We Need to Restore a Healthy Protestantism to Save American Liberalism

An incisive book by an atheist convincingly shows how both major strands of this faith tradition lost their way

Jonathan Rauch, author of Cross Purposes (Yale University Press, 2025). The UnPopulist illustration.

Book Review

An atheist has just written one of my favorite books on religion in recent memory. As a committed Christian, I see nothing unsettling about that—not when the book, Jonathan Rauch’s Cross Purposes, treats its main subjects, American Christianity and its connection to liberal democracy, with such great intellectual care.

Rauch and I don’t share a religion, though we do share an allegiance—a devotion, even—to a particular political configuration: liberalism. Rauch’s thesis is that the American project has always relied on the presence of vibrant forms of both Christianity and liberalism as a precondition for its flourishing, and that for a long time now, Christianity has not been upholding its end of the arrangement. The book’s subtitle, Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy, literally faults my faith for our society’s foundering.

And rightly so.

Epistemic Excellence

Most people of faith aren’t very receptive to being told that their community is coming up short. That’s why Rauch’s intellectual humility throughout Cross Purposes is so important. He comes across as simultaneously confident about his conclusions but also lucid about his limitations. Indeed, every chapter contains a recognition that he is “on thin ice” in trying to explain something about a particular religious tradition—whether it’s evangelical Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Mormonism—while standing fully outside it.

As a philosophy instructor, I’ve always gravitated toward thinkers who, in good Socratic fashion, know what they know but also—and this is the harder part—know what they don’t know. It’s this latter virtue, epistemic humility, that makes Cross Purposes possible in the first place—its thesis arises out of Rauch’s willingness to mercilessly scrutinize his own past views, especially a 2003 Atlantic essay that in his prologue he calls, “The Dumbest Thing I Ever Wrote.” That essay praised America’s growing “apatheism” or indifference to religion.

This is Rauch simply living out what he’s been preaching; his 2021 book, The Constitution of Knowledge, specifies the epistemic norms that characterize the “reality-based community.” When Rauch writes that a past view of his was “superficial” and “not how things turned out,” this is the author embodying the liberal virtue—and the crucial methodological posture in science—of holding to one’s views only provisionally, subject as they always are to empirical disconfirmation.

Rauch makes it easy for Christians like me, one of the book’s target audiences, to engage in self-examination.

American Pastoral

What’s the view that Rauch confesses that his younger self got so wrong? That as Christianity in America would continue to decline across every metric—affiliation, participation, cultural influence—society would be all the better for it. He doesn’t think that anymore. On the contrary, Rauch now believes America’s liberal order—for its sustenance, yes, but also for its flourishing—needs more Christianity, not less (more on this point below).

---

MAGA Evangelicals' Un-Christian Quest for Political Power: A Conversation with Russell Moore

---

Rauch’s gradual appreciation of the critical role that virtue-inculcating institutions, such as religious communities, play in stabilizing liberal democracy has followed from his growing attentiveness to what some of the most significant thinkers in the American liberal tradition—from Founders like James Madison, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson to keen observers of American society from different eras like Alexis de Tocqueville and George F. Will—have had to say about the relationship between religion and politics. These thinkers “were not wrong,” Rauch writes, in maintaining that “it is important for Christianity and democracy to be reasonably well aligned. Neither can thrive if they are at cross purposes. I did not fully appreciate that in 2003, and I think too few Americans on both sides of the line, secular and religious, appreciate it today.”

I don’t want to overstate Rauch’s error here—he's always appreciated the idea, prevalent among the Founders, that a prerequisite of a successful republic is a citizenry imbued with republican virtue. His mistake was thinking that as time went on, religion-like substitutes, equipped with all of the good parts (such as a values framework) without any of the bad ones (such as excessive religious zeal), would emerge and usher us toward “a major civilizational advance.” Instead, these substitutes—our “bespoke religions,” as Tara Isabella Burton calls them—have preserved the zeal even as they’ve failed to replicate the theological anchors and communal blessings of traditional faiths.

As Rauch himself puts it:

What did I get wrong? ... My younger self acknowledged the social benefits of religious participation but imagined that other institutions and pursuits could substitute, an assumption which proved wrong as an empirical matter.

My younger self also took the stability of both democracy and Christianity too much for granted. Like many of us in the aftermath of the Cold War, I was too ready to indulge in liberal-democratic triumphalism, forgetting how hard it is to build and maintain the value structures which support democracy. ...

