculous actions to his people. Without Pharaoh refusing to “let my people go,” the fullness of God’s power wouldn’t have been known vividly—maybe only accepted intellectually by his people. But given Pharaoh’s refusal, God did things to display how he is superior to pagan gods. But here’s the thing, believers are never supposed to be enthusiastic about these God-used vessels like Pharaoh. Yet with Trump in 2016, some believers were like, “We’ll vote for you, but we have a problem with how you conduct your private life.” Now that posture has given way to an enthusiasm that is blinding.
Rauch: Yeah, some Christians use the word “idolatrous” to describe it.
Belvedere: Absolutely. But I wonder if there’s something about the inner logic of politics that required this move. Your book is big on this Trump enthusiasm being a matter of the agency, the choices, of evangelical leaders and voters—that it was a conscious choice they made.
Rauch: Well, I don’t know that it was a conscious choice. It was just a choice. Some of it is because, as pastors say, “We get them for two hours a week if we’re lucky, and cable news gets them for 12 hours a week.” You have pressure from partisan media (of course you get that on the left as well), and you have internet culture and the way it sucks people in. You have Libs Of TikTok. And of course, very importantly, maybe most importantly, you have leading politicians, including President Trump himself, stirring up anxiety and fear, saying, “There’s a War on Christianity, and if I don’t win, it’s the end of America as we know it.” So all of those things are going on, and they’re all age-old.
The question that I think is most relevant to our conversation is: What is it that Christianity says about fear? And how does Jesus Christ want us to behave in a challenging environment? It turns out that Christian teaching has answers to those questions. The most frequently repeated injunction in the Christian Bible, I’m told, is don’t be afraid. It’s a fearful and dangerous world and there are always going to be challenges and things to be afraid of. But you remember the parable that Jesus and the disciples are in a boat and a storm comes up and it looks like the boat’s going to founder and they’re all going to drown and the disciples panic and they rush to wake up Jesus who is sleeping and beg him to do something and he just says, stay calm.
“[S]tarting in the ’80s and ’90s, the evangelical movement began to associate itself with Republican Party politics. It made the gamble that it could influence the Republican Party more than Republican Party would influence it. And it lost that gamble. Increasingly, the white evangelical movement became a kind of auxiliary of Republican partisan politics to the point where now, in every election, 80 plus percent of white evangelicals vote for the Republican candidate, whether the person on the ballot is a Mormon or Donald Trump. … That merger has had two effects. One, it has made the church smaller because, once again, the church is not being countercultural. If you want to be involved in politics, you don’t have to give up a Sunday to do that. And a lot of people who wanted the teachings of Jesus kind of drifted away. It also gets more politicized and changes in complexion as it becomes more political.” — Jonathan Rauch
So, Christianity is supposed to counsel calm in times of fear and political stress. It’s supposed to counsel keeping your mind on the next world and not the next election, remembering that God has a plan for you. It’s supposed to counsel forgiveness. There are three main pillars of Christianity according to theologians and pastors. The first is don’t be afraid. The second is imitate Jesus. And the third is forgive each other. Judgment and retribution belong to God, not to us. So when someone comes along and says, “I am your retribution,” that is idolatrous. That is not Christianity. That’s something very, very different.
So, going back to your point, which you said so well, it’s not just that Christians accepted Trump for a little while as a necessary evil. In 2024, they had the choice of Mike Pence. He had experience as a sitting vice president. He was more conservative and more reliable on issues like abortion than Trump, who clearly doesn’t care about abortion and threw pro-lifers under the bus in the campaign. And he’s a devout Christian. Uh-uh. Not interested.
So, the question for Christians, especially white evangelicals, becomes: Why should anyone think you guys are on the level? I mean, just explain that to me. You preach one thing and practice another. That’s weakening Christianity and because Christianity is a load-bearing wall in our democracy, it’s creating a political crisis as well.
Belvedere: So, there’s a meme that is really popular in right-wing discourse. And the meme has a quote in it. The quote itself is from a novel, but it’s been appropriated by various conservative subcultures as a kind of explanation for how liberal leaders steer us toward civilizational decay, in their eyes. I’ve got the quote here. “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times.” Right-wing subcultures love it because they interpret liberal leaders who hail from a tradition that values the equal moral worth of human beings, tolerance, constraints on power, and so on, all of that leading us toward a kind of societal deterioration.
Rauch: Softness, effiminacy, weakness.
