The Miller Center hosted a conversation with author and journalist Jonathan Rauch titled “Exploring democracy and Christianity” on Tuesday. Rauch unpacked the arguments in his newest book, “Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy,” which posits that democracy and robust religion need one another, but that Christianity is failing to serve its moral, counter-cultural purpose in American civic life.
John Owen, Miller Center faculty senior fellow, moderated this conversation, joined by Associate Professor of Politics Colin Bird and Professor of Religious Studies Laurie Maffly-Kipp, who participated in the panel alongside Rauch.
The Miller Center is a nonpartisan affiliate of the University that aims to inspire the next generation of political leaders with insights on the presidency, democracy and the public good. The Miller Center hosts regular events featuring a range of guest speakers.
Rauch is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution. He argued throughout the panel that democracy needs religion, specifically Evangelical Christianity, to function productively and virtuously. According to Rauch, Christianity would ideally hold a unique role by standing apart from culture, serving as a moral foundation for democracy without entangling itself in politics.
Recently, however, Rauch said religion has merged with political and cultural forces, and this politicization has contributed to both the decline of the Church and the weakening of American democracy. Christianity, according to Rauch, has failed to remain the stoic force it once was, independent of culture and politics.
“[The white Evangelical Church’s] composition changes as the members and message become more politicized and that, in turn, means that we begin to import religious zeal into our politics, and we begin to import politics into religion,” Rauch said. “America is becoming ungovernable because Christianity is failing.”
To preface his beliefs, Rauch clarified his identity as gay and a religious atheist but ethnic Jew. He said that he dismissed Christianity for at least 20 years of his life because he thought it was “bigoted” to people like himself, but later in his life, he regretted this ignorance. According to Rauch, faith is a gift that he was not given.
“Ignoring [religion], I think, was the biggest intellectual mistake of my career,” Rauch said.
According to Rauch, stabilizing democracy requires more Christianity — not as a tool for political weaponry and division, but as a guiding influence rooted in the teachings of Jesus Christ. He said that the three core teachings of Christianity are the same three core values he views within liberalism — do not be afraid, imitate Jesus and his teachings and forgive each other.
“I'm in the weird position of being an outsider saying to Christians — the answer is right there,” Rauch said. “It's in the Gospel, we need more of what you have to offer, if you will only offer it.”
Bird agreed with Rauch’s claim that Christianity has succumbed to blending in with culture and becoming internally corrupted through fear and absorption of secular influences, but he also posed the question of whether Rauch’s argument could be extended to other cultural forces that have been corrupted such as journalism, corporate responsibility and political parties.
According to Bird, these are other corrupted pillars of society that share this abandonment of their ideal and just responsibility. He said each of these pillars exemplifies fear and defensiveness, a general worry about competitive market societies and a gamification so that the contest matters more than the substance of the results.
“Why is religion the unique venue for this?,” Bird said. “And why is religion the unique source of solution? In the United States, there are particular historical reasons for thinking that religion is especially important. But the United States, while it's certainly a very important liberal democracy, isn't the only liberal democracy. In other places, religion won't be perhaps quite as important.”
Rauch responded by backing up his claim that the corruption of Christianity is a unique grievance to democracy because it gives people a sense of the meaning in life, unlike the other forces Bird mentioned. According to Rauch, religion answers two questions — why am I here and what is the foundation of moral truth grounded in something more than human preference. By answering these questions, Rauch believes Christianity provides democracy with a broad moral framework, encouraging citizens to look beyond individual interests and work toward the common good.
“The way we answer those questions in our society is a 2000-year-old, very deep set of traditions, which we call Christianity,” Rauch said. “Christianity is meant to focus us on the next life and not the next election. It's supposed to discipline people to behave in certain ways that are bigger and broader and more fundamental.”
Maffly-Kipp said she came to the book skeptically, citing many other books she has read that aim to reduce the influence of Christianity but said she ultimately agreed with much of the diagnosis Rauch presents. She specifically agreed with his pitch to incorporate the academic study of religion into the education system.
“I love the pitch … for the academic study of religion, not just in seminaries or in churches, but I would add in public universities like the University of Virginia,” Maffly-Kipp said. “It's extremely important to provide students and other listeners with basic religious literacy.”
Maffly-Kipp did question Rauch’s focus specifically on white, Protestant Christianity. According to Maffly-Kipp, there are many other religions that provide resources for social teaching. She cited work from African American Protestant churches, Jewish sociologists and other sects within Christianity.
“It strikes me that there are so many other resources within Christianity, even if we don’t move to Judaism or the other many religious traditions we could talk about,” Maffly-Kipp said. “[These] seem to me an extremely important resource for thinking about social teaching.”
Rauch agreed that there are many other resources besides the Evangelical Church to glean moral teachings and influence the political sphere. However, he supported his book’s claim by pinning the current crisis in our democracy to the white Evangelical church and the “radical” turn towards politicization it has taken. He said this crisis is not due primarily to the influence of other religious groups.
“The crisis that we're experiencing is not because of Jews … [and] it's not because of the African American church and it is not because of Catholics who are not that culturally influential except on the Supreme Court,” Rauch said. “It is because of the white Evangelical Church and because of the radical move … it has taken.”
Speaking to Maffly-Kipp’s work as a scholar of Mormonism, Rauch said that the Church of Latter Day Saints is currently taking a radical approach — in a positive sense, unlike the Evangelical Church — by actively living out its moral beliefs. With their core values of patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation, Rauch said he is seeing this faith practice what their religion stands for in the public sector, which is what Christians should be doing.
Rauch concluded by saying it is harder to have a society that does not have answers to the “big questions” than a society that does — not everyone has to be religious to be virtuous, but religion helps in the cause to uphold a moral democracy. According to Rauch, the push for a fully secular society is failing. In the absence of a secular substitute that provides the benefits of religious virtuosity, Christianity must persist as a cornerstone of American democracy.
“We need to take theology seriously,” Rauch said. “I believe firmly in separation of church and state … but we're too ignorant about religion and we do need to teach it more. There is lots that we can do to make the country more welcoming of faith in general and Christianity in particular.”
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