At the same time, I didn’t foresee the extent to which mainline Protestantism would collapse as a source of public values, and I certainly didn’t foresee the extent to which evangelical Protestantism would turn resentful, confrontational, and authoritarian.

This last passage is crucial to understanding Rauch’s argument. When he says we need more Christianity, he does not mean last decade’s version of evangelical Christianity. No committed liberal could conclude that we need more of that—and, again, I say this as someone who originally hailed from the evangelical tradition. Cross Purposes is an appeal to American Christians to rediscover our true faith by returning to our roots and recovering our proper social role.

Christianity’s Capture

The problem is that two of Christianity’s most recent prominent iterations—mainline Protestantism (which Rauch dubs thin Christianity) and MAGA evangelicalism (sharp Christianity)—have rendered this historic faith wholly incapable of holding up its end of the bargain in American society.

---

Bishop Budde Wasn’t Breaching Her Clerical Charge by Speaking Truth to Trump from the Pulpit

---

Rauch’s exhortation is for the retrieval of what he calls thick Christianity. That, and only that, version of Christianity can supply the American liberal order what it needs.

Christianity’s “thinning,” which refers to ecumenical Christianity’s gradual decline, has largely involved two mutually reinforcing developments: Americans’ dwindling affiliation with, and participation in, mainline Protestant Christianity; and the latter’s “secularization” or loss of differentiation with the wider culture.

Rauch’s notion of secularization refers to the mainline church’s conscious decision to take up socially progressive causes (like environmentalism and anti-war activism) but underemphasize biblical distinctives (like a robust theology of the sinfulness of humankind and belief in miracles) that don’t overlap with those values. Rauch turns to historian David A. Hollinger’s account, which documents mainline Protestantism’s accommodation to a “demographically diverse, sexually and racially egalitarian, globally engaged, and scientifically literate society welcoming to Jews and to other non-Christians” to explain its conversion from a spiritual institution into a cultural one.

Not everything about this turn is wrong. It’s more a question of how this was accomplished—and to what extent. To explain the problem, Rauch invokes an economic metaphor: the idea of a cultural trade deficit:

[W]e secular atheists rely on Christianity to maintain a positive cultural balance of trade: we need it to export more moral values and spiritual authority to the surrounding culture than it imports. If, instead, the church is in cultural deficit—if it becomes a net importer of values from the secular world—then it becomes morally derivative instead of morally formative. Rather than shaping secular values, it merely reflects them, and thus melts into the society around it. It becomes a consumer good, a lifestyle choice, or just another channel for politics—SoulCycle without the sweat; partisanship without the bunting and balloons.

It is important to emphasize that Rauch does not assume, as conservative Christian commentators overwhelmingly do, that “secularization” is inherently bad. He writes:

Secularization does not necessarily imply that theology melts away, believers stop believing, churches empty out, and clergy compromise their principles. Up to a point, it can mean cross-pollination as religions interact with their social environments and become less countercultural, with both sides often benefiting from that exchange. ...

[S]ecularization is not a dirty word—up to a point. Yet students of religion have persuasively argued that the secularization of both mainline American Protestantism and white evangelical Protestantism went beyond that point, albeit in different ways.

As the last part of that passage suggests, the secularization that evangelical Protestantism has undergone is far more extreme and in the direction opposite to mainline Protestantism. The latter has gone in a progressive direction and the former in a reactionary—even ultra-reactionary—one. In fact, mainline Protestantism’s decline features prominently in white evangelical Christianity’s self-conception and political mobilization.

The story the evangelical movement tells about itself is that it is a Bible-honoring rebuke to mainline churches that were absorbing progressive values and abandoning the historic tenets of the faith. In actuality, the evangelical movement became a vehicle driven by a culture war agenda that used its religion mostly to grant theological justification for its political ambitions. It’s no surprise that this tradition, which Rauch calls sharp Christianity, has become—especially in the era of Trump—a significant threat not just to liberalism’s prospects but to society at large. It is a “divisive, fearful, partisan, and un-Christlike version of Christianity with dangerously illiberal implications,” Rauch says.