Belvedere: This critique of liberalism, first of all, is crazy. The liberal order for all its flaws is able to boast some of the most spectacular periods of growth, prosperity, global peace, that the world has ever known. But put that to the side for a second. The reason I bring up this meme is there’s a kernel of truth to it that speaks to something you discuss in your book. It’s this: the background conditions under which a tradition exists and operates will largely determine how it responds to what we might call relative disempowerment. What I mean by that is ... let’s apply this meme to traditions rather than individual leaders. Take white evangelicalism. This has been the dominant religious outlook in America for a long time. The fact that it has not been fighting for its survival, fighting for scraps, seen as exotic or different or an alternative to the mainstream view, but instead has been the mainstream religious outlook ... that then leaves it unprepared for social change, even of the objectively unremarkable variety. Even worse, it actively perceives minor advances of multiculturalism as a kind of existential threat, as apocalyptic.
What’s funny is how odd this is against the backdrop of biblical history. There have been points at which, in the Bible, God’s people are in power. But for the great majority of it—this is 66 books spanning thousands of years—they’re out of power. God’s people are slaves, exiles, second-class citizens, you name it. They knew what actual disempowerment was like. Large swathes of American Christianity, by contrast, believes disempowerment to consist of Target cashiers saying “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas.”
In the book, you note something about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—that having been forged in the fires of antagonism and repression from society, it is perhaps spiritually and intellectually prepared to accept certain liberal principles more than evangelicalism has been. Will evangelicalism ever be able to accept a kind of power sharing, that it’s not the culturally dominant force, without thinking that the sky is falling? Or is that just not possible given its history?
Rauch: The sociologists who study American Christianity say exactly what you just said, which is that a lot of the fear, the partisanship, what I call the sharpness that has overtaken the white evangelical movement has to do with its decline as a share of the population; the decline of its clout in the culture, which it used to virtually define; the rapid changes in the country that are going on; and the culturally hostile movements, or what evangelicals see as culturally hostile—things like feminism and homosexuality, and now transgender [rights], and so forth. That’s the $64,000 question, right?
So far, they are not adapting. They are hunkered down. Generally, there are important exceptions. But reality is reality. Partly because of the catastrophically tragic choice that they made to become a partisan auxiliary, we do see this collapse in the numbers of people in the church. The choice that they’re making is propelling the exact type of change that they’re most afraid of. This is not a good strategy.
“[T]he white evangelical church made a tragic wrong turn when it allowed itself to be subordinated to partisan politics, and when it went a step further and embraced the most un-Christ-like politician possibly in American history. One of the most famous polling results of this century was a poll that asked people twice, once in 2011 and then again in 2016, whether being a person of good character was essential to holding high government office. In 2011, of all religious denominations, white evangelicals were the strongest ones saying that character is essential in elected officials. Five years later, in 2016, among all denominations, they are the ones saying character is the least essential in public officials. Now, what happens in 2016 that you think might have led them to do this monumental flip-flop from two to one on one side to two to one on the other? … The answer is that they saw in Donald Trump and his MAGA movement a path to power. They might not love the way he behaves, but they said, “We’re voting for a president, not a priest, and he will give us power.” That is what Trump promises.” — Jonathan Rauch
So, I come along as an innocent, naive outsider, and I noticed that the three core teachings of Christianity are also the core teachings of liberal democracy. Don’t be afraid, imitate Jesus, who is egalitarian and believed in the basic rights of everyone and protecting minorities, and forgive each other, which maps on to, if you win an election, you don’t try to crush the other side. Continue to treat them as your peers and citizens. So, I look at this and I say: If the white evangelical church can move back toward Jesus, maybe that will actually work better than moving away from Jesus. Christianity’s had 2,000 years to establish that the teachings of Jesus are radically countercultural. They go against so many of our intuitions about power and politics. Turn the other cheek—who does that? And yet this is the world’s biggest religion. It is transformative on an individual and social level. So, I’m thinking: Well, why not try some of that? It’s worked in the past. If all else fails, you could try Christianity.
One of the interesting aspects of all this is that the first wave of white evangelical politicization was top-down. It was driven by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. The current wave is driven by the pews. The pastors hate it. They want to preach the gospel. They want to do God’s work. But parishioners are coming to them every day and saying, “Look what I just saw on Fox News or OANN. Why aren’t we doing something about that?” And it’s not even a majority of the people in the churches. It’s a very outspoken minority. But it’s having the effect of driving a lot of people away from the church. One survey found that 42% of pastors had seriously considered quitting in the last year. The number three reason after the obvious first two—high stress and low pay—was politics.
So, here you’ve got a church which is shrinking itself as fast as it can by politicizing and turning itself away from its own doctrines. You tell me, Berny. You’re a person of faith. What did I miss?
Belvedere: I think that’s absolutely right, which is why the second chapter in your book on Sharp Christianity is just a must-read. Here’s my take. I actually think that American evangelicalism might have gotten itself to a place where it could accept relative disempowerment. I mean, there are American evangelicals today who have accepted that. One of the people you dedicate your book to, Tim Keller, I admired a lot as well. There are people from that tradition who can accept that without thinking that a new round of Crusades are needed. But something happened that will either delay that reckoning that we need in order to adjust and become more like Jesus, or even reverse it for the foreseeable future. I’m referring to evangelicalism’s convergence, really its merger, with Trumpian populism.
This development is just disastrous for evangelicalism. It’s why I had to leave. I think the inner logic of populism leaves people of faith just incapable of adopting the right posture that Christianity requires. Let me give you an example. Even at their most triumphant moments, right-wing populists are psychologically reliant on an indelible sense of being in a kind of permanent outsidership. For these people, there’s always going to be a swamp, there’s always going to be a deep state, there’s always going to be a uniparty to go up against, in a kind of cartoonish, us-against-the-empire dramaturgy. Right after the election, the side that had just won the presidency, the Senate, retained control of Congress, boasted a solid majority on the Supreme Court … these people were obsessed with the idea that they were on the verge of losing access to credit markets based on their political beliefs. They were mass sharing a meme that had a store clerk telling a shopper, “I’m sorry, sir, but your card has been declined due to your political beliefs.”
“[T]he Founders were right in a very fundamental way that liberal politics and religion need each other. They’re always in tension because they’re such very different outlooks and yet they’re both incomplete. Liberalism can provide a pluralistic governing framework. It can give us markets and science and democracy and the fantastic material benefits that come from that. Religion can provide the source of meaning and morality.” — Jonathan Rauch
How is it possible that this is what is going through your head as you have your hands on all of the political levers of power? So this feature of Trumpian populism, this reflexive feeling that you are never not being oppressed, it fosters an endlessly renewable persecution complex.
When American evangelicalism married itself to this political program, it found itself moving further away from being able to shake this cognitive tendency. It’s always, look how everything is oppressing us and look how society is dead set against us. Not in a way that steers them toward doing what Jesus wanted, but in an angry, revenge-seeking kind of way. And what I think is needed is a revival in the old timey sense of the word where a critical mass of believers, a tipping point of evangelical leaders and churchgoers, look at the horrors of Trumpism squarely in the face and say, “We need to repent.” That’s my take.
Rauch: And will they? Can they?
Belvedere: Power is a drug not easily weaned off of, right? So long as they’re in power, they won’t want to. It’s a good question. I don’t have a forecast, either.
Rauch: Well, current indicators support that view. Current indicators suggest that Trump was right when he said that in exchange for power, his white evangelical base would allow him to do absolutely anything. So far, that has been true. In the 2024 race, he did come out against a national ban on abortion, thus effectively saying, “Well, it’s okay if hundreds of thousands of babies die.” I think that should have been noticed by white evangelicals, pro-lifers, but it wasn’t. So there goes another core moral precept—one after another.
But the warning to the church would be Russell Moore’s warning, which is: “If this is the road that you’re determined to go down, if you’re determined to march away from the call of Jesus and become essentially a political faction, you’re going to shrink.” That seems to be happening. So the question is: Can there be a Christian revival? You use that term, and I love it, and it’s exactly the right term to use. And Moore says he thinks there can be. He wrote a book about this. It’s a very good book called Losing Our Religion. He says that this is not the first time Christianity got into bed with power and it ended badly—think Christendom and the corrupt popes and all of that. He says what will happen if it gets repaired is it won’t be some big existential clash between the MAGA Christians and the anti-MAGA Christians, and there won’t be a giant schism and a war and someone wins. He says it’s going to be grassroots. it’s going to be from the bottom-up. It’s going to be those pastors who are just tired of doing politics. It’s going to be parishioners, especially younger people, who begin getting curious about Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. It won’t look like my parents and your grandparents’ megachurches and cathedrals. It’ll be more customized and personalized. It’ll be church plantings. It’ll be in the small groups, which are how evangelicals socialize each other—the Bible studies and so forth.
The optimists in this group say, “Look, Christianity is 2,000 years old and it’s at its strongest and most appealing when it is an exilic faith.” That is to say, when it’s the outsider to society looking in, not the power-holder wielding dominion. If anyone was ever a persecuted outsider, it’s Jesus. I’ve had pastors tell me that something that’s missing for the church right now is that exilic sense.
So, I don’t know. You tell me, Berny. You are a person of faith and I’m not, but I think if it happens, that’s how it happens. And I think if the church continues on the path it’s on, society will continue its march toward being hyper-partisan and over-secularized. And the pseudo-religions and substitute religions, everything from “wokeness” and QAnon and MAGA to the weird stuff, the crystals and the psychedelics, and the SoulCycle … those things will continue to grow. And those things are not capable of doing the moral and social work that the great religions, that Christianity, can do. They just can’t do it. They don’t even try. They can’t minister to your needs. They can’t be with you at your side when your parents die. They don’t have long and deep traditions of moral thinking. They just can’t do it. And so I pray if God hears the prayers of an atheist, and Tim Keller told me that he does, I pray that white evangelicals will look around and say: “What the heck were we thinking?”