Unlike the mainline Protestant church, evangelical secularization does not involve the adoption of pervasive moral values into a bland synthesis with the wider culture; it entails the transformation of a historic faith patterned after Christ’s teachings into an uncompromising clash-of-civilizations posture and culture war belligerence fascinated with social domination over ideological rivals. In particular, the emergence of a Christian nationalist faction within it is evidence that evangelicalism has become hollowed out by its thirst for political power. The word “transformation,” above, is deliberate—as Rauch notes, Christian nationalism “is not a religious creed but a political one.”

Although not every evangelical is a Christian nationalist, transformation does describe the broader evangelical movement. It’s not just Christian nationalists who have repurposed a religious perspective into a political program. In fact, one particular statistic Rauch provides helps depict the depths of this movement’s descent: A 2011 poll when Barack Obama was president found that fewer than 1 in 3 white evangelicals believed that “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” A mere five years later, when Trump became the GOP presidential nominee, nearly 3 out of 4 white evangelicals agreed with that statement. In other words, white evangelical Christians started identifying their religious tradition with a particular political program and bent the theological principle of personal righteousness to accommodate a politician, not the other way around.

---

A Liberalism Without Apology or Fear...

---

What makes this enlistment of Christianity into the service of a reactionary political agenda such a tragic choice is that this is a faith tradition that is supposed to transcend the quest for earthly power and actually underwrite its opposite: a values framework that accounts for and supports diversity, freedom of conscience, advocacy for the vulnerable and the downtrodden, and peace among the people. That’s the Christianity that must return—for the sake of its own witness and for the good of American society, too.

Godly Pluralism

Rauch compellingly notes that it is precisely because “Christian principles track closely with liberal principles” that “they can be brought into alignment in ways which strengthen both.” This idea, generalized to include other faith traditions, is the beating heart of one of my favorite projects at The UnPopulist: our Liberalism & Religion series.

The introduction to the first entry explains:

[V]iewing liberalism and religion as implacable foes doesn’t merely misunderstand liberalism; it also misunderstands religion. Religion serves two main purposes: It offers adherents personal meaning—telos—to be sure, but it also provides moral guidance for living in harmony with others despite differences and disagreements. The latter is a big part of the liberal project, and therefore every religion inevitably has some liberal, humanist elements at its core too. ... [And what’s more], by being a good liberal, one also becomes a better member of one’s faith.

While our entries focus on the most historically prominent faith traditions—Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, and even the decidedly more irreligious tradition of agnosticism and atheism—Rauch offers the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormon church, as an example of a faith community that “is proving right now, in the real world, that a conservative church can embrace pluralism as spiritually exalted and scripturally sound, without watering down the church’s doctrine or distinctiveness.”

It’s not surprising that a tradition arising within the American experience will be naturally calibrated to respect its sociopolitical framework. Mormonism was officially founded in 1830, about half a century after America’s Founding so, as Rauch notes, in Mormon scripture, “the U.S. Constitution is specifically named as divinely inspired.” And as he also points out, the fact that the Mormon church has faced persecution and geographical expulsion from its earliest days has forged in it an acute sense of the importance of civic compromise and toleration; it now respects what it did not initially itself receive. Rauch provides numerous examples of the modern Mormon church embodying what he calls “the civic habits of peaceful coexistence”—such as when, in 2015, Utah’s conservative state legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill granting nondiscrimination protections to its LGBT residents with the support of the church.

However, there is nothing inherent to mainstream forms of Christianity that are preventing them from adopting the same posture. Rauch writes:

The post-liberals are wrong to claim that liberalism is inherently antithetical to conservative and communitarian varieties of Christianity. The Church of Fear is wrong to insist on a divisive, oppositional attitude toward politics. You need not surrender your religious faith or identity in order to embrace Madison’s constitutional pluralism. You need not regard compromise as defeat and opponents as enemies. Better still, tearing down the wall of separation between personal and public Christian values strengthens both. Seeking to “moderate and unify” in civic life is both pious and public-spirited.

To paraphrase the evangelical scholar Mark Noll, the scandal of MAGA Christianity is that there is not a lot of Christianity in it. A recovery of its authentic form—one retaining a firm belief in its historic doctrinal tenets, free from ideologically-driven hysteria and culture war toxicity, responsive to the teachings of Jesus, attentive to the importance of forgiveness and grace, and inflexibly committed to the dignity and equality of all—would be a blessing upon America.

Don’t take it from me, take it from one of the sharpest atheists writing today.

© The UnPopulist, 2025

Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.

We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.