Belvedere: Yeah, and we’ll need many more Tim Kellers to be able to achieve that. I talked about this with Russell Moore when he was on Zooming In that it will be a difficult sell, in this current moment, when the dominant form of Christianity has basically accepted that it’s on a quest for power above all else, to reach people with the message, “Actually, the Bible suggests that you should make room for others” and “domination is not good if you actually respect other people’s dignity and agency.” But although that will be a hard sell at the moment within this subculture, certainly the Tim Kellers and Russell Moores of the world will need to be a big part in taking us there.
“Madison has the insights that make it possible to have a large constitutional democracy. Democracy tends to be an unstable form of government and it usually fails. And one of the reasons it fails is that it splits into factions and one faction becomes dominant and takes over and becomes tyrannical or it just fractures into pieces and can’t govern itself because it becomes too factional. … [But] what you get out of Madison is the first truly dynamic democracy that is stable. And when you think how long we’ve been around—we’re looking at 250 years next year since the Declaration of Independence—and the challenges that have been posed to our country, you have to conclude that Madison was a space alien. Because what are the odds that someone of that particular genius would come along at that particular moment?” — Jonathan Rauch
Can we end on a sunnier note? I wanted to ask you about someone who you have a lot of respect for, James Madison. In Cross Purposes, he’s frequently invoked. And I would like to gush about him for a second. I feel like, as liberals, we can do more of that. We can do more of rhapsodizing about our heroes. The anti-liberals and post-liberals, they’re quite comfortable doing this with their cherished icons. You’ve probably bumped into many accounts online, trad accounts, who feature some kind of emperor figure from the ancient world in marble bust form in their profile pictures, whose insights would save civilization if we returned to them.
So, let’s do some liberal hero worship here if we can, and maybe “worship’s” too strong given the religious valence of the discussion, maybe a bit blasphemous. How about veneration? It’s that old Catholic response to the Protestant charge that Catholics worship Mary. “No, no, we venerate Mary—we don’t worship her,” the response goes. So, tell me why Madison is such a political-philosophical genius, such a colossal figure within the liberal tradition.
Rauch: Because more than any other single person, Madison has the insights that make it possible to have a large constitutional democracy. Democracy tends to be an unstable form of government and it usually fails. And one of the reasons it fails is that it splits into factions and one faction becomes dominant and takes over and becomes tyrannical or it just fractures into pieces and can’t govern itself because it becomes too factional.
The other huge historical problem with democracy is the problem of demagogues, ambitious people who tend to be interested in politics, who use that ambition to undermine the democracy. I think we’re seeing a version of that right now. And Madison, again, more than anyone—not by himself, but more than anyone—comes up with the brilliant solutions to these problems. So, ambition can be contained only, he says, by one force. This is such a brilliant insight because it’s so counterintuitive. The one force that can contain ambition is ambition. You set up the system so that ambitious people have to contend with each other in peaceful ways to reach decisions.
So, you take that force of ambition and you channel that into political contention and you actually get a dynamic force that pushes us forward. And that dynamic force is compromise. The constitution is, if you had to sum it all up, a compromise-forcing mechanism. That’s why it has all those divisions of power, the levels of government, saying, to get anything done, you’re going to have to compromise with others.
Madison understands that compromise is a dynamic, constructive, creative force. Because the way compromise really happens is not everyone just walks away unhappy after splitting the loaf of bread—it’s that you and I fundamentally disagree, so we go into a room together and we have to think creatively about solutions. And so you say, “Well, what if we enlarge the whole pie?” or “What if we bring in this other ally?” And I say, “Well, that’s an interesting idea, but how about if we do this other thing on top of that?” And so what people leave with is better than what they came in with. You pit ambition against ambition by forcing ambitious people to negotiate and compromise, and you get a dynamic engine of change that is democratic and stable. No one thought of that before. I guess Montesquieu kind of did.
The other big problem is the problem of faction. Until Madison came along, people thought that only a small democracy can work because you need people who can agree with each other. Otherwise you’ll have factionalism. Madison says, “No, you got that backwards. You need to have a large republic.” He says, “Expand this sphere”—because if you have enough different factions, no one of them can predominate, at least not for long. And that will ensure that you have enough change and enough churn to keep your society dynamic.
So, what you get out of Madison is the first truly dynamic democracy that is stable. And when you think how long we’ve been around—we’re looking at 250 years next year since the Declaration of Independence—and the challenges that have been posed to our country, you have to conclude that Madison was a space alien. Because what are the odds that someone of that particular genius would come along at that particular moment?